Written by Kirk Baird
In a recent interview with Stan Lee, I asked the famed comic-book writer and co-creator of so many classic Marvel superheroes — the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four — if there are any titles remaining he would still like to see on the big screen.
Of course Lee, 89, had several he said would make great movies, Dr. Strange and Black Panther being two he mentioned by name. He also said if any Marvel film was competently and properly made, any of its superheroes could be a winner on screen. Perhaps that’s why he’s excited about the upcoming Ant-Man adaptation by Edgar Wright ( Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).
But alas, not all superhero films are created equally, especially from Marvel properties. But those that have worked have been met with critical praise and huge box-office numbers, the biggest and best of these being this summer’s The Avengers. This all-star team-up of some of Marvel’s biggest names — Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow — not only was the biggest film this summer, but ranks as the third biggest moneymaker of all time. With the release of The Avengers on DVD and Blu-ray, here are some of the other best and brightest of the Marvel superhero film catalog:
The first two X-Men movies ( X-Men and X2) and the prequel reboot, X-Men: First Class. The link between these three movies is filmmaker Bryan Singer, the director and cowriter of the first two X-Men movies and a hands-on producer for the reboot. In between these high points for mutant kind was X-Men: The Last Stand, which Singer and his writing team abandoned in favor of the ill-fated reboot, Superman Returns, while director Brett Ratner was brought in at the last minute.
X-Men: First Class was a successful attempt at negotiating around the third film disaster and reigniting the X-Men franchise, this time at the beginning, with a new cast, several new heroes, and a fun 1960s James Bond vibe.
Iron Man and Iron Man 2: With the cheeky brilliant Robert Downey, Jr., in the lead of Tony Stark/Iron Man, a genius, cocky, and sardonic scientist billionaire, the first Iron Man proved to be a classic in the comic-book genre. I’m in the minority, though, in thinking that Iron Man 2 is a worthy sequel. In terms of summer popcorn entertainment, it does exactly what it needs to do: keep you entertained from start to finish. Look for Iron Man 3 next summer.
Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2: I’m not so much a fan of this summer’s Spider-Man reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, as I feel it covered much of the same back-story territory that Sam Raimi and co. did with the first Spider-Man, which launched the franchise in splendid fashion. The second film was even better, now that the characters had been established and it could move beyond the origin story. The third film, unfortunately, tried too hard to one-up its predecessors, squeezing in three villains and a muddled plot.
Captain America: The First Avenger: With the origin of Captain America as the movie’s plot, director Joe Johnston cobbles together an engaging superhero romp that never takes itself too seriously, and even manages to pay homage to World War II propaganda films. Chris Evans makes for the ideal film representation of the perfect soldier. Evans will also don the red, white, and blue costume again in 2014 for Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The 64th annual Emmy Awards were presented on Sunday night, celebrating the best of the best that television has to offer. The ceremony was hosted by comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who kept the show moving while entertaining the audience between award presentations. It was mostly a tame performance, the highlight coming when 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan pretended to pass out on stage for a Twitter gag.
The night’s big winners were Modern Family (ABC) and Homeland (Showtime), each with four awards, including Best Comedy Series and Best Drama Series, respectively. Homeland also won for Best Drama Actor (Damian Lewis) and Actress (Claire Danes), while Modern Family won Best Supporting Comedy Actor (Eric Stonestreet) and Actress (Julie Bowen).
As a network, HBO did very well in the awards, to no one’s surprise. The movie Game Change, detailing Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, won four awards, including Best Actress Julienne Moore for her portrayal of Sarah Palin. Julia Louis- Dreyfus won Best Comedy Actress for Veep, and Boardwalk Empire took home a trophy for Best Directing. There were no awards, however, (at least during the televised portion) for series like Girls and Game of Thrones, despite a number of nominations.
Other notable winners included the History special Hatfields & McCoys, which won for Best Actor (Kevin Costner) and Supporting Actor (Tom Berenger). Dame Maggie Smith won Best Supporting Drama Actress for PBS’s Downton Abbey, while Best Supporting Drama Actor went to Breaking Bad’s (AMC) Aaron Paul. Jon Cryer won Best Comedy Actor for his role on Two and a Half Men (CBS).
Let us know your thoughts on the ceremony and the awards in the comments section below. For a full collection of winners, please see our website.
Written by Kyle Slagley
Ask just about any group of patrons to name the most prolific author of horror novels they can think of, and more often than not the response you’ll receive is Stephen King. Like him or not, the Maine native has almost singlehandedly restructured the way the average reader thinks about the suspense novel.
King’s first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974; since then, both his bibliography and his film credits have grown at such an astounding rate it leaves you wondering if the man isn’t eerily supernatural, much like some of his stories. Indeed, King has over 50 novels, twice that many short stories, and numerous miniseries and films based on his writing.
King turns 65 today, and based on his official website he shows no sign of slowing any time soon. In fact, this week a release date (September 24, 2013) was announced for his upcoming novel Dr. Sleep, the much-anticipated sequel to The Shining.
Here are some of our favorite books and movies from the frighteningly masterful and masterfully frightening writer.
Carrie ( film: 1976): A high school girl with telekinetic powers takes revenge on her classmates after being humiliated at prom.
The Green Mile ( film: 1999): Tom Hanks and the late Michael Clarke Duncan tell the tale of a wrongfully convicted murderer on death row with an unusual gift for healing.
It ( novel: 1986, miniseries: 1990): Inhabitants of Derry, Maine, must face an evil clown that terrorizes the town by bringing fears to life. This work is quite possibly the reason that so many of us, to this day, have an irrational fear of clowns.
The Shawshank Redemption ( novella: 1982, film: 1994): An established banker is wrongfully sentenced to life in Shawshank prison for the murder of his wife and her lover. During his imprisonment he expands the prison library and navigates the corruption of the guards before escaping.
Hearts in Atlantis ( novella: 1999, film: 2001): Published in a collection of the same name, this story follows a boy who helps a friendly stranger with supernatural gifts escape the pursuit of the shady folks that follow him.
Carrie: The Musical ( soundtrack: 2012): Debuting on Broadway in 1988, Carrie: The Musical made its mark in theatre history as the most expensive flop on Broadway at approximately $8 million to produce and closing after only five performances. On March 1 of this year, the Off-Broadway revival debuted at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, closing the following month on April 8 after 46 performances.
For a comprehensive look at King’s prolific career, SmartBrowse “Stephen King” on our website.
Written by Kirk Baird
Working in newspapers most of my adult life, I acknowledge I have a soft spot for print journalism and I fear for its future. I don’t think newspapers are going away, as so many other doomsayers predict; rather, they are changing. Perhaps my fear is for the unknown of what that transformation will be.
The entertaining and engaging documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times is an admirable effort in putting faces to this mounting industry crisis, as major newspapers are losing money and shuttering or slashing staff to keep the presses going.
To examine this problem, filmmaker Andrew Rossi turned his camera to the leading light in U.S. newspapers, The New York Times, and specifically its new Media Desk, a department created to report the transformation of journalism amid the changes from the Internet and social media.
As with any newspaper, there are colourful characters at the Times, none more so than David Carr, a fair, thorough, and tough-minded media reporter and columnist who is a recovering cocaine addict. After surviving the depths of despair in his own life, it’s hardly surprising that Carr is also the most optimistic in the film about the survival of The New York Times and print journalism as a whole.
Equally fascinating to those who haven’t worked in a newsroom will be the excitement Rossi builds as Carr works to report a damaging expose of the upper-management culture and climate at the Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Orlando Sentinel, among others, and its new ownership.
As Page One: Inside the New York Times suggests, the debate about the future of journalism will rage as it has for decades. Media is an industry constantly in flux. And while experts have differing opinions on what changes new media will bring, everyone is in agreement that a world without newspapers would be a bleak one indeed.
Written by Kirk Baird
The Avengers was the crown jewel of the summer movie season, while some big-budget flops such as Dark Shadows and Battleship took a toll on the overall box office.
But the biggest losers this summer were the film studios, which watched ticket sales continue to slide. Attendance, according to Hollywood.com, dropped about 4 percent to 533 million overall, the lowest number in nearly two decades. Just since 2002, total ticket sales are down 100 million.
Just as alarming: box-office receipts also were down 2.84 percent — about $4.3 billion — from the same May to Labour Day period from 2011.
Of course, higher ticket prices and upcharges for 3D and IMAX help mask this serious problem in the industry: patrons are coming to the movies less often.
Marvel’s The Avengers got summer off to a massive bang with a $1.5 billion worldwide total haul, $620 million of which was from the domestic box office, according to boxofficemojo.com. The runner-up box-office king was The Dark Knight Rises, with $433 million domestically and more than a billion dollars worldwide. Rounding out the superhero triumvirate was The Amazing Spider-Man, which was also the third-highest grossing film this summer at $260 million domestically and $735 million worldwide.
On the flip side of these successes was Dark Shadows, which earned less than $80 million domestically for the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp supernatural dark comedy that cost $150 million to produce, and Battleship, which grossed only $65 million domestically for the $209 million film based on the Hasbro board game.
It was the foreign box office to the rescue, however, pushing both films to a profit with $236 million and $302 million total worldwide receipts, respectively.
The foreign box office also helped Men in Black 3 generate nearly $625 million worldwide and Snow White and the Huntsman earn $394 million around the globe.
Not every film needed help from abroad, though.
The raunchy R-rated comedy smash Ted, about a teddy bear come to life, grossed $216 million domestically, more than four times the costs of the film. Even better was Magic Mike. The comedy-drama directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Channing Tatum as a Tampa stripper — the film was based on the actor’s real-life experiences — earned nearly $114 million in North America, or more than 16 times its $7 million production cost.
Small-budget films also found big audiences this summer.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel earned $131 million worldwide on a budget of $10 million. And Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom grossed nearly $60 million worldwide on a budget of $16 million.
And while no production budget was available, certainly the conservative documentary 2016: Obama’s America exceeded industry expectations with more than $20 million so far at the domestic box office after an opening haul of $31,000 in mid-July in one theatre in Houston.
Written by Kirk Baird
Coming out on a two-disc Blu-ray, two-disc DVD set is the love story set to tragedy and drama, Titanic. Fifteen years after its release, the film remains an effective combination of a director’s unyielding vision, an audience-pleasing romance, historical curiosity, and arguably the best use of CGI in movie history with the sinking of the ship.
Written and directed by James Cameron, the 1997 Best Picture Oscar winner remains the filmmaker’s greatest triumph and, until Avatar came along, his most flawed work. Titanic is a 90-minute gripping film with a 90-minute warm-up, but given the limitations of Cameron’s workspace — he had to shoehorn a dramatic plot into a historical disaster everyone knows — his script and film succeeds.
Leonardo DiCaprio shoulders some unnecessarily harsh criticism for his role as lower-class and happy drifter Jack, while Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Actress for her role as upper-class beauty Rose, who’s miserable with her station in life. The unlikely couple make for a likable and, more important, believable pair, and without them Titanic’s sinking is simply an exercise in groundbreaking effects.
But this movie is less about the people on board the ship than the film’s namesake, and the spectacle and grandeur of the recreated Titanic and its historically accurate details make for a magnificent display on Blu-ray. While the commentaries with Cameron, the cast, and historians have been imported from the 2005 DVD release of the film, the Blu-ray offers two-and-a-half hours of new material, including a pair of documentaries — Reflections on Titanic and Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron — as well as 30 deleted scenes, and 60 behind-the-scenes featurettes. This is a must-have for fans of the second-biggest film of all time.
To complement the Titanic Blu-ray release is Ghosts of the Abyss 3D, Cameron’s documentary capturing his return trip to the Titanic and its resting place on the floor of the icy Atlantic Ocean. The three-disc combo Blu-ray 3-D/Blu-ray/DVD version offers the original hour-long theatrical release from 2003 and an expanded 90-minute cut. The extra half-hour provides extended trips into the rusting and deteriorating ruins of the ship, as Cameron and actor Bill Paxton, who played treasure seeker Brock Lovett in Titanic, dive in submersibles to the wreckage. More impressive is the footage from special underwater robot cameras nicknamed Jake and Elwood as the crafts negotiate ghostly dark rooms and hallways that have been silent since April 15, 1912. CGI effects provide context and ghostly visions to the often-unrecognizable remains, as the ship is slowly being reclaimed by the sea and sea life.
Ghosts of the Abyss makes a fascinating bookend to Titanic — assuming after more than three hours on the S.S. Cameron you’re up for another 90 minutes with the director and the doomed ship.
Written by Kirk Baird
United 93 opened in theatres to critical acclaim in April, 2006. Months earlier, the trailer for the film — a white-knuckle and gut-punch re-enactment of the hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania — was famously derided by audience heckles of "Too soon!"
"Too soon" seems so distant and quaint now, especially as Sept. 11 has become a cottage industry in popular culture 11 years later.
Musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Tori Amos, and Toby Keith have flocked to the theme. Writers explored the attacks and the aftermath in an assortment of fiction ( Terrorist by John Updike and Falling Man by Don DeLillo) and even non-fiction (the bestselling The 9/11 Commission Report). And, of course, filmmakers followed United 93's lead with sobering examinations of a post-9/11 world, including Reign Over Me, World Trade Center, and most recently Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
For a nation that once collectively said it was "too soon" to discuss the tragedy, we are spending a lot of time absorbing Sept. 11, 2001, reading about it, and watching it.
"Too soon?"
Hardly.
With the 11th anniversary of the attacks today, here are some Sept. 11-themed movies and documentaries:
* 9/11: The Filmmakers Commemorative Edition (2002): French brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet happened to be filming a documentary on NYC firefighters when the attacks happened, and their cameras captured moments of heroism, chaos, and death that are impossible to forget.
* Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004): Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore explores the Sept. 11 attacks, and the role of the Bush administration, in his controversial documentary.
United 93 (2006): Paul Greengrass ( The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum) directed this tense recreation of the heroism of 40 strangers who stood as one against the terrorists who seized control of their plane.
* World Trade Center (2006): Oliver Stone directed this true story of the rescue of two Port Authority policemen trapped in rubble after they volunteered to help the victims of the World Trade Center attacks.
Reign Over Me (2007): Adam Sandler stars in this drama about a suicidal New Yorker who lost his family in the attacks with Don Cheadle as the friend who tries to help him.
Man on Wire (2008): This Oscar-winning documentary details the famous high-wire walk by Frenchman Philippe Petit in 1974 between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers as well as history about the buildings themselves.
Mooz-lum (2010): A moving drama that explores post-9/11 life for a black Muslim in an increasingly wary society.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011): A grieving 9-year-old boy goes on a great adventure through New York City as way to be close to his father, who died in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
*Unfortunately, these movies are out of print.
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