Is THIS the face of Scott Pilgrim???

(Hmmmm...)

A few years ago, now, Edgar Wright attached himself to direct a feature film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim. This is, quite frankly, the most perfect filmmaker/comic book pairing in the history of such things. And as a matter of course, I will state matter-of-factly that Bryan Lee O'Malley's Canadian manga stands as one of the crowning achievements in comics to date, so I'm not a neutral party here.

Now, according the Hollywood Reporter, Juno's Michael Cera is in negotiations to star as the titular character.

(The greatest line of dialogue in comics history. Possibly the greatest page in comics history. Easily the greatest use of swearing in the history of the English language. For reals.)

Not sure I see it. He's talented, sure, but can he pull off the awkward, yet all-encompassing charm? Can he play bass, but not very well? And can he kick massive amounts of ass?

Looks like we have a "wait and see" on our hands, folks. I'm not sold yet, but if Edgar Wright can see it, then I'll give him the benefit of the doubt...

For now.

Anthony Minghella, I Mourn Thee with Mixed Feelings

Tragedy struck this week when Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award-Winning director of The English Patient, died at the age of 54. Too soon... Too soon...

With any remembrance, the tendency is to focus on all of the positive things about the person in question. Of course, I didn't actually know Anthony Minghella in any particular way aside from his movies. But even that was a rocky affair, with highs and lows, and I feel that any serious discourse on his passing should take the bad with the good. And Anthony Minghella was a lot of both, to me.

A minor SPOILER ALERT for each film discussed below.

TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1990)

(The DVD cover for Truly, Madly, Deeply - surely one of the worst DVD covers of all time. Try and guess what the hell is happening to Juliet Stevenson up there. Is she laughing? Did she just see a rat in her kitchen? Did she just spot Justin Timberlake? Damned if I know...)

I first met Anthony Minghella when I found a VHS copy of Truly, Madly, Deeply at the 99 cent store in Pasadena. I had heard of the film previously via my copy of "The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made," an indispensable volume that, though immediately dated (like all "Best of" books truly are), has never steered me wrong in over ten years. So, seeing little harm in spending 99 of my mother's cents I convinced her to purchase me the British weepy in question. My mother didn't bat an eye at my choice, as she knew me very well.

Though at the time relatively unfamiliar with the concept of genuine loss, I was nevertheless struck by the film's quiet, peaceful examination of the subject. Anthony Minghella walked me through the stages of grieving along with his protagonist, played by an immensely likable and plausibly attractive actress named Juliet Stevenson. The man she loved has just passed away, you see, but she can't move on. To cope, she imagines that he still looks out for her in all the little ways that the truly, madly, deeply in love do. He reminds her to brush her teeth the right way, and walk safely in the streets at night.

It's a tender dementia, both understandable and forgivable, but one day she finds out that she wasn't really crazy after all. He's waiting for her at her apartment, the same as always, and they resume their relationship. It's not as if nothing has happened. He tells her a bit about the afterlife, though always remaining vague, and occasionally has his living-impaired friends over to watch videos. The problem is that he can't ever seem to leave the apartment, and no one else ever discovers that he's back.

There's an reasonable interpretation that the entire thing is in Nina's head, but being fanciful as a rule I prefer to think otherwise. Nina discovers by continuing her relationship that perhaps she was wearing rose-colored glasses since his passing. Their love, while genuine and sweet, was not perfect and perhaps was not meant to last in the first place. By living as if he were still alive, she manages to move on with her life and eventually meet someone new... someone who perhaps isn't better, but at least equally sweet and perfect for her new outlook on life.

Her lover is played by Alan Rickman, in one of the few roles where he doesn't play either a villain or someone who at least acts as such. As far as I'm concerned, it's the greatest role the actor ever had. He is at turns charming and carelessly flawed, and to see his character for even the briefest of periods is to understand Nina's affection. To know see him over longer periods, however, we begin to understand him as an individual - as needy and imperfect as even the finest among us.

The film is understated to the point of being almost plain, but the effect is one of the most believable worlds captured in cinema from the last 30 years. It is, by far, my favorite Anthony Minghella film.

MR. WONDERFUL (1993)

(Matt Dillon in a movie I actually hate far more than Mr. Wonderful. That's damning with faint praise, though...)

But then, Minghella followed it with this. Trite Hollywood romantic mish-mash of the highest (read: lowest) order. Matt Dillon can't get a loan on a business because his alimony payments are bleeding him dry, so he tries to get his ex-wife married, and stat. It's one of those concepts that sounds cute on paper, but even the most casual of examinations reveals it to be a hollow premise for a film, and ultimately a rather mean-spirited one that depends on a protagonist trying to control a former loved one's life in a comparatively disgusting way. I haven't seen this movie since it came out, and frankly it left such a bad taste in my mouth - not just because of the plot, but because of the overall blase demeanor of the filmmaking as a whole - that I have no desire to ever see it again. Strike 1.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996)

(The only scene anyone actually remembers from The English Patient, and that's only because of the parody from the Academy Awards.)

And I'll never understand this film's popularity. Actually, "popularity" should be viewed as a relative term here, because despite a surprise Oscar sweep, it never made much money or found too significant an audience. But this film always manages to polarize those viewers who do make the effort to watch it. Some are enraptured by it, but everyone else hates its ever-loving guts.

I'm in the latter camp, incidentally. There's quality work to be found here in individual scenes and performances, but none of them - none of them - are in any way involved with the A-plot, in which an army nurse cares for a wounded man with no name and a mysterious past. Of course, we discover his past throughout the course of the film, only to discover at the end (MAJOR SPOILER) that he left his one true love to die in a cave. Sure, he tried to get back there, at the cost of betraying his own country, but yeah, that's what we're left with.

Ouch, right? That would be a truly tragic ending if we felt a sense of urgency as he struggled to get back to her, but we don't. It's pretty unemotional stuff at that point. In fact, despite a few overly choreographed love scenes we never really feel the connection between these two people at the heart of The English Patient, resulting in a fairly painful experience made occasionally tolerable by supporting players Naveen Andrews (TV's Lost) and Willem Dafoe, in roles so engaging that you quickly begin to wonder why the movie wasn't about these characters instead. Tying everything together is Juliette Binoche in compassionate performance as a character with ultimately quite little to actually do.

Back when I worked at the website The Tuesday Night Movie Club, we would force the loser of the annual Oscar pool to watch and then review The English Patient as punishment. I never lost that particular pool, but never heard the end of it from the poor bastards who did. This is a painful film, both saccharine and heartless, and after Mr. Wonderful and this I had just about written off Anthony Minghella as a director.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999)

(Remember the good times...)

Luckily for me, Minghella followed his Academy Award-winning opus with The Talented Mr. Ripley, an adaptation of the first in Patricia Highsmith's remarkable series of Ripley tales. Highsmith's Ripley is an impenetrable man who uses everyone around him in cunning, cruel and outright sociopathic ways to achieve whatever his ends are at a given time. It's captivating to watch him work, and the suspense frequently derives from hoping he gets caught, instead of the other way around.

Minghella, however, took the source material and made a film about why Tom Ripley does what it is that he does. In one of Matt Damon's very best performances, Ripley constantly finds himself sacrificing what he truly desires in order to fulfill what he thinks he wants. He manipulates and consumes lives for the illusion of happiness - to have others see him as successful and desirable - but sacrifices relationships with the people he truly cares about in order to do so. Frequently through murder. The great tragedy comes not from this dilemma, but in a fatal flaw in his very character. Ripley is too damaged and incomplete a person for anyone to truly like him for who he really is, whatever that means in his case. So the murder and con games, and the fleeting moments of vague satisfaction that they bring, are as happy as he will ever get.

This emphasis on character takes what would in most hands be a quick, pot-boilerish film noir to a running time of 2 hours and 39 minutes, but the plot is crisp enough and the suspense unbearable enough that it doesn't feel like your time has been wasted. It's a remarkable film that had me thinking that Minghella as a director is completely bi-polar, and only capable of making films that I love dearly or utterly despise.

As a side note, 2002 brought us another adaptation of one of Highsmith's Ripley novels, with John Malkovich taking over as the lead. Ripley's Game takes a less empathetic look at the character, but Malkovich's performance provides all of the nuance needed to find a human being inside the monster. It's one of the best films ever made that never saw theatrical release, and I recommend it with absolute confidence that you'll thank me for it.

COLD MOUNTAIN (2003)

(I couldn't find any pictures of the albino acrobat sharpshooter, but let's try to take this movie seriously anyway, all right?)

Minghella's last film (that I saw, at any rate), proved me wrong on that count. Cold Mountain is an over-long, melodramatic mess of a movie, and like The English Patient, the various asides and subplots are on the whole far more interesting than the love story they are supposed to support. Jude Law loves Nicole Kidman. Jude Law goes to war. The war is hell, and the initial battle sequence is one of the best scenes Minghella ever shot, so Jude Law leaves to walk home.

The problem is that home is apparently over 50 billion miles away, leading to a frustrating number of montages showing Jude walking, and walking, and walking while some amorphous singer drones over and over again, "I'm going to FI-ind my true LO-ove." Look, we get it, okay? But along the way, he encounters a large number of characters who - with generally only one or two scenes each - are fascinating and dramatic enough that you forget that, once again, you really don't care about Minghella's protagonists. Phillip Seymoure Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Cillian Murphy and Jena Malone still come vividly to mind as I recall this film, and all in remarkably positive ways.

Less positive are Nicole Kidman and Butterfly McQueen's story, which we cut back to at regular intervals. At least, I think that was Butterfly McQueen. When she's in whiteface she sure looks a lot like Renee Zellweger, doesn't she? Zellweger's performance in a role clearly designed for a racial stereotype inexplicably won an Oscar that year. And for the record, I like Renee Zellweger, but man, Minghella was trapped in another period of storytelling at unusual interviews throughout this film. All of the female driven melodrama, complete with a far-too-broad for any modern movie villain, all feel like they were ripped directly from a D.W. Griffith film. And the villain's trusty albino crackshot acrobat sidekick? Where exactly does that come from?

My on-again, off-again relationship with Anthony Minghella probably stops here, with a mixed-bag of a film that alternates between the director's finest work and his worst, and while it certainly is a tragedy that he died far, far too young, it almost seems like an appropriate capper. Minghella gave me characters and films that both enlightened and infuriated me, frequently within moments of each other. While I prefer to remember the good times, in order to move on I need to also come to terms with the bad. Anthony Minghella taught me that, and I'm thankful for it.

WALLACE AND GROMIT: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Everyone with a heart in their chests has a soft spot for Wallace and Gromit. The animated duo have starred in a trio of classic shorts, and one classic feature film, bringing Aardman Animation's touching, understated and human sense of whimsy to appreciative audiences around the world. After the tragic fire that recently decimated Aardman's studio, along with most of their Wallace and Gromit models, I was worried that it might be some time before we saw more W&G, but...

Empire announced the following:

"Wallace and Gromit have a brand new bakery business, ‘Top Bun’. Their whole house has been converted into a granary with a ‘Wallace patent-pending’ old-fashioned windmill on the roof. Although business is booming, Gromit finds himself having to run the whole operation single-handedly as Wallace is ‘dough-eyed’ in love with the beautiful Piella Bakewell, former star of the Bake-O-Lite bread commercials.

But Gromit is not so enamored of Piella - her ‘woman’s touch’ at 62 West Wallaby Street puts the dog’s nose out of joint. What’s more, a dozen local bakers have disappeared in recent months and Gromit is worried that Wallace may be next. Gromit turns sleuth and the duo soon find themselves drawn into a sinister murder mystery - it’s ‘A Matter Of Loaf And Death’."

Okay, that's cute, but isn't that the same plot as A Close Shave? Wallace and Gromit have a new business, but Wallace gets distracted by a new, pretty clearly doomed lady love who is involved in committing crimes? Anyone? Anyone? The Holly-Smoot Tariff Act which, anyone? Anyone? Raised or lowered...?

Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends thoughts

So writing about Spectacular Spider-Man got me thinking about this classic series from the 1980s. In watching the old intro on Youtube, two things came to mind that always bugged me.

1. Peter's apartment weirds me out. Pulling on a football trophy causes supercomputers underneath Pete's couch to appear? How does Aunt May not notice this? Has she never dusted that trophy? And how long until she realizes that he nerdy nephew never played a game of football in his life? And how do the people living beneath them feel about having a super-computer on their ceiling every day, except on those rare instances when there's a couch instead?

2. Yellow is not Dr. Doom's color.

I'm famous (again and again)

To those who don't know:

I was recently interviewed for both Viral on Veoh and Jonathan London's Geekscape podcasts about Bus Pirates. On Geekscape, I also got to go all Tarantino-like and review some movies, comics and videogames. Here are the links, hope you enjoy them, blah blah...

VIRAL ON VEOH:

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v6234985a7Fk56je?searchId=2381827141820972017&rank=6

GEEKSCAPE:

http://www.pod.geekscape.net/Geekscape065.m4v - Right click and Download and watch it in Video!!

http://www.pod.geekscape.net/Geekscape065.mp3 - Right click and Download the magic in Audio!!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=211000351 - Click for iTunes video and all the action!!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=212023196 - Click for some iTunes audio, baby!!

Da Fug? Spectacular Spider-Man is good?!

Well, I didn't see this one coming...

If you haven't checked out Spectacular Spider-Man on "Kids WB" (and I really hate writing that), then you should. It looks like Marvel finally has a decent animated series to their credit.

And before you argue, shut up. Have you actually tried watching X-Men: The Animated Series or the 1990's Fox Spider-Man series lately? I too have rose-colored glasses hiding in a drawer somewhere that I used to put on when talking about these shows, then I actually tried watching a few episodes. The writing was "eh" at best - good for Saturday morning, pale in comparison to the Bruce Timm-iverse. And the character models were so heavily detailed that the actual animation quality suffered as a result. Way too hard to make those characters move when each one always has to look "just so."

Spectacular, on the other hand, is shaping up quite nicely after a slightly rocky start. The art style is slightly mangafied. In fact, I'd venture far enough to say that the creators are probably big "Scott Pilgrim" fans judging from the character models. The result is a fluid, youthful feel that's very inviting once you get used to it.

From a story perspective, they're actually creating a very cohesive universe between episodes. Character arcs continue as the show progresses, and they're dovetailing a lot of characters' origins into plausible narratives that are faithful to the comics without being beholden to them. Granted, a few of the costumes leave a little to be desired. Electro in particular is something of a disappointment, but each villain also has a fair amount of pathos to them, keeping the show from being a "villain of the week" series and instead creating done-in-one plots with people you actually care about.

That said, it's a little annoying that villains keep "naming themselves" after something someone called them off-handedly only once. I wouldn't have noticed if it didn't happen twice in only three episodes.

Still, a list of things I appreciate:

1. Surprisingly infectious new Spider-Man theme song. Weird the first time you hear it, but it genuinely grows on you.

2. Gwen Stacy is one of the main characters. Apparently Mary Jane is showing up later, but the show's creators decided to use Gwen even though she hasn't been a series regular in any major Spidey series in years/decades.

3. The series really shows Spider-Man screwing up Peter Parker's life. The old series had Peter being late for dates and such, but in this one there are consequences. Peter has a curfew as a result of Spider-Man related activities, and so frequently has to call Aunt May in the middle of fighting for his life. Peter keeps trying to get pictures of Spider-Man to sell to the Bugle, but they always suck for one reason or another (blurry, or a window reflects the flash making it unusable, etc.) And the one time he does get a good picture, his byline proves that he was out taking pictures when he should have been helping as Peter Parker, making him lose his job. This is good stuff, people.

4. Armpit webs. Haven't seen 'em in action before, to the best of my knowledge. My roommate didn't even know Spider-Man suppose to have those.

And some flaws:

1. The naming thing is a little lame, as discussed above.

2. Every episode ends with an establishing shot, in which a spider web is super-imposed over the sky. Retro, but distractingly so.

3. Making all of the origins cohesive leads to some distracting coincidences. Two monsters in two weeks, both stemming from Doctor Connors' lab? Might be time to pack up shop, Doc. That place is cursed.

Still, even these problems are all a result of over-thinking rather than under-thinking. It is weird that people would name themselves something villainous, so they try to explain it away. And it's almost more of a coincidence if all of these failed scientific experiments are completely UNconnected, so I'll let that slide too. And at least the spider-horizon is a cute idea in theory.

Once again, however, I have to say that this is officially a TV show worth watching for Spider-fans and casual viewers alike, and I went in thoroughly expecting to hate its ever-loving guts too.

Go Spidey, Go!