The Best of 2010 in TV
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WEEKEND breaks down the Top 20 movies of 2010.
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The finest in images and words this year
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Parks and Rec” comes into its own during its second season. The first season of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” was painful to watch at times. It was so clearly aping the formula of “The Office” that each character could be neatly paired with a character from that show. The jokes weren’t very good either.That new-show awkwardness continued for about two episodes of the second season, but after that, “Parks and Rec” became a different show, and arguably, the best comedy on television.This DVD set collects all 24 episodes of the second season, as well as the requisite bonus materials that help NBC justify the sticker price.Season two’s strengths lie in its character development; getting to know Ron “F-ing” Swanson is truly a privilege, and the April-Andy romantic awkwardness is as fun as Jim and Pam’s ever was during the peak years of “The Office.”“While lousy ratings might keep “Parks and Rec” from doing its thing on television for much longer, it works tremendously on DVD, and this package is well worth the asking price for fans of the show.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium Trilogy, focusing on computer hacker Lisbeth Salander’s efforts to expose abuses in the Swedish sex worker industry, is the punk-rock “Harry Potter.”Salander is a tattooed, pierced lesbian who has captured the collective imagination of Sweden and the United States alike with her strength and cunning. Swedish actress Noomi Rapace has landed the role of a lifetime in portraying Salander, and in the second installment of the trilogy, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” she shows her impressive versatility in the part.“Fire” sees our protagonist assuming numerous visages as she hides from both hired goons who want her dead and police who think she’s responsible for three murders, and Rapace pulls it off with poise.The film is plagued by some of the pacing issues that often come up with middle installments of trilogies, but two endlessly riveting performances from Rapace and veteran character actor Michael Nyqvist keep things consistently interesting.The Swedish film industry is doing some impressive things today, and “The Girl Who Played With Fire” shows that even big-budget bestseller adaptations are artistically resonant pieces of work that demand one’s full attention.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Yeah, we know you’ve all seen “Night of the Living Dead,” “28 Days Later...,” “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland.” Lots of people have, but that doesn’t make them zombie lovers. Who wants an interesting film when all we really want are zombies? Sometimes it’s just more fun to watch an awful (or not), guilty pleasure horror B-movie that the “Twilight” crowd would’ve never heard of. Here’s a list of some our favorite, goriest and dumbest zombie movies ever made. So, if you’re like a zombie looking for brains, this is not the list for you.“White Zombie” (1932)One of Hollywood’s first interpretations of the zombie is 1932’s “White Zombie.” Based on Haitian folklore of ‘zombis,’ Bela Lugosi (better known for his title role in the 1931 classic monster movie, “Dracula”) plays Murder Legendre, a voodoo sorcerer with the power to raise the dead to work in his sugar mill. Unlike other zombies, these undead are meant to be objects of pity, not fear. As the first of its kind, it is an important zombie movie to check out, but with weak performances and unbelievable dialogue, “White Zombie” is a one-time watch. — Charles Scudder“The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?” (1964) This verbosely-titled film is probably the worst zombie movie ever made, and I don’t mean that as a compliment to some gloriously campy send-up. It’s actually just a terrible, boring movie with some tangential attachment to zombies — who, according to this film’s special effects crew, just look like people. This movie is only notable because it is responsible for one of the funniest episodes of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” — Brad Sanders“The Astro-Zombies” (1968) “The Astro-Zombies” is one of those films that you feel embarrassed for everyone involved with by the time the movie is done. There are some movies that are so bad that they’re good, but “The Astro-Zombies” is not good. In a nutshell, a “space agency” scientist goes rogue and creates a zombie, the zombie breaks loose and goes on a killing spree, the CIA tries to track down the zombie, somehow a Mexican gang gets involved, there’s a damsel in distress and in the end, well, in the end you’re just confused. — CS“Zombie” (1979) Italian director Lucio Fulci’s most famous film (known everywhere but America as “Zombi 2”) is a scary, fun romp through the jungles of fictional Matul Island. It’s a solid enough movie all around, but it’s still talked about today primarily because of one particular scene involving a zombie, a woman and a shard of wood. YouTube “Zombie eye scene” and have your life changed forever. — BS “The Evil Dead” (1981) In director Sam Raimi’s (“Spider-man”) first feature film, five college-age students go on a trip to an abandoned cabin in the woods. As usual in such situations, stuff goes wrong. Someone reads an ancient passage from an old book, the forest attacks a girl who tries to leave and people start turning into zombies — really anything that could go wrong does. This isn’t your normal back-from-the-grave zombie, but more of a possessed-spirit zombie. “The Evil Dead” is one of the most extraneously bloody zombie movies out there, but it’s definitely one not to miss. Make sure to check out the sequels, “Evil Dead II” and “Army of Darkness.” — CS“Return of the Living Dead Part II” (1988) While the first installment in the now five-part long “Return of the Living Dead” series is considered a minor classic, it’s the second film that perfectly encapsulated the 1980s horror-comedy vibe that director Ken Wiederhorn was trying to accomplish. Every performance is overacted to the max, the special effects are fantastically cheesy and the plot drips with late Cold War paranoia about government secrets and conspiracies. The entire series is worth at least one run through, but if you’re likely to revisit one movie, it’s “Part II.” — BS“The Serpent and the Rainbow” (1988)This is perhaps the most notable film in the “real life zombies” subgenre. Wes Craven’s mid-career masterpiece is based on a nonfiction book of the same name that details an herbal brew concocted by Haitian witchdoctors that generates the symptoms of being “undead.” The film’s protagonist, a Harvard ethnobotanist, goes to Haiti to investigate the drug for a pharmaceutical company but becomes obsessed with the zombies instead. — BS“Dead Alive” (1992) Before Peter Jackson was tossing off billion-dollar masterpieces in the early 2000s, he was a young Kiwi with a camera and a love for gore, zombies and over-the-top schlock. “Dead Alive” (released as “Braindead” outside of the U.S.) might be the best film from this era of his career, and it is certainly the goriest. And honestly, isn’t any film whose premise can be summarized as, “plague rats raped tree monkeys to create rat-monkeys who make humans into zombies if they bite them,” worth watching at least once? — BS“Fido” (2006) This Canadian comedy takes place in a world where living with zombies has become normal. In fact, zombies have been domesticated as pets/servants. The dead can choose to be decapitated and buried separately from their head or return as a zombie-slave. But just like you hear news stories about supposedly “domesticated” tigers attacking their owners, this zombie-as-pet analogy was never meant to work properly. In this strange, twisted love story of a boy and his zombie, we see one of the most romanticized interpretations of the zombie to date. — CS“American Zombie” (2007) “American Zombie” is a mockumentary about the life of the modern zombie in their own world. Zombies are completely sentient but simply do not remember their past life. Some zombies spend time trying to re-discover their past while others attempt to re-integrate into “normal” life. This movie puts an entertaining new twist on the old zombie, but the last half-hour flips the story on its head, keeping you on the edge of your seat until the final scene. — CS“Zombie Strippers!” (2008) This largely failed attempt at political satire and camp appeal tells the story of a strip club in which a stripper is infected with the zombie virus. After becoming undead, she becomes a more popular stripper, and so naturally the other strippers become zombies one by one to stay competitive. The zombie strippers kill clients in private dances, begin fighting each other and overcome lackluster attempts to contain them. Really, the only excuse for having seen this film is “I watch every movie with ‘zombie’ in the title” or “I really love Jenna Jameson,” the movie’s lead actress. — Corin Chellberg
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>There are few industries with business competitions as exciting as the one in the comics world between DC and Marvel.This friendly war is almost always good for the consumer, as the two media giants slash prices, attract top talent and churn out an ever-flowing stream of quality material all in the name of beating the other guy.In the last decade, running a comic book empire has become as much about the extras as it has about actual comics. The explosion of the comic book movie has had a lot to do with this, and it’s one area where Marvel has annihilated DC both in overall quantity and average quality.But in the last two years or so, DC has started to bounce back, releasing a slate of movies highlighted by “The Dark Knight,” “Kick-Ass” and now, “Red.”Unfortunately, in an effort to be as broadly appealing as possible, “Red” may find itself without an audience. While it is indeed based on Warren Ellis’ and Cully Hammer’s 2003-04 miniseries of the same name, it dropped most of that book’s violence and foul language to secure a PG-13 rating. Since most of the book’s appeal comes from its ultra-violence, the watered-down film version packs little of its source material’s punch.The movie’s greatest strength is its cast. Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban and a 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine are all sublimely funny and somehow wholly in their element, even when firing machine guns and jumping out of moving vehicles. The cast is another way that appealing to an unnecessarily wide audience worked to the movie’s advantage; this reviewer heard more than one elderly gasp of delight in the theater at Borgnine’s first appearance onscreen.While “Kick-Ass” will go down as DC’s greatest contribution to movies in 2010, “Red” provides a cleaned-up, if not always interesting, counterpoint.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>For more than four years, “Chicago Sun-Times” film critic Roger Ebert stood staunchly behind one controversial statement that drew more ire from the world of pop culture than any one of his thousands of reviews. That statement was simple, short and uttered as though it were a truism: “Video games can never be art.”When he refused to recant, the critic quickly became the criticized. Thousands of responses flew in, mostly from people in the game industry and gamers themselves. But Ebert held fast. He likened saying video games are art to saying games such as chess — which he plays — are art as well. Ultimately, he simply couldn’t credit a medium that he saw as so vapid with the distinction of being “art.”But video games have come a long way since the days of “Pong” and “Pac-Man,” and gamers believe that their medium should have more widespread respect in the 21st century.Norbert Herber, a lecturer in the IU telecommunications department who has worked as a sound designer and composer for video games, finds Ebert’s criticism outdated.“I think (Ebert) is hung up on this romantic idea of art. His conception of art is still in the 19th century, and if he were to update that, he might consider his experiences as a chess player to be somewhat of an art experience,” he said.Herber also successfully anticipated Ebert’s caveat that came several months after his most infamous anti-video games blog post.“Ebert talks about games as someone who has never talked about having played these games, and the points that he makes shows that he has watched the trailers, that he may have seen pictures, but he has never played the games, and he can’t possibly speak from any position of authority on this,” he said. “It would be like someone trying to critique a movie having only seen the trailer.”Indeed, Ebert declared in a July 1 blog post that he “should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.” Familiarity was certainly part of it, but perhaps the bigger culprit was generation.Edward Castronova, an associate professor in the IU Department of Telecommunications who has researched the social sciences as they relate to virtual worlds in online role-playing games, said the rate at which technology accelerates necessitates that some people will always be left behind. He said he subscribes to the theory set forth by the physicist Max Planck, that “science progresses funeral by funeral.”“I think it’s tough to expect someone who’s 65 to see the potential in a medium that’s nothing that they grew up with,” Castronova said. “But technology is advancing at an exponential rate right now, which means that every generation will have this same experience. I will be a white-haired person saying ‘There’s this thing out there, I’ve never done anything with it, I don’t understand it, and I don’t think it’s going to amount to much.’”Herber said he agreed on that point.“(The Baby Boomers) grew up with a completely different relationship with media,” he said. “My parents are in Ebert’s generation, and I’ll often be their tech support. And just based on the questions they ask me, it’s so clear to me that they see the computer in such a completely different way than I do. We may be accomplishing the same things in the end, but the conceptual framework around the thing is very different, so I think for people who look at the computer in that way, it’s really hard to see games as an art form.”One project based at IU stands firmly on one side of the video games as art debate. “Londontown” is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game currently in development by a team of IU students and faculty spearheaded by an assistant telecommunications professor, Lee Sheldon. The game leads players through “a London that never was; a London we all remember,” wherein players will encounter both literary characters and real historical figures in Victorian London.Jessica Wininger, a senior majoring in English and a co-lead writer on “Londontown,” said the game’s emphasis is on story, a component of gaming that is more readily accepted as art by skeptics.“What’s really important about ‘Londontown’ is the narrative. That’s what we’ve focused on the most. Even the battle system in it is nothing really complex,” she said. “Our whole goal that we’ve been working on as writers has been to have really strong (non-player characters) for the player to interact with, and out of that, writing really interesting story arcs and basing the quests around them.”Although “Londontown” and a whole slew of other recent video games are steering the ship toward story, that doesn’t make it the only facet of games worthy of the “art” tag. Herber said he doesn’t believe the components of a game should be separated when assessing its value as a work of art.“You can’t say the music is art, the visuals are art, but the story is not, or any mix like that, because the experience of playing the game that comes out of the participation is something that you as a player are directly responsible for,” he said.Castronova conceded that most video games haven’t yet ascended to the highest echelon of art. He used “Fable,” a highly interactive role-playing game, as his standard for a video game that is also great art — a distinction that he said he only awards to things that are “shocking, interesting and true.”“By that standard, ‘Fable’ is absolutely a work of art. Does it rise to the level of the Mass in B Minor? Probably not. We’re not up to a Brahms quartet in video games right now. But the potential is there.”
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“The U,” director Billy Corben, 2009 — After the Dolphin’s 1972 perfection and before Dan Marino (and even into his tenure), the University of Miami, aka “The U,” was defining what football meant to South Florida. Billy Corben’s documentary of the same name is a fascinating depiction of how the social and racial unrest of early Miami of the 1980s manifested itself in the Miami football program. The players coaches Howard Schnellenberger and Jimmy Johnson recruited were as brash and unpredictable as the rapidly developing city itself. The interviews and footage are brilliant snapshots of how gangster and thug culture were really received before hip-hop took them to the mainstream. — Adam Lukach“Man on Wire,” director James Marsh, 2008 — “Man on Wire” follows Philippe Petit, a 24-year-old wire walker from France, as he sets out to fulfill an extremely lofty dream. Petit wanted to perform a high-wire walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, which were the tallest buildings in the world in 1974 when the events of the film took place. As the fascinating events unfold, interviews with Petit’s friends add richness to the narrative and offer insight into Petit’s motivations. “Man on Wire” won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Documentary, a collection of other prestigious awards and the hearts of audiences everywhere. — Corin Chellberg “Super Size Me,” director Morgan Spurlock, 2004 — “Super Size Me” follows filmmaker Morgan Spurlock as he sets out to eat nothing but food from McDonald’s for 30 days. His goal is to illustrate by exaggeration the health risks of the country’s increasing consumption of unhealthy fast food. He goes through an ever-worsening range of symptoms as the film progresses, starting with weight gain and eventually including depression, sexual dysfunction and heart palpitations. By the time Spurlock completed his experiment, he had gained almost 25 pounds. This entertaining but stomach-turning film will make you think twice before ordering a Big Mac the next time you are at McDonald’s, and that’s probably a good thing. — CC“Sherman’s March,” director Ross McElwee, 1986 — “Sherman’s March” begins with a shot of a massive empty apartment as McElwee narrates how he always dreamed of making a movie tracing Northern general William Sherman’s march through the South during The Civil War and seeing if its effects are still relevant today. However, it quickly turns into a tale of McElwee’s love for the women in his life and his failures in connecting with them. At times heartbreaking and hilarious, “Sherman’s March” is the film Woody Allen would make if he made a documentary. — Mikel Kjell“Jesus Camp,” directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006 — In the last decade, dozens of skeptical filmmakers have directed their vitriol at organized religion, blaming its influence for everything from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the corruption of young children. While Bill Maher’s much more successful “Religulous” uses humor to aim at the former, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “Jesus Camp,” the far superior documentary, seeks to shine light on the latter. Scenes like the one of home-schooled children of Evangelical Christians pledging their allegiance to the flag of the Christian nation after being taught by their mother that evolution is an unproven theory are truly disturbing. The film should serve as a call to arms to stop extremists from teaching their kids whatever they want. — Brad Sanders“For All Mankind,” director Al Reinert 1989 — Filmmaker Al Reinert documented the history of the Apollo space missions using footage shot by the astronauts themselves. The film features a classic score from Brian Eno, the perfect accompaniment to Reinert’s celestial visuals. No fictional movie to date has represented anything as visually stunning as the documentary footage used here. — Brian Marks“F for Fake,” director Orson Welles, 1974 — Orson Welles’ final film was this free-form documentary that was part a study of reality and fiction, a pure experiment in filmmaking, a biography of an international art forger, an autobiography of Welles’ career, factual to the smallest detail, and part lying through his own teeth. It’s a bizarre work of art by the greatest of all directors, and real or fake, it’s absolutely mesmerizing. — Brian Welk“An Inconvenient Truth,” director Davis Guggenheim, 2006 — “An Inconvenient Truth” is the famous documentary of former Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to teach people around the world about global warming by giving detail-rich and visually stunning presentations. A large portion of the film is that very presentation, presented on a massive scale. That format combined with Gore’s reputation as a bland speaker may sound more like a nap-inducing lecture than a documentary film, but the presentation is dramatic, compelling and backed by a mountain of widely accepted data. The film paints a chilling picture of a slowly warming planet and serves as a clarion call to action, and it was the first to do so for the masses. — CC“Night and Fog,” director Alain Resnais, 1955 — Alain Resnais’ documentary about the Holocaust is one of the shortest made on the subject and also one of the most important. Resnais avoids minutiae and instead focuses on why something so unimaginable could happen. The answer: There is no explanation. — BM“Woodstock,” director Michael Wadleigh, 1970 — “Woodstock,” directed by Michael Wadleigh, helped to define an entire generation.Wadleigh (with the help of editors, including a young Martin Scorsese) used innovative visual techniques to catalogue all of the music and mayhem of the famous festival. See it if only for Jimi Hendrix’s closing performance. — BMThe “Up” Series, director Michael Apted — The “Up” series became the most ambitious collection of films ever made, fact or fiction, after starting in 1964 with 14 students and the mantra, “Give me a child until the age of 7, and I will give you the man.” Michael Apted faithfully followed how 14 kids from different parts of Britain grew and developed in seven-year intervals, and his project has not stopped. In 2005, Apted’s subjects turned 49 in the series’s seventh installment, and “56 Up” has been announced for a 2012 release. — BW“The Man With the Movie Camera,” director Dziga Vertov, 1929 — Regardless of whether you can call it a documentary, “The Man With the Movie Camera” is one of the greatest films ever made. Released in 1929 with an average shot-length as rapid as today’s action extravaganzas, the film was the first wholly cinematic experience of the time. It has no plot, no characters and no intertitles, and it proved that audiences could watch the shooting, editing and screening of a film about the day in the life of the people of Moscow. It’s one of the most remarkable cinematic experiments of all time. — BW“The Cove,” director Louie Psihoyos, 2009 — The Oscar-winning documentary of last year is one of the most heartbreaking, empathetic documentaries I’ve ever seen. It condemns the practice of dolphin slaughter in Japan on an emotional, environmental, ecological, political, cultural and medical level. It does all of this as though the viewer were watching a crime caper. Try not to cry at the horrific footage of dolphins being stabbed to death in a secret cove off the coast of Taiji, Japan. — BW
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Although the ubiquity of the lead single “The Boys of Fall” makes it seem much older, Kenny Chesney’s 14th studio album, “Hemingway’s Whiskey,” just dropped Sept. 28.While the aforementioned song struck enough of a chord with middle America to launch it into the Top 40, the rest of the album falls just shy of its wonderfully schmaltzy romanticizing of high school football. As with most modern country albums, the sappy, slow songs are the highlights, at least partly because they connect at the most basic level of human emotion. Everyone understands nostalgia, lost love and loneliness, but how many of us drive tractors and spend our vacations drinking tequila on the beach? Fortunately, most of the shortcomings of “Hemingway’s Whiskey” are inherent in its genre. Taken strictly within its context, it’s a solid disc. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it offers a semi-essential glance into a modern country scene dominated by acts like Rascal Flatts and Lady Antebellum that is rarely worth examining.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“The Secret in Their Eyes” became a familiar name to American film lovers earlier this year when it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.The Argentinean film is the story of a vigilant federal justice agent who, along with his best friend and a young lawyer, sets out to convict a man accused of rape and murder of a woman. After an unsuccessful attempt to put him behind bars, the killer appears to drop off the map. But in the film’s penultimate scene, a brilliant twist changes everything. All of the performances are spot on, and director Juan Jose Campanella shines in familiar territory. He has also directed seventeen episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” That’s not a slight against it, though; the film clearly earned its Oscar. Through tense dialogue and claustrophobic camera work, the gravity that the movie’s central crime holds for all of its characters is made abundantly clear. Every scene is crucial, and more importantly, well-executed.
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____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Rhino’s: Bloomington’s premier all-age rock club is located at 331 S. Walnut St. and has both national and local shows showcasing everything from death metal to indie rock. You’ll encounter lots of obnoxious high school kids because the venue is all ages, but the low ticket prices, top-notch sound and extremely visible stage more than justify the suffering. Rhino’s will be hosting indie rock stalwarts Wavves with openers Christmas Island and Apache Dropout on Sept. 14. Tickets are $10. The Bluebird: Located at 216 N. Walnut St., The Bluebird books more nationally touring acts than any other club in Bloomington. The venue has crisp sound and a big enough floor to have mid-sized acts from a plethora of genres. Since it’s really just a bar that has shows, the venue is age-restricted, and you can’t get in if you aren’t 21. The age restriction doesn’t keep out all of the riff raff, but it does create an adult-oriented environment more conducive to enjoying a concert. The Bluebird will have heavy metal power trio High on Fire with touring support from Kylesa and Torche on Oct. 11. Tickets are $15 on Ticketmaster before convenience fees. The Bishop: Opening shop last year in the building formerly known as the Cinemat, the Bishop is a relatively new concert venue for Bloomington, located at 123 S. Walnut St. Finding a happy medium between the all-age rumpus of Rhino’s and the older-than-21 exclusiveness of The Bluebird, the club has an 18-and-up policy, making it theoretically open to all college students while excluding most high school students. It books local and touring bands of all genres and of a wide range of popularity levels, from black metal shows that you’ll find yourself practically alone at to marquee indie pop gigs where the standing area is shoulder-to-shoulder. The Bishop is bringing Indianapolis indie giants Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s on Oct. 14. Tickets are $13. Buskirk-Chumley Theater: If the band you’re interested in seeing is too big for any of the above clubs, perhaps they’ll book a gig at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, located at 114 E. Kirkwood Ave. With a large seated auditorium complete with balcony, shows at the Buskirk-Chumley can hold hundreds more people than shows at any of Bloomington’s rock clubs and are generally geared to a more subdued audience. That is, one without beer. Some of the most popular shows that roll through town are here, and the sound quality is superb. The Buskirk-Chumley will have The New Pornographers on Oct. 13. Tickets range from $27.50 to $30 before fees.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>One of the highlights of “Grindhouse,” Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 joint tribute to bad ‘70s splatter flicks, was the fake trailers. While both “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof” provided ample over-the-top fun, the experience was pushed into the stratosphere by ads for five fake movies with titles like “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” and “Hobo With a Shotgun.”So far, one of those phony movies is a reality. Robert Rodriguez stretched his two-minute trailer for “Machete,” an action movie starring a scowling, revenge-bent Danny Trejo in the title role, into a 100-minute movie.It was a risky move, but Rodriguez knocked it out of the park. “Machete” is a movie ostensibly about the immigration debate, but mostly about a dude who slices people up with a machete and sees a lot of boobs. The political aspects of the story are delivered in just as schlocky a manner as the violence, showing Rodriguez wasn’t trying to make a statement so much as he was trying to make another fun movie that pays tribute to a genre of film that he reveres.And as far as ultraviolent Mexploitation flicks go, there’s hardly any better than “Machete.”
On Monday night at 8:00 p.m., WEEKEND says "Chuck" is the better show than "House" this season.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>For 35 years, Iron Maiden has represented the best in what heavy metal can offer. Their album art, lyrics and undead mascot Eddie constructed an image that horrified parents rejected and wide-eyed youths embraced, but it was always their second-to-none songwriting and theatrical live performances that set them apart from their counterparts. But even a well-oiled machine is liable to rust eventually, and the band’s 2006 full-length “A Matter of Life and Death” was applauded by only their most diehard fans. Critics complained about the business-as-usual approach and recurring song structures — namely the long, mellow intros and codas that were present on all but two of the album’s ten tracks. “The Final Frontier,” the band’s fifteenth long-player, sees Maiden falling back on a few of its old tricks, but also expanding its repertoire to include sounds it has never explored before. The album opens with “Satellite 15,” a four-minute intro track of guitar feedback, distant synthesizers and electronic drums that would be at home on one of singer Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums, but which is totally foreign to Maiden. That leads into rollicking single “The Final Frontier,” the band’s best opener since 2000’s “The Wicker Man.” The experimentation continues throughout the record’s 76 minutes. “Isle of Avalon” and “Starblind” have groovier middle sections than anything the band has done, “Coming Home” is the closest thing to a ballad they’ve ever composed, “The Alchemist” is the fastest song they’ve written in over a decade and “When the Wild Wind Blows” is the third-longest song of their career. As with any album that pushes its creators’ boundaries, not every experiment works. The acoustic section in “The Talisman” is unnecessary and boring, and the verses to “El Dorado” see Dickinson singing in a totally new way that incidentally sounds terrible. Still, the band’s effort is commendable, and it has enough variation to keep the diehards around while bringing some lost sheep back to the herd. If the rumors that “The Final Frontier” will be Iron Maiden’s final album are true, they could go out a hell of a lot worse.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When Adam West famously portrayed Bruce Wayne in the 1966 big-screen adaptation of Bob Kane’s Batman comics, the idea of transforming comics into movies was entirely new.There had been televised serials of both Batman and Superman in the ’40s, but the 1966 film marked the first time people could go to the movie theater and watch actors recreating the exploits of their favorite comic-book characters. To a lot of moviegoers, it didn’t make sense. Brightly colored costumes and flowing capes looked good on the printed page, but on the screen they seemed like a recipe for disaster. Besides, comic books were kid’s stuff. No serious filmmaker should be looking to them for inspiration.Fast forward to July 18, 2008. Lines were forming and snaking around city blocks as people eagerly awaited entry to the theater. The movie they were about to see shattered weekend box office records and eventually made more than $1 billion in worldwide box office revenues. Critics almost unanimously praised it as one of the best films of the year. The movie was “The Dark Knight,” British director Christopher Nolan’s latest take on the Batman movie franchise. Clearly, something has changed. Now four of the top-20 all-time U.S. box office leaders, as well as 11 of the top 100, are comic-book movies. Studios turn out new comic-book movies on an almost-monthly basis. In 2010 alone, six comic-book movies will see wide release in American theaters, and the relatively new production company Marvel Studios has 11 movies slated for release in the next two years. How did we get to this point?For one, the movies are getting better, and even when they’re not getting better, they’re definitely getting slicker and more marketable. This shift comes not only from the film studios, but also from the current trends in the comic-book industry. In the infancy of comic books, the medium was mostly targeted toward children and the comic artist’s palette was garish and brightly colored. These factors made it difficult to produce serious comic-book movies for a wide audience, and when they were made they were incredibly corny — just like the comic books they sought to emulate.Today, comic books are of a different breed. Since the British Invasion of comics in the 1980s that saw writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman bending the rules of the genre and making the medium appeal to an older audience, comics have become darker, more realistic, and more conducive to being made into films.Hollywood took notice but not immediately. The current explosion in comic-book movies can be traced back to the hugely and shockingly successful “X-Men” in 2000. There had been a number of Batman and Superman movies in the preceding decades, but none accurately reflected their source material in a way that satisfied true believers and newcomers alike quite like “X-Men.” As the enormous earnings from movies with the Marvel and DC license started piling up, studios got a little more adventurous. If audiences would pay to go see movies about comic books that everyone is familiar with, perhaps they would be willing to take a chance with something more underground.Such was the logic behind film adaptations of “300,” “V for Vendetta,” “Kick-Ass,” and a dozen other lesser-known comics. The box office results varied, but in general studios were rewarded for taking a chance.The future is bright for comic book movies. As the risk of overdoing certain characters grows, fans of smaller-budget series are increasingly likely to see their favorite comics transformed into films. Thankfully, comic books are a rich and nearly bottomless source of material, so Hollywood still has plenty to show us.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>There has to be someone in the world who was excited to learn second-tier ’80s hair metal band Ratt was “finally” releasing “Infestation,” the follow-up to their 1999 self-titled album, but it’s still difficult to wrap one’s head around the possibility.This hypothetical Ratt fan probably heard the embarrassingly titled lead single “Eat Me Up Alive” on his local classic rock radio station and thought it was the musical equivalent to achieving nirvana. The song has everything someone who listens to this kind of music could ask for: a limp main riff trying to pass itself off as heavy, processed vocals equivalent to that of a strip club cover band and, of course, a guitar solo!The 10 guys on Earth who actually want to hear this still haven’t upgraded from cassettes, and thankfully, “Infestation” won’t be released on that format.