Over 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 Moreby Robbie Imes
I’ve hated you from the beginning.
When I woke up at three o’clock in the morning with a slight pain in my back. When I awoke again at four-thirty and looked outside, the still, dead tree indicating another cold day. Nothing had changed. Spring had come, but it was you holding it at bay.
The night before I feared you. As I went to bed, sayonara social media friends, the pit in my stomach grew. I knew you were there, wicked. You waited for me in the dark. You wanted to devour me. And I sort of wanted to die. I shut my eyes.
Read MoreIt’s been 55 years since we last heard from Pulitzer Prize winning author Harper Lee, but that silence ends this summer. Lee, inarguably one of the greatest writers of our time, will release a sequel to her famed and much beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird this year. Entitled Go Set a Watchman, the book is set to come out in July, with a proposed run of two million copies, says publisher Harper.
Read MoreBack in July, I wrote at length about my hopes and fears for the first student reading I’d be hosting at The New School. The story was published with Slice magazine, and I ended it on a relatively positive note, saying we’ll have to wait till September to see how it goes. Well September happened and my followup essay never saw the light of day (my Slice column was transformed into a monthly Q&A). So here, at long last, is my follow up. I hope you’re ready for a tale of gut-wrenching humiliation, because spoiler warning, that’s exactly what happened.
Read MoreOne of the highlights of last year’s Fantastic Fest was Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about a film that never got made. It’s fitting that a stand out from this year’s festival is a documentary on a studio that perhaps made too many movies. The studio was Cannon, and the crowd-pleasing documentary is Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.
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 MoreWithin our personal existence there’s so many experiences we will never truly know. A select few of us experience the vast, depthless wonder of stepping onto the moon, while others live in the lap of luxury, afforded the gifts of all creation at their whim. There are triumphant athletes and hero firemen, medical geniuses and musical prodigies. Then there are those that live a less thrilling life by those standards, those that live the lives of the ordinary people of the world. Those that read about the extraordinary and wonder what could be, or maybe just don’t give a shit about any of it at all. They live with little means to make happiness bloom, and never fully know how much better their lives can be.
Enter Ugly Girls, the new novel by the fiercely talented Lindsay Hunter. Known for her assaultive flash fiction, pieces that shout the tales of crude and forgotten denizens of planet earth with visceral poetry, she’s an author with little regard to boundaries. Not surprisingly, her novel doesn’t stray far from that broken glass covered path. Written from several points-of-view, all of them deeply insightful to the human condition, and sometimes upsetting in their own morbid ways, you’re taken on a no-fucks-given journey through the minds of people who have not quite given up hope, but are standing, shaky legged and tippy-toed, at the brink of the cliff, ready to fall into the quarry of no turning back.
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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