Upcoming Home Entertainment Releases

According to ICV2 the following Home Entertainment items are on their way to stores in the near future.

Batman Begins Deluxe Edition DVD (October 18) -- Will include a 72 page comic book.

Carcassonne: The River II -- This is an updating of a previous release, more than a sequel, in that it is designed to work with other Carcassonne updates. Carcassonne is an innovative and enjoyable tile based game of "world construction and control" where players lay tiles attempting to create cities or roads to control. The name comes from the famous French city known for its vast fortifications. It's history stems from Rome to the Albigensian Crusades to the Hundred Year's War. The growth of the city and regions are the inspiration for the Carcassone board game, the fortress is the inspiration for the Carcassonne: The City version of the game.

Frank Miller's adaptation of Thermopylae 300 starts filming in October as well. Ironically, it will begin filming in Montreal a city not known for its "Gates of Fire." The film will be directed by Zack Snyder of Dawn of the Dead remake fame. While I very much enjoyed Miller's 300, I wish that Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire was the work being adapted. That being said, I don't know if it is better that the writer of such epics as Freejack and Above the Law be left behind and the writer of Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 be rewarded. Oh, and if you mention Sin City, I just have one thing to say...over-rated. Sky Captain and the World of Tommorrow did the computer environment better, and as Noir...do I even have to begin going down that road. I'll take Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Gilda, Criss Cross, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) and at least a dozen films over Sin City's watered down Noir anyday.

Wow

Pierce Brosnan is out as 007, after long speculation.

A single, surprising phone call and it was over. That's how Pierce Brosnan says he learned that his services as James Bond would no longer be required.

"One phone call, that's all it took!" the 52-year-old actor tells Entertainment Weekly magazine in its Aug. 19 issue.

One interesting bit...

Brosnan says he's grateful to have had the role, but adds: "It never felt real to me. I never felt I had complete ownership over Bond. Because you'd have these stupid one-liners _ which I loathed _ and I always felt phony doing them."

I remember the last Bond movie I saw, the one with Halle Berry, had a massive overload of puns. Glad Brosnan agrees.

Comic Books and "Art"

A while back, I wrote a post both praising and lamenting the possibility of an upcoming Watchmen movie. One of our early group members posted this in reply. I still stand by most of what I wrote, and will go into more detail later this week. But I thought that I would offer the following thoughts on "Art" as a prelude to further discussion on the topic. The paragraphs below are adapted from Roger Scruton's book "Modern Culture." I am certain he would be horrified by the use, but if Scruton read Fantastic Four issue number 56 (Third Series) "Remembrance of Things Past", Scuton might be very forgiving.



This is one of those cases where the interior art is superior to the cover, and where the cover has little if nothing to do with the narrative inside.

Without further ado...here is a modified version of what Scruton has to say about our affection for Superheroes (particularly Silver and Golden Age versions):

Comic books tried to create a new narrative audience, one that would not merely see the point of the heroic ideal, but also adopt it...

In contemporary comic books we see exactly what the transition from moderism to the 'post-modern' world involves, namely, the final rejection of high culture as a redemtive force and the ruination of the sacred in its last imagined form.

Modern comic book authors like Alan Moore and Warren Ellis were anticipated by Nietzsche, for whom the heroic in comic books is a sham...Rather than accept comic book superheroic characters in the terms suggested by the drama we should, Nietzsche advises, translate them 'into reality, into the modern -- let us be even crueller -- into the bourgeois!'...Nietzsche's judgements are seldom fair, and this is no exception. Comic books, particularly Gold and Silver Age, are concerned with creating a new kind of heroism, and to offer a new kind of solace to those of us for whom the old heroic way of life is not available. Heroes of the old type are larger-than-life versions of humanity, who live, love and suffer more completely than the rest of us, and who illustrate the possibilities to which man, with divine assistance, may aspire. Comic book superheroes belong to a new type. They exist in a state of exalted solitude (note Superman's "Fortress of Solitude"), the result of some primeval mistake; but they long either to redeem or to be redeemed, through an act of loving sacrifice...

Our sympathy for the comic book superhero...is not the artificial thing that Nietzsche pilloried. It stems from the deepdown recognition that his predicament is ours. Precisely because we live in a morbidly unheroic world -- the world of the cynic and the salesman, in which gods and heroes have no place -- we are driven to regard our own existence as some kind of mistake.

Ironically, much of the modern cynicism in comics is rooted in the book "Seduction of the Innocent" by Frederic Wertham. In the book, Wertham argues that the "crime books" glorify evil and are corrupting the minds of the young. His criticisms were largely baseless, founded on bad methodology and a Frankfurt school approach (with its inherent disdain of proletariat art), but they led to the strict regulation of comic books. This strict regulation, in turn, eventually caused an "anti-comics code" backlash. This backlash contained many books devoted to the very subjects restricted by the Comics Code. Many of the "great books" of the "graphic novel" era are a part of this backlash, but almost universally the books exhibit a cynicism and sophistication (in the classic sense) very much because they seek to "lower" the hero and bring him into the real world.

Gerard Jones, in his book Killing Monsters, argues that young people need comic books, or entertaiments like them, (and their portrayal of the ideal hero) in order to assist in the development of moral behaviors. I don't know if his thesis is correct, but it matches Scruton's description of "heroic art" and its intentions. Gerard Jones is a professional comic author so his advancing this kind of argument lends practical support to a philosophic position. In other words, he shows that the producers of the medium are thinking of the medium in the same way that a philosopher might.

But Gerard Jones has never written anything like The Watchment, The Authority, Hellblazer, or The Dark Knight Returns. His books all take place in the realm of imagination and do not attempt to bring the hero down into the real world.

This discussion begs the question..."What happens when we lower the echelon of the moral ideal?" In other words, "What does it say when Superman becomes less super? Or when The Question, a Randian objectivist moralist created by Steve Ditko, is turned into a madman?"

Those are some beginning thoughts which will be followed by a more specific discussion. My apologies once again to Roger Scruton.

The Simpsons

Given the literally hundreds of Simpsons episodes there must be in existence at this point, and the fact that we only watch the Simpsons about a handful of times during any given year, it absolutely amazes me that nearly every time I watch the Simpsons it’s an episode I’ve already seen. We nearly broke this record a couple of years back while hanging out at my sister’s because they had gotten TiVo and we sat around watching the Simpsons for a couple of hours. Nonetheless the only new episode I remember watching was the one where the family goes to England. So, it was no surprise to me that when we just happened to turn on the television while eating pizza, and it just happened to be showing the Simpsons, the episode was, of course, the one where they go to England. As if there is some cosmic que out there keeping track of what episodes we’ve watched and preventing us from seeing new ones. I don’t even care all that much, but the statistics of this happening astound me.

Sky High

Well, I planned to do a really well-thought out review. Except that I never did. So... Sky High. I liked this movie a lot. Basically, if you have some fondness for goofy silver age type superheroes, you will too. If not, you'll complain about bad acting and effects, like some of the mainstream reviewers did.

One of my favorites (not mentioned earlier) was people complaining about the super kids not getting drunk at a party scene. Because, you know, the kids of the super hero protectors of the world are all gonna be gettin' drunk and peelin' off their clothes all the time. Sigh.

Anyway, if you like silver age heroes, and if you like Bruce Campbell or the Kids In The Hall (who have good parts-well, two Kids), go fo for it.

Bad news for Comic Books!

Carl Icahn, whose attempts at buying and then shattering Marvel almost destroyed one of the "big two", is attempting to buy Warner Brothers. According to ICV2:

he reportedly wants to sell all or part of its cable TV and publishing operations.

DC Comics is a part of the Time Warner family, so if his bid is successful he may end up destroying the comics legend. Can you imagine a world without Superman?



Icahn certainly can. Having read the book Comic Book Wars (an article about it is here, I hope that someone like ToyBiz is willing to buy DC if divestiture comes. But mostly I hope that Icahn...can't.

Watching another "Big Boy" fall.

A commonly occuring theme on this blog is the ever shrinking comic book market, but while that market is indeed shrinking it seems to have redefined its role as a loss-leader for movies. As a loss-leader, I imagine that comic books will be able to subsist at current levels for some time. The same cannot be said of the Roleplaying/Collectible Card Game market.

Roleplaying Games (RPGs) and Collectible Card Games (CCGs) are both media which can tie themselves to any given intellectual property, but with rare exception RPGs/CCGs are not the "origin" of the intellectual property. For example, the Dungeons and Dragons RPG is the oldest and most successful Roleplaying Game ever made. Yet, when New Line Cinema, and Joel Silver, decided to make a D&D movie it was a huge disappointment. Why? Frankly because D&D is a product made to "simulate" a type of intellectual property that pre-existed the game, chiefly "heroic fantasy" and "epic fantasy." Pick a fantasy story, from Tolkein to Jordan, and I can use that as the basis for a great D&D campaign (or series of games). But to take a "genre simulator" and try to make a film based on it is a daunting task, in fact I would argue it is too general to be successful. A much better idea would have been to base a movie on a narrative created for the D&D game, like Dragonlance or the Assault on the Slavers modules (Slave Pits of the Undercity, Secrets of the Slavers Stockade, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, and In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords), or one could have based the movie on one of an abundance of novels.

In a brief restatement, RPGs and CCGs are dependant on other media for inspiration/market appeal because they are simulations of that media. A great example of this phenomenon are the recent troubles at Decipher. Decipher makes RPGs and CCGs based on a number of intellectual properties. Chiefly their games are (and have been) based on The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Star Wars. Three huge intellectual properties with large fan bases, fan bases with a great deal of crossover appeal into the RPG/CCG world. For some time this lead to great success, but as this article points out that success may be short lived.

In the case of RPGs, as opposed to comic books, the alternate intellectual property is the market lead in. As interest in the Lord of the Rings movies tapers, so tapers interest in products related to it. This is essentially what has happened to Decipher, who went from good sized company to a company on the verge of collapse. The rapid growth/retraction of products based on specific IPs is a danger that Decipher didn't seem to properly take into account, and now they will probably cease to exist.

Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, simulates a genre and its fans will keep buying the game and other products from the genre even if the D&D movie was among the worst films ever made. Surprisingly, a sequel to the D&D film awaits. Tragically, like with Deuce Bigelow, some unseen cosmic force will pull me into the theater. Even though I know only doom awaits.