Holy crap.
The “real one” version of Sin City sounds worth waiting on. (I didn’t see it in the theaters for reasons that remain murky, even to me.)
Collectable covers notwithstanding, I’m a little perplexed at why the studio would put out this version now, unless there was just no chance to get any of the extras prepared, but it’s not like they haven’t had months and months to work on it.
In any case, yoinking it off the Netflix list now. It’s not like I don’t have enough stuff on the list as-is. (The MyNetflix mod not correctly limiting the results to 10 films is making me strongly reconsider having the list on the site at all.)
The Washington Times is many things, but known for great arts coverage it is not.
That said, this line from a review of Liz Phair’s concert at the Birchmere may be one of the best descriptions of her and her work that I’ve ever come across:
In such a stripped-and-clipped setting, the singer’s decade-strong catalog came across tough and tender, kind of like Miss Phair herself — a pint-sized charmer with a hazardously sexy persona and a potty mouth.
That’s deeply cool, in a nerdish writer way. You’ve got a rhyme, alliteration and a hardcore-fans-only allusion to a popular early bootleg of Phair’s work. (Look, this is better than the time at the News Messenger where we sat around goobing about the semicolon for over an hour.)
And yes, I’m still a Washingtonian in my brain, so I get to say “the Birchmere” as though everyone would know what and where that is.
I’ve posted new reviews at Amazon.com for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Red Thunder and Constantine. If you like them (or even if you don’t), click through to the actual product and vote for (or against) the review.
Let me say this up-front: I’m a huge fan of the “Hellblazer” comic book, especially the long run by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. So I was more than a little nervous about this movie. But at the same time, I also like films like this, even when they’re not connected to any existing franchise.
“Constantine
” feels like it both took too little from the comic books and not enough, which is a neat trick. There’s likely a heck of a good movie on the cutting room floor or, more likely, in previous versions of the scripts that were sliced and spliced together to make the theatrical version of the film.
Keanu Reeves plays LA detective John Constantine or, as he says it, “John Constantine, a-hole.” That’s a cute line, but it points to one of the major problems with the film: It’s Schwarzeneggerized. Dialogue in the movie, for the most part, consists of clever catch phrases (and we know “John Constantine, a-hole” is a catch phrase because a riff is done on it by another character within the first minute of Reeves saying it in the movie). Is he an a-hole? Hard to tell: In the comics, he certainly is — John Constantine in “Hellblazer” will sacrifice small children to save a city, or sell someone else’s soul for a marginally improved chance of defeating an enemy. In the film, Reeves’ Constantine is mostly just moody, but we never heard him say “I’m Neo, a-hole” or “I’m either Bill or Ted, a-hole” in previous movies, despite his Constantine not being dramatically different from any of his other roles. But it’s a cute line, so we’re stuck with it.
In the comics, these clever bits that Constantine says are spaced out over several issues and we see a lot more of his street level grungy street magic. He’s not a cool guy, he’s a failed human being who happens to pull a rabbit out of his hat and save the day, once in a while, but at great cost to everyone around him. In the movie, we get all the cool bits and none of the context. This is Neo in wool instead of leather and using magic instead of virtual reality.
Likewise, the story, involving the Devil’s son, angels and demons involved in a cold war on Earth and twin psychics, is very authentically “Hellblazer” — specifically, it hits a lot of the moments in the Ennis/Dillon run — but where it should explain, it skims and where it should move quickly, it broods on arty sequences. As a result, the actual plot of the movie comes suddenly at the end, and it feels as though most of what came before was unneeded, and it probably was.
Having said that, the film looks like a million bucks, whether it’s cinematography, special effects or costuming. You can certainly see where they spent the money they saved on having a solid script doctor come in and clean things up afterwards.
Those interested in the subject matter — a war between Heaven and Hell in a modern urban landscape — would be better advised to pick up the Ennis/Dillon “Hellblazer” paperbacks (all of which are available here at Amazon) instead. “Hellblazer” fans would be advised to rent this, at most.
Someone, someday, will make a great gritty supernatural thriller set on the mean streets of London. “Constantine” isn’t it, and isn’t even a particularly satisfying appetizer for that film.
“Titan,” this ain’t.
John Varley’s done some novels, most notably “Millennium” and the Gaia trilogy, that are full of Big Ideas and sprawling imagination. In contrast, “Red Thunder” is a popcorn movie, all concerned with fun and momentum forward.
Literally a novel about four friends who help assemble a homemade spaceship in an attempt to be the first people on Mars — with the help of a disgraced ex-astronaut and his idiot savant cousin — “Red Thunder” is a love letter to the Robert Heinlein “juvenile” novels about people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of their moon boots and heading out into space for adventure.
And “Red Thunder” succeeds at that, handily, in fact. His physics, once you get over the giant deus ex machina at the heart of the revolutionary space drive, are pretty good. His realpolitik is excellent, and a bit more canny than Heinlein. And, for once, Varley doesn’t emulate Heinlein at the end of his life, meaning this is his first novel in decades without strong (and often somewhat strange) sexual content.
This is a fun-for-all-ages, no deep thinking necessary adventure novel. Judged on its own merits, it’s a definite success. Judged as part of the Varley canon, it feels like something he just knocked out for fun between bigger projects. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing his next big project, whatever it might be.
Strongly recommended for space adventure fans of all ages, especially readers of earlier Robert Heinlein novels.
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