Quotes of the Week: The Mather

Calvin's first Rule of Movie Making: The higher the concept, the more you have to go full retard on the execution.
--Brother Cal

Gary had no idea who The Mather was, but he got the message loud and clear not to mess with his iced tea.
--Catalog Living

Kill All Monsters! pp 24-26

Chapter One comes to a close with the first look at one of our heroes outside her Bot. With all the monster fighting that's been going on so far, I'd sort of forgotten how much of a genius Jason is at facial expressions and body language. I'm so proud to be working with him on this thing, you don't even know.

The Awesome List: Isle of 1000,000 Graves

I'm trying a slightly different, less image-intensive format for this. It's not as fancy, but it'll help me streamline things and is more organized than the way I used to do it. Let me know what you think in the comments, even if what you think is, "Eh. Whatever."

Comics

• Cartoonist Jason's new Fantagraphics book Isle of 100,000 Graves will feature a a girl protagonist and pirates. [First Second Books]
• Nemo Publishing's Sea Ghost #1 is available for pre-order through Previews. [Maine News Simply]
• Shanna, the She-Devil Blogger has scans of a Shanna article that ran in Back Issue Magazine #43.
• CBR has a preview of Savage Beauty #1, Moonstone's new jungle girl comic that also has a back-up article by This Guy. [Comic Book Resources]

Movies

• Ewan McGregor may be playing eco-pirate Paul Watson in Ocean Warrior. [/Film]

TV

• Four photos from Stephen Spielberg's time-travel/dinosaur TV show Terra Nova. Sadly, no dinosaurs in any of them. [/Film]

10 movies I loved in 2010

So here they are. My ten favorite films from last year. Not necessarily the "best" in any objective way, but the ten I unabashedly dug the most.

Number 10



The other Leonardo DiCaprio movie that invites more than one possible interpretation. I like this one more though because though everything wasn't spelled out, it didn't need to cut away just before a crucial moment to deliver the ambiguity. We got the complete story. How we interpret it is up to us.

Number 9



Iron Man 2 got a lot of flack for not being Iron Man. And its critics are right that it isn't as tight a movie as the first one and feels like it spends a lot of time setting up The Avengers. But it was very entertaining in the process and though I never felt like Tony was actually going to die, I was engaged by the mystery of how he was going to survive. Which really, is as much as any adventure series with a recurring character can do. Besides, if nothing else, the film brought Scarlett Johannson as Black Widow and that's Top Ten worthy all by itself.

10 movies I liked a lot in 2010

Now we're getting into the good stuff. These ten films were almost perfect, but for some minor detail that kept me from loving them forever.

Number 20



The dialogue, the setting, the acting, and the mood are all as great as everyone says they are. I loved it right up until the "25 Years Later" jump, which is where it lost me. I know people who appreciated that closure, but I would've preferred it another way.

Number 19



A powerful and moving love story, but I couldn't get behind the couple, as I've said before. And even though I suspect that was exactly the reaction I was supposed to have, it kept me from fully embracing this movie.

10 movies I could take or leave in 2010

The movies in today's list are ones that I generally liked, but wasn't able to get really excited about for various reasons.

Number 30



I like Thomas Haden Church and Elisabeth Shue and the premise of Don McKay grabbed me. Church plays a lonely, high school janitor who gets an unexpected letter from his own high school sweetheart (Shue) asking him to come home. She's dying and wants a second chance at their relationship before she goes. When he gets there though, he finds his true love surrounded by a creepy caregiver, an even creepier doctor, and an awful aura of Something's Not Right Here. It's a great setup and while the movie's focusing on Don and his loneliness and teasing the mystery, it's good stuff. Unfortunately, once it reveals what's going on, the movie gets a bit nuts and hard to connect to.

Number 29



It's Green Zone's marketers fault that I was in the mood for another Bourne movie when I saw this, but even had I been fully on board with the different tone, the preachiness of the film would've been enough to keep me from fully embracing it. I really like the character of Freddy (Khalid Abdalla) though and the perspective he gives to the differences between American and person-on-the-street Iraqi interests in that country. That alone made the movie worthwhile for me.

10 movies I didn't care for in 2010

Unlike yesterday's list, these movies did have something positive about them. Not enough to make me like any of them, but enough to keep me from screaming that I wanted my two hours back right after.


Number 40



I appreciated that it made an attempt to fill in Fred Krueger's backstory and even played with the idea of turning him into a sympathetic character. But then it wussed out Big Time and just remade the original.

Number 39



I don't have a high tolerance for romantic comedies, but this had a couple of things going for it. I love movies with large casts and intertwining plots (Playing by Heart and Crash, for instance) and I like a lot of the people in this one (mostly folks from Alias and Grey's Anatomy, and Anne Hathaway and Queen Latifah). But there was an unfortunate, anthology-like feel to it where - even though the stories connected - they weren't consistent in tone or quality and I found myself wishing to skip past many of them, even when they featured a favorite actor.

Number 38



I knew what I was getting into by going to see this, but there was nothing else going on at the theater that week. Two years ago, I was a big Gerard Butler fan, but with The Ugly Truth, Gamer, and Law Abiding Citizen he's been working hard to fix that. On the other hand, while I don't like a lot of romantic comedies, I do like certain things about them and The Bounty Hunter managed to push a couple of those buttons. Not creatively,  mind you, but in that knee-jerk, "I like it when they do that" way. And Butler and Aniston are nice to look at. I have to take Jennifer Aniston in small doses, but this is the first thing I've seen her in since the last season of Friends.

12 movies I hated in 2010

They say that every cloud has a silver lining. If that's true, the silver linings in these storm clouds were bolts of lightning about to strike the tree I was standing under. From worst to...well, "best" doesn't seem like the appropriate word, but "least worst" maybe:

Number 52



I wrote a full review for the Kill All Monsters! blog, but the short version is that Skyline had no story. It was an idea for a story, but it went nowhere and ended at what should have been the movie's halfway point. Horrible.

Number 51



The movie that proved that M Night Shyamalan is so far gone that he doesn't even have to direct the movie for it to suck. Devil didn't make any sense and replaced Plot and Character Motivation with things like Fate and Whatever Shyamalan Decided to Pull Out of His Butt.

Quotes of the Week: Becoming Santa

I'm watching A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart as Scrooge. As well acted as it is, there are so many inaccuracies. For instance, there's no rat-accountants in Scrooge's office. Also they've completely missed the other Marley brother, and their song. As a matter of fact, there's no songs at all. Next there'll be no Fozziwig's Rubber Chicken Factory. Avoid.
--Gavin Spence

Santa isn't about ontology. It's about giving gifts and not taking credit for them. Learning the joy of finding the perfect gift for a loved one and watching them open it. To see the joy and surprise and tears when they open it. It's about learning to become Santa.
--Richard Beck

What we’re setting out to do with [Clash of the Titans 2] — the writers and the director and myself — is improve. I think I can act f***ing better, to be honest…Just take all the notes from people that I have been reading about on the ‘net and give them a movie they f***ing want.
--Sam Worthington

24 movies I missed in 2010

The list-making bug caught up with me yesterday, so I'm not going to be able to leave it alone with just songs and comics. Over the coming week I'm going to post about every 2010 movie I saw. All 52 of them. In order from least favorite to most.

But as I made the list, I was also reminded of all the movies that I wanted to see this year, but never got around to for a variety of reasons. So, by way of explaining why you won't see Toy Story 3 or Harry Potter 7.1 on the big list, here are - in alphabetical order - all the movies that I wish I could've caught in the theater in 2010. Some of them (Harry Potter) I hope to still see on the Big Screen, but I'll have to wait for most until they hit the Netflix.

I'm tempted to comment on why I want to see each of the following movies or - better yet - why I missed them, but I'll resist that. If you really want to know why any of these appear here, I'll be happy to go into detail in the comments.

...In with the new

I think I've figured out why I'm not feeling the Newness this year. For me, the New Year started back in November when I went back to work and Kill All Monsters! launched. But it's still a time for goal-setting, so I feel like I should be doing that even if I don't feel like doing it, if that makes sense.

Fiction-wise, the priority is to finish the Kill All Monsters! script. I'm close enough to the end now that I realize I've got some re-writing to do on the earlier stuff. Nothing that Jason and Ed have already drawn and lettered fortunately, but it's going to be more involved than just completing the current draft and typing, "The End." Lesson learned: even on a webcomic, finish the script before you launch. Frankly, had I had the completed script (instead of just a detailed outline) before we pitched to publishers, we would have had a stronger idea about what we were pitching and might have received a more enthusiastic response. That uncertainty was a casualty of also not knowing what format we were pitching: complete graphic novel or serialized mini-series. In the end, it shouldn't have mattered though. I should have had the script done either way.

I won't make that mistake with the next project, which is going to be the pirate/jungle girl story that Jessica Hickman and I want to do. As soon as I finish Kill All Monsters! it'll be on to that. Hopefully I'll be able to at least get started on it this year because there's a second - though very different - pirate story I want to do with Darla Ecklund right behind it.

On the blogging front, the goal for this year is to be more adventurous and try new things. I have no idea what that will look like, but I've settled into a comfortable niche and I need to step out of it occasionally and see what other possibilities and opportunities are waiting. I'm a planner and it's very difficult to leave this goal vague and open, but I'm going to and will consider doing so my first step towards meeting it.