The other day I fell into one of those wonderful internet sinkholes and began browsing through pages featuring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures I played with as a child. I couldn’t get enough of them and Playmates knew there were many kids like me, so they kept churning out more and more toys. More often than not, the toys had nothing to do with the animated series, comics, or movies. They were just bizarre interpretations of the characters. At the time, I never put much thought into who was coming up with these toys. Looking at these action figures now, I noticed a not so sly recurring theme – Many of them were just really queer.
Read MoreBatman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opened strong at the box office despite mostly negative reviews. After watching the film, it’s safe to say the reviewers might have been kind. The film is such a shallow mess, devoid of charms, character development, and a basic level of coherency that it doesn’t warrant an in-depth discussion (Madeline Kahn in Clue: The Movie sums up my feelings perfectly). My expectations were low from the start. Its predecessor, Man of Steel, was a flawed film, though I didn’t have many of the issues others did. The film’s execution aside (not necessarily a pun), it offered the promise of something greater. I’ll paraphrase Grant Morrison’s excellent All-Star Superman, when his father Jor-El says, “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal.” At the time, I hoped Man of Steel was just a rough first step toward a stronger series of films with a much more inspirational Superman. Now, with Batman v Superman released, it’s clear this series is not striving toward anything close to Jor-El’s words. The franchise is has its feet firmly planted in mediocrity.
Read MoreStanding out among the glut of indie horror films is never an easy task. A strong trailer is typically a safe and effective way to grab audiences’ attention and build buzz, but every film has a trailer. It’s hardly unique. Perhaps that is why I was so pleasantly surprised to hear about the upcoming film Excess Flesh not from a trailer, but a music video.
Music video tie-ins to films were prevalent throughout much of the 90s, garnering frequent airplay on MTV and showing off a hard-to-ignore tune folks would find in the film once it was in theaters. In that tradition, Patrick Kennelly, the director of Excess Flesh, and the film’s composer Jonathan Snipes teamed up to create this excellent video for the track “I Don’t Race” featuring the film’s star Mary Loveless.
Read MoreAcclaimed Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is no stranger to Fantastic Fest, appearing in 2013 with Jodorowsky’s Dune and again last year for the documentary My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn directed by his wife Liv Corfixen. He returned once again this year with Fantastic Fest serving as the perfect launching pad for his new book Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing.
Read MoreIn 2011, DC Comics made the surprising and controversial decision to reboot their entire line of comics, erasing years of continuity and starting fresh. In promotional images for the reboot, all their main characters had new costumes designs that reflected this new era. No longer were DC’s heroes clad in spandex. The red trunks Superman famously wore for decades were gone. His costume (and the costumes of his peers) more resembled battle-ready armor. But unlike the rest of the Justice League, Superman was featured in a second promotional image with a completely different and even more surprising outfit—a t-shirt and jeans.
Read MoreOver the weekend, David Ayer, director of the upcoming Suicide Squad film, debuted the first image of Jared Leto as the Joker. The look garnered a great deal of response – both passionate hatred and accepting optimism. But the vocal and emotional reaction is unsurprising. The Joker has been around for 75 years, and he means a lot of things to a lot of people. With this new Joker in our midst, it has inspired me to reminisce about some of my favorite looks of the Clown Prince of Crime.
Read MoreFor those who haven’t been keeping up on the 52-year long soap opera that is the X-Men, the founding members of the team—as they were in the 1960s—have traveled to the present and got stuck there, potentially damaging the whole of space-time continuum if they remain. And in the latest issue of All-New X-Men (#40 to be exact), Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, is outed by Jean Grey, his mind-reading teammate. He’s gay… and crushing on teammate Angel to boot!
Read MoreFurious 7 opened over the weekend with the largest box office debut in the 14-year-old series. The upward trajectory of the franchise has been astonishing especially when it seemed all but exhausted after The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006. The appeal of this big, loud, and silly series is undeniable. Wesley Morris, film critic for the Boston Globe, summed it up perfectly when he called the franchise “the most progressive force in Hollywood.” Short of a LGBTQ character or two, the series reflects today’s world better than most.
Read MoreLove lasts forever, or at least until we’re dead. And let’s face it, we’re all going to die. Some of us swiftly and tragically, some slowly over a gruelingly long period of time. Either way, we all face the same fate – that long black corridor of eternity. Our literary characters are no different. They’ll meet their fate at some point during the narrative, or maybe long after the final pages have turned, careening forever toward their destiny, entertaining us along the way.
When a character is taken from us, plucked from the narrative in some dramatic way, it hurts. It truly hurts. Their demise, though completely made up, haunts us. As in real life, we’re often left thinking about what could have been – if only they wouldn’t have made that stupid choice, got on that plane, lit that fire, etc. But, much to the author’s devilish delight, we must live with their deaths. And it’s even more heart wrenching when the characters are in love. Because what doesn’t make your eyes fill like water reservoirs more than a tragic love and death?
Read MoreDanny Peary’s Cult Movies series has been loved for decades. Before the dawn of the internet, his books were many film lover’s gateway into the odd corners of cinema. Recently I was given the opportunity to edit a series of ebooks culling the material from these books, repackaging them in genre-specific collections, starting with Cult Horror Movies. The strength of his writing left little room for revision, though the new releases afforded Peary the opportunity for minor updates and tweaks (think of it as an Author’s Cut), as well as adding HUGE checklists for additional cult movies in each genre. These lists bring so much joy to my geek heart.
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