by A.J. Focht
Super heroes are in right now. While their popularity has been steadily growing for years, each blockbuster movie released only fuels the fanboy frenzy. Video games, movies, television, and merchandise have never been more adorned with super hero icons. The question though is: Who’s super heroes are they?
by Fred Topel
“I look at porn every morning.”
– Kevin Smith
Actor, writer, director and comic book buff Kevin Smith, whose breakthrough film was 1994’s Clerks, is at his best when he’s just talking. He even figured that out, so in between actual movies, he films his college Q&A tours to release An Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs, the third of which is now in stores. Smith’s movies force him to take break from his raw wit for things like plot and character development. But at least when he makes them, we get to hear some unedited Smith-isms when we interview him.
by Edward Kelly
My friends and I used to hang around in parking lots quite a bit. Loitering was something of a past time, but not because we were latchkey kids or looking for someone to buy us beer. We just always ended up in parking lots. Didn’t matter how cold it was or how many cars were there, we’d be seen standing around talking about whatever for a couple hours. As we grew up we traded parking lots for apartments, bars, and diners.
So it came as somewhat of a surprise when one night a few months ago I, now way beyond appropriate parking-lot-loitering age, and my friend, who also put his parking-lot years behind him, ended up in a parking lot, doing the same thing we did as teenagers: arguing about entirely insignificant stuff. Or in other words, shooting the shit about Star Wars. See, I had had the audacity to suggest the unthinkable – that with the right creative team and a few tweaks, the original trilogy of Star Wars could and should be remade. This, in nerd terms, is the equivalent of videotaping yourself having sex with your best friends’ mother.
by Damon Martin
The ball has dropped and the calendar has flipped, and now that we are entering 2011, comic book fans are looking forward to the biggest books and events for this upcoming year. The landscape over the next few months will most likely be shaped by DC Comics juggernaut series Green Lantern, which will feature expansions into a new series, with one mega event wrapping up while another begins, and of course the summer release of the new Green Lantern movie.
The Green Lantern was often thought of by comic book fans as a second tier character to the bigger named heroes like Batman and Superman, but over the last few years current DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns has turned the book into the most popular series for the comic giant.
“It’s like going to your high school reunion.”
– Rob Zombie
When Rob Zombie got to work on compiling the White Zombie box set, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, his first thought was “I don’t really remember all of this.” The second thought was, “What were we thinking?!” Anyone familiar with the musical horror show that is White Zombie knows that the band’s 1998 demise wasn’t exactly an amicable one. So, putting the 5 CD/1 DVD career-spanning box set together wasn’t exactly a fun trip down memory lane for Mr. Robert Bartleh Cummings.
by Ryan Stewart
“A lot of my life depends on what male actors are gonna be doing.”
– Elizabeth Banks
If you’re Sam Raimi, you have an interesting little dilemma to solve. One constant of the three Spider-Man films has been the Betty Brant character, a Peter Parker-smitten secretary who pops in for a couple of quick minutes to bat an eyelash at Peter or take a dig at her Daily Bugle boss, J. Jonah Jameson, before disappearing again. No one suspected, when the last film completed lensing in early 2006, that by the time pre-production on a fourth one rolled around, Elizabeth Banks, the actress who plays Betty, would have mushroomed into a bonafide A-list actress with starring roles in Oliver Stone’s W. and Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno under her belt. The rumor mill has been heating up lately with talk that Raimi may pursue the obvious solution of expanding the Betty Brant role into a lead part in Spider-Man 4, but for now it’s just talk.
You film minions are a voracious breed. I gave you a Horror Top 10 in October, which you greedily devoured. Unsatiated, you tore open another vein with the Holiday Top 10 in November, and now you want more. So I bring you The Film Strain’s Top 10 Tragically Underrated or Ignored Films of 2010. As with my previous lists, it is impossible to be 100% definitive and catalog all the films that got created this past year. Some of the films that I’ve included are big names, but considered failures by the studios. Many of them were tragically ignored by the masses and quietly slinked into DVD/Blu-Ray releases. Some may be completely unknown to many film lovers, so write them down. Here are 10 from 2010 that just did not get the respect and viewer love that they should have, but all of them actually got released in theaters somewhere.
