See the Turtle of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind
He holds us all within his mind
On his back all vows are made,
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.
— from Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower” series
Everything you’ve heard about “Lucy” (2014) is correct — it’s exactly as trite and nonsensical as its multitude of unfavorable reviews have described it. Maybe this was intended as some sort of weird, meta, inside joke by writer and director Luc Besson … after all, it’s a movie about increased “brain capacity” that is, ironically, really dumb.
I can’t imagine why Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman would sully their reputations by starring in this film. Although, sadly, even the wonderful Johansson is not at her best here. She seems to try to portray increased intelligence by delivering some of her lines like a robot. (Seriously, she reads some of her lines like a speedy automaton, and it’s a bad creative decision for her performance.)
I could go on and on about the silly things in this movie. So could you, if you’ve seen it. But it’s a lot more fun listening to the surly wise-asses over at Cinema Sins. Their trademark “Everything Wrong With” video for “Lucy” is particularly harsh. At one point they call it “an aggressive dickhead of a movie.” Here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3rZmnJ66Po
There is one overriding problem I need to address myself … and that’s how its premise seems to relate so little to the events of the story. We begin by understanding that the titular Lucy is affected by a drug that increases her brain capacity. Before the movie reaches its halfway mark, she appears to gain omniscience. (She doesn’t need to actually learn anything — she simply knows virtually everything already. This is evinced by her ability to translate foreign languages instantly, with no books or instruction at all.) She also appears omnipotent by the film’s end. Her powers become literally godlike. And I’m not talking about Thor or Odin from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — we’re talking the all-powerful, Old Testament God of Abraham.
Why? Why should increased intelligence, no matter how incredibly vast, give her power of matter, space and even time? If she were as smart as a thousand Stephen Hawkings, she still shouldn’t be able to do the things she does in the movie.
Believe it or not, I’d rate this movie a 4 out of 10. (That’s far kinder than the other reviews I’ve read.) I managed to have fun with this movie by rewriting some of it in my head while I watched. Instead of Lucy benefiting from a drug that increases her brain capacity (which borrows a bit from 2011’s excellent “Limitless,” anyway), I pretended that I was watching a movie in which Scarlett Johansson became God. (Think of 2003’s “Bruce Almighty.”) Honestly. I swapped out the plot device in my head, and imagined a different movie. That made it fun — watching Scarlett Johansson as a wrathful God was strangely satisfying, especially when she wreaks havoc on the bad guys.
And speaking of bad guys … that is actually one thing that this otherwise clueless movie manages to get right. No, I’m not kidding — the Taipei gangsters that serve as the story’s antagonists were performed to perfection by their actors. The villains were repulsive and terrifying, and they aroused more interest in me than the good guys. Min-sik Choi was terrific as the homicidal patriarch of the Taiwanese crime syndicate. Even better, though, was Nicolas Phongbeth as the cherubic-faced, vaguely androgynous, sociopathic lieutenant. If they were vanquished in this brainless movie, it’d be nice to see them resurrected in a James Bond film or a season of Fox’s “24.” It’s weird seeing a movie so bad do one important thing so successfully.
There are really only two reasons why anybody should see “Lucy.” One is morbid curiosity. Two is if they are a learning to be a screenwriter, and are looking for a feature-length example of what NOT to do.
No matter how many letters I write to Hollywood, I’m still waiting on that “Wolf Creek”/”Dawson’s Creek” crossover movie.
I’m starting to worry it might not happen.
I talked about Todd McFarlane’s “Spawn” in last week’s Throwback Thursday post; these are some very early issues of a few of Image Comics’ other titles when the company launched in 1992. I remember snapping them up in earnest when I was 19 years old — as I said last week, it was exciting for a comics fan to see a new company challenge the “Big Two,” Marvel Comics and DC Comics, with a new superhero universe.
I and other ambitious collectors also grabbed these off the shelves because we naively expected they all would one day be very valuable. (Investing in comic books is a little more complicated than that — they’ve generally got to be in extremely good condition to fetch high prices.)
The first Image comics were a mix of good and bad. If memory serves, Jim Lee’s “WildC.A.T.s” was very good; Rob Liefeld’s “Youngblood” was less so, but was at least interesting. The art and writing for Jim Valentino’s “Shadowhawk” was truly mediocre. That didn’t stop me from buying a few issues, though — the novelty of these new books just gave them too much appeal.
There were a lot of creative things going on with early Image titles. Some of the new characters were pretty neat. I remember being partial to Youngblood’s “Diehard” for some reason, along with the WildC.A.T.s’ “Grifter.” (The former has the red, white, and blue full bodysuit; the latter has the trenchcoat and pistols.) And I definitely liked WildC.A.T.s’ “Warblade.” He’s the guy below with the ponytail and the shape-changing, liquid-metal hands. He was a favorite of mine despite the fact that he seemed to borrow a trick or two from the newly iconic liquid-metal terminator. (“Terminator 2: Judgement Day” had hit theaters a year earlier.)
Image comics were quite different than those produced by Marvel and DC. (As I explained last week, Image was formed by artists who revolted against their prior employers’ unfair, work-for-hire payment policies — their new company gave them complete creative control over their characters.) Despite the popularity of Image’s new books, however, they sometimes appeared to have been developed without some needed editorial oversight.
The violence and gore was often far more graphic. And Image’s creative decisions ranged from the inspired to the strange to just being in questionable taste. (It all depended on your disposition, I guess.) WildC.A.T.s, for example, portrayed Vice President Dan Quayle as being possessed by an unearthly “Daemonite.” (Damn, those Daemonites were wicked-cool bad guys, and Lee Illustrated them beautifully.) Shadowhawk’s signature move was breaking the spines of criminals. He was also HIV-positive, the result of some gangsters’ reprisal — they captured him and injected him with infected blood. The character thereafter spent some of his history trying in vain to locate a cure for AIDS. (This was 1992, just after the epidemic became fully entrenched in the public’s anxieties in the 1980’s.)
My interest in these titles eventually waned, though I did still pick “Spawn” up when I had the money. The Image universe was densely crowded with new characters, and it was just too much information to sustain my interest. (Seriously, look at the first couple of covers below.) I spent far more money on DC’s various “Batman” and “Green Lantern” titles. And if I wanted edgy comics, I had discovered the various incarnations of Matt Wagner’s “Grendel” that were available through Dark Horse Comics. Those boggled the mind.
But Image comics did burgeon into a great success, even if these early titles have since been retired. “Spawn,” of course, is still being produced. And today the company’s wide range of books includes Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead.” It’s hard to imagine either of the Big Two picking up Kirkman’s gory epic masterpiece … so I suppose we have Image to thank for the TV show.
From page 530, in a section for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (“Are those her sails that glance in the sun …”)
I’m pretty sure I spot the artist’s name just beneath the illustration, but it’s too small to make out.
When a US Presidential spokesperson recently used the term alternative facts to explain away inconsistencies between the White House version of truth and objectively verified truth it triggered a global revival of interest in the George Orwell classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Single-handedly, the term alternative facts caused a run on the 68-year old novel and led to cinemas across America re-screening the 1984 film adaptation. Acknowledged as one of the most important literary works of the modern era, 1984 has been adapted to film, television, radio, stage, music, and other popular culture platforms and it continues to resonate as a contemporary dystopian warning about how power can be used as a weapon to crush truth.
The film’s plotline, setting and acting are starkly minimalist. Oceania is an imaginary futuristic totalitarian society that is in ruins from perpetual war. The people are under constant surveillance and there are screens everywhere broadcasting…
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Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the passing of Roger Ebert. (Our own Blog Correspondent Pete Harrison pointed it out to the gang on Facebook.)
I still miss reading Ebert’s reviews. He was such an intelligent man, yet so lacking in pretense or pedanticism. His had an unassuming, straightforward, everyman’s voice that the average reader could trust and relate to. His talent for that remains inimitable.
The quote below is one I discovered just today. It’s a good one.
If you haven’t caught up with The Bees Are Dead lately, now is a good time to do so. B.A.D. featured a particularly potent piece today by Stephen Jarrell Williams, “In the Desert.” It’s a surprisingly effective poem despite its deceptively simple language, and I recommend it highly.
You can also find an outstanding example of prose poetry in Darren C. Demaree’s “Trump as a Fire Without Light #86.” (This is actually one of my favorite poems submitted to B.A.D. so far, and I have no doubt that many readers both here in America and abroad will relate to its poignant social commentary.)
Be sure to peruse Wren Tuatha’s “The Trees Tell Our Future” too. It’s a beautifully evocative poem that has stayed with me long after I read it for the first time.
Clearly this shopping center lies along the path of The Beam.
Only Stephen King fans will get that joke.
There are at least two cool places to grab lunch there — McAlister’s Deli and Firehouse Subs. Unless I’m mistaken, we don’t have those chains in New York.
Opaque and transparent watercolor over graphite under drawing on paper.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 