Will DOLLHOUSE be a stinker?

Word on the Internet is that Joss Whedon's new sci-fi TV series Dollhouse, set to debut on Fox next month, has "bad vibes" written all over it. But it looked good to me when I saw trailers at the Whedon/cast panel last July at Comic-Con. Besides, it stars Eliza Dushku, so how bad could it possibly be?

PRIMEVAL has dinosaurs, sex appeal

Comic-Con last month was pretty much nonstop 24/7. So to rest my throbbing feet, I’d often slip into the nearest panel, not really caring what it was about.

One was for Primeval, the British time warp, dinosaurs-in-the-bedroom series that debuted on BBC America just two weeks ago. My interest was piqued enough to take a look. The show’s worth pursuing if you haven’t already. The special effects are excellent, the characters are likeable (with the exception of those who aren’t intended to be likeable), and the writers have done a good job of holding back just enough info to keep me tuning in each Saturday.

To be completely honest, one reason I keep tuning in Primeval is 27-year-old Hannah Spearritt, who plays Abby, the jaw-droppingly adorable reptile expert. So far, Hannah hasn’t fallen too deeply into a damsel-in-distress routine, but she has mastered The Scream. And the show’s producers have already had her do a dance in her underwear.

You’ll know where to find me tomorrow night at 9:00.

Whedon squashes SERENITY sequel rumors

Since Comic-Con in San Diego three weeks ago, there have been rumors circulating again about a Serenity sequel. You see, Summer Glau, sitting on the Sarah Connor Chronicles panel, made the mistake of saying she was ready, willing, and able to do another Firefly-based movie, although she added that if there wasn’t a Serenity sequel, she’d “feel at peace” with that. Of course, rabid browncoats heard the first part of Glau’s statement and, while gasping with excitement, totally missed the second half.

Anyway, Firefly creator Joss Whedon, now immersed in his new Fox TV series Dollhouse, has put the kibosh to Serenity sequel rumors. He says that although he and the cast are ready to make another film, no studio is willing to launch one.

Ah, well… We can always stick Serenity back in the DVD player anytime we want. And if you’d like to watch that movie with ten other diehard browncoats, why not download the feature-length fan commentary available right here at Hey, Want to Watch a Movie? It’s a long podcast — about two and a half hours — with almost 22 minutes spent on everybody getting their favorite beverages in hand and cueing up the DVD, so the MP3 file is pretty gorram big. But it’s all a lot of fun.

Gone to San Diego for Comic-Con

Movie review: SHOOT 'EM UP

It’s been a kinda sucky weekend. Not horrible. Just kinda sucky. I spent most of yesterday trying to regain a sense of normalcy with my PC, once sick but now well. A good 40 minutes were spent watching Windows try unsuccessfully to “find” my HP printer, then it turned out the problem was the frickin’ USB cable had shaken loose. Plus I waited all day for a cabinet guy to deliver some stuff for the house remodel — “I’ll be there at noon, no, I’ll be there by two, ulp, gimme another hour” — and the sumbitch never did show up. No call. No nuttin’. And he didn’t return my calls. Sheesh.

So here’s the weekend’s highlight: Shoot ’Em Up.

My pal Steve and I have been waiting for this action-packed monster since July at Comic-Con, when we heard writer-director Michael Davis and star Clive Owen talk about it and show lengthy clips from it. When I say “waiting,” I mean twitching, salivating, night-sweat waiting.

So Friday night, Steve and I dragged our wives to Shoot ’Em Up. He and I had an absolutely terrific time. The movie was everything we’d hoped for — and more. We loved it. The ladies, despite their fondness for Clive Owen, not so much.

But Shoot ’Em Up wasn’t created for them. It was made for gross, beer-guzzlin’ action freaks like Steve and me. And on that level, it works big time. This may be the greatest gunplay picture ever made. All the stunts — all of them — are among the cleverest I’ve ever seen in a movie. Every moment of this film is over the top. (Clive’s hidden in a stall in a men’s room with a crying baby, bad guys ready to bust in, and he drops his gun in the toilet. What to do? Within seconds, he completely disassembles the piece, cleans it, reassembles it, dries off his ammo, and reloads, all on a changing table. And all in the nick of time, of course.) I have no idea what the body count is in this movie. It’s high.

Clive Owen is fantastic, a perfect fit in a film of this kind. Paul Giamatti seems to have the time of his life playing the vile hitman. And Monica Belucci is so good that she brings a real touch of class to her role as the lactating prostitute from the fetish brothel. (Don’t ask. Just see the damn movie.)

So the weekend hasn’t been a total loss. Sure, there’s been frustration and disappointment. But there’s also been Shoot ’Em Up. And a greater appreciation for carrots. (Again, just see the movie.)

A Flash in the pan

SciFi Channel’s new Flash Gordon series debuted last night with a 90-minute pilot. Eleven more episodes should make up the first season. But I think I’ve already seen enough.

If you’re gonna tackle an American sci-fi icon like Flash Gordon — even if you plan to give him something of a contemporary spin — you’ve still gotta give us Flash friggin’ Gordon. If you plan to just stick the 1934 Alex Raymond names on 2007 faces and then ignore the spaceships, ray guns, swashbuckling swordfights, minaret-strewn landscapes, colorful villains, and flamboyant costumes, don’t call your show Flash Gordon. Call it anything else, call it Zippy Corrigan or something, but don’t call it Flash Gordon.

Two weeks ago, I attended a panel discussion about this new show at Comic-Con. The producer was there. The head writer was there. Stars Eric Johnson (Flash) and Gina Holden (Dale Arden) were there. And even though the two or three clips they showed didn’t particularly impress me, these people seemed enthusiastic and sounded like they understood the series’ source material. I left with a small bit of hope.

That teeny bit of hope was demolished last night. Flash Gordon sucks. Period. You can camp up the old comic strip, as they did with the 1980 movie, and get away with it, because we old fans get the joke, we know that Flash is “of his time,” he’s retro sci-fi, and the whole idea of Ming the Merciless, Mongo, and winged men is, well, a bit silly. But don’t fuck with Flash’s very essence. Don’t suck all the life out of him. Don’t give us a Zarkov who’s nothing more than an eccentric, RV-driving, sputtering, loser geek. Don’t give us a politically correct Ming who’s more Donald Trump than Fu Manchu.

Thankfully, Johnson does a reasonably good job as Flash. He’s not embarrassing. And Holden is an appropriately yummy Dale. She’s no damsel-in-distress, but Dale’s never had to be. If the rest of the cast were as good, and if the scripts were, well, even “OK,” we might have at least something to work with here. But I’m afraid we don’t. And that’s a pity.

Go rent — or better yet, buy — the new DVD of the 1980 Flash Gordon movie. You know, the one with the terrific Queen score. Revel in its comic strip sappiness. Or rent the old Buster Crabbe serials from Netflix. Have yourself a party. Just ignore this new SciFi Channel “original.” It’ll be gone in a few weeks anyway.

DVD Review: SUPERMAN DOOMSDAY

Ten days ago at Comic-Con, Steve and I spent more than three hours — first in line, and then sitting and waiting in a gigantic ballroom (capacity: 4,500) — to see the world premiere of Superman Doomsday, the first of DC Comics’ direct-to-DVD, older-audience (i.e., PG-13), animated features. For geeks, this movie is a pretty big deal. For one thing, it’s “inspired” by DC’s long-running, bestselling “Death of Superman” series from a decade or so ago. For another, its producer (and co-writer) is Bruce Timm, who was responsible for the best string of animated superhero TV shows ever (Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond, Justice League Unlimited). Expectations were high at Comic-Con. So what’s the verdict?

Superman Doomsday offers a couple of real surprises, neither of which has much to do with its story. The first surprise, for me, was that the movie doesn’t fall anywhere into the continuity of Timm’s original Superman series; rather, it’s a whole new ballgame, with the familiar cast of characters sporting all-new looks and new voices. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, but it did jar me initially, and I confess that I was somewhat disappointed. In the voiceover department, Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Serenity) replaces Tim Daly as Superman, Anne Heche replaces Dana Delany as Lois, and James Marsters (Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) replaces Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor. All of them do admirable jobs, but I do miss Brown’s Luthor, who had really developed phenomenally through the ten-year run of various TV shows. The second surprise is how serious DC is about the PG-13 rating. The violence, of course, has been heightened considerably, to the point where I winced at seeing Superman bleed as freely as he does. The sexuality is also a touch explicit for a cartoon feature; the secret “dates” Superman and Lois share involve serious lip-action and overnights at the Fortress of Solitude in bathrobes. Superman Doomsday ain’t for the kiddies.

But what about the movie’s story? I think it’s very well done. Granted, the source material’s been tweaked, sometimes radically, but it had to be. Only diehard fans who don’t recognize the challenge of cramming two years of comic book story into a 75-minute film should be dissatisfied. A few may argue that the movie’s center section — the post-Doomsday, mourning period of the story — shuffles along a bit too slowly. It may, but at the same time, it builds into what’s a boffo finish. Grumbles were heard in the Comic-Con crowd that no Justice League members appear in the film, as they did in the comics. But to have included Batman, Green Lantern, or Wonder Woman would have diminished the dramatic impact of a “world without Superman” in this short movie.

Overall, Superman Doomsday is a dandy, rock ’em sock ’em, animated feature. Superman fans and comics geeks in general should check it out when it’s released on DVD September 18.

Steve Ditko revisited

Jack Kirby may have been The King, but my favorite comic book artist as a kid in the ’60s was, hands down, the great Steve Ditko. I read everything of his I could find, starting naturally with Amazing Spider-Man, then moving on to Doctor Strange (the Strange Tales back-of-the-book feature) and even his very early monster and sci-fi stories. I followed Ditko from Marvel to DC, where he produced the Creeper and Hawk & Dove, but the stuff he ground out for Charlton Comics in 1966-68, like the “new” Captain Atom and a relaunch of the Blue Beetle, is what enthralled me most.

Best of all Ditko’s Charlton creations, though, was his no-nonsense, blue-suited, faceless, Randian hero, The Question. (A few years later, I’d discover his similarly Objectivist-themed and even more unswerving Mr. A in Wally Wood’s Witzend fanzine.) The original Question canon consisted of just five short appearances in the back of the Blue Beetle comic and one full-length solo book — just 62 pages in all. (The Question also appeared in a Beetle story, but only as reporter Vic Sage.) Those stories were tremendous fun and crammed with hardcore “A is A” values:

“Help! Do something! We’re caught in the current! Can’t hold on much longer!” shout two murderous thugs The Question has kicked into the city’s raging sewer system.

“So why tell me your problems?” says The Question. “You’re both crazy if you think I’d risk my neck to save the likes of you! As far as I’m concerned, you’re just so much sewage! And you deserve to be right where you are!”

“You’re inhuman! You can’t leave us here! You’ve no right! It’s your fault we’re here! You must save us! It’s your duty! It’s...”

“Duty?? — to whom??”

I lost my copies of The Question’s original Charlton appearances long ago. I reread them so often that I probably just wore ’em out. But I never lost my love for the character. Unfortunately, Steve Ditko never returned to Vic Sage and most attempts to resurrect him have been unsatisfying. Denny O’Neil tried his hand at it in the mid-’80s, thoroughly discarding the unique Ditko flavor and injecting instead an inappropriate Zen philosophy. Recently, the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series presented a version of The Question more inspired by X-Files than Ditko. As far as I know, the genuine Ditko article has shown up just once in the past 40 years, still checking his premises and spouting the Objectivist jargon; that was in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again graphic novel in 2002 (“I’m no Ayn Rander!” The Question yells at Left-leaning Green Arrow. “She didn’t go nearly far enough!”).

Anyway, I’ve wanted to get hold of and revisit Charlton’s original Question stories for a very long time. So everybody in San Diego last week probably heard my big gasp when I discovered at Comic-Con that Ditko’s entire Question saga, plus every smidgen of his Blue Beetle and Captain Atom work from the same period, is now collected into a wonderful, single hardcover book, part of DC’s Archive Editions series. The book’s titled The Action Heroes Archives Volume 2, and it’s fantastic. The reproduction is crisp and beautiful. For Steve Ditko fans, this book is a dream-come-true, as is the first Action Heroes volume, published in 2004, which features all of Ditko’s earliest Captain Atom stories from as far back as 1960.

Long live Steve Ditko. And long live The (quintessential) Question.

Comic-Con: Indiana Jones Cast

How I survived Comic-Con 2007

I may be getting too old for Comic-Con. My friend Steve, too. But we had the time of our lives the past five days, shuffling the length of the San Diego Convention Center over and over with tens of thousands of other geeks at a pace somewhat slower than Spidey’s Aunt May crawling over broken glass. I saw Stan Lee promote his SciFi Channel series. I saw F. Paul Wilson, David Morrell, Cory Doctorow, Vernor Vinge, and George Romero. I saw Clive Owens market his new movie Shoot ’Em Up, which may feature the greatest gunplay sequences ever. Extra special treats were seeing J. Michael Straczynski, Bruce Boxleitner, Tracy Scoggins, and Peter Woodward from Babylon 5 discuss their direct-to-DVD Lost Tales project; watching a wonderful panel made up of folks from CBS’s resurrected Jericho, who were understandably very appreciative of their fans; seeing the great Jeffrey Combs, who will forever be Herbert West to me; and sitting in on the world premieres of two upcoming direct-to-DVD animated movies, Bruce Timm’s Superman Doomsday, from Warner Bros. Home Video, and Doctor Strange, from Lionsgate and Marvel Studios. Big thanks to Lynn for introducing us to Peter Mayhew (you know, Chewbacca) and getting us VIP passes to see the Saturday night masquerade.

Steve and I both came home with treasures won in drawings. Steve won a fabulous, limited edition, 19-inch, 12-pound, collectible figure of Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett, which retails (when it’s available) for $325. Pretty damn cool. I, on the other hand, won a pair of men’s white cotton briefs with the Balls of Fury movie logo stenciled on the front, worth, oh, maybe three bucks.

More to come in the week ahead.

South Park Wally: off to Comic-Con 2007

As Cartman would say, the resemblance is friggin' uncanny. Create your own South Park image here. Hat tip to Brad Spangler.