The Powerpuff Girls Volume 1

Writing and art by Troy Little

            The Powerpuff Girls is one of my favorite Cartoon Network shows, and probably one of my favorite cartoons in general.  Full of action, humor, and memorable characters, it hit all the right marks.  It makes an obvious choice for IDW’s sudden plan to revive several Cartoon Network shows in comic book form.  And the comic is a perfect adaptation from page one.

            The comic starts naturally enough, with the girls once again foiling one of Mojo Jojo’s plots.  But from there, Mojo Jojo gets so tired of being constantly defeated that he decides to make a major change.  No spoilers here, but it’s a moment that’s surprising and…well, you know it’s going to snap back, but the road there is what’s interesting.  There’s several more twists here along the way, especially as Him begins his own schemes.  Sadly, my review copy only came with the first 3 issues of the arc, so I can’t judge how everything ends, but I want to find out how things end up, which I consider to be good enough.  Overall, it’s just like a story you’d expect from the show in a longer format than normal.

            And tonally as well, this is right on point.  From the classic “The City of Townsville” opening to the narrator jokes to the art style, this reads and looks just like the show.  It can be so common, even with animated shows, for the comic to get off-model for the characters, but there’s none of those problems here.  The comic even includes some of the more adult jokes that you’d expect (like references to Ed Wood and Saw), which is especially great for the older fans who actually get these jokes now, while not distracting from the basic family-friendly style.  It’s what you want out of an all-ages comic, and even kids that have never seen Powerpuff Girls before would likely be interested in it from this book.

            If this is the high quality I can expect for IDW’s Cartoon Network comics, then you can sign me up for all of them.  An adaptation that tells new stories in a style that’s almost indistinguishable from the show itself.  You can’t get much better than this.

Fatale Volume 4: Pray for Rain

Written by Ed Brubaker

Art by Sean Phillips

            Fatale is nearing its end, and the story isn’t necessarily coming together as more than a series of stories about Josephine.  And somehow, it doesn’t matter.  The simple concept of Josephine being cursed to make guys unnaturally attracted to her keeps finding new and interesting territory to explore, and Volume 4 takes another decade leap and another twist on it.

            After the previous volume of one-shots, Pray for Rain is another full story of Josephine, this time in 90s Seattle, right in the middle of the grunge scene.  She shows up on the doorsteps of the band Amsterdam, who had a one-hit wonder before their songwriter went insane, and now they have to rob banks to survive.  And of course, everybody becomes attracted to Josephine as she becomes their muse.  There’s just one problem: she has amnesia, and she doesn’t remember about her curse.

            That simple twist that changes everything.  Up to this point, we’ve seen Josephine guarded, hiding away from people and on the run from the cult that’s trying to find her.  Here, she’s open and free, having sex with whoever she pleases, and it is terrifying.  It shouldn’t be a shock that this volume does not end in sunshine and rainbows, but the violence and depravity that takes place is done so suddenly and so effectively that it just clicks.  As always, Sean Phillips’ art is walking that line between noir and horror, just like this whole comic has been walking that line.  When it’s the simple fact that the band is likely going to tear itself apart over her, it’s tragic.  When you get that reminder that the cult is also after her, it goes straight into horror.

            Hopefully things will start to come together more as Fatale nears its end.  Even if they don’t, Pray for Rain is yet another volume that can be read as a piece of the whole or as a standalone story, and either way, you’re not going to be disappointed. 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise

Written by far too many people to list

Based on the novel by Victor Hugo

            There’s that period of Disney animated history, going from Pocahontas to Meet the Robinsons, where about every movie was hit-or-miss (with Robinsons finally starting the hit streak again).  There were some great movies (Lilo & Stitch, Emperor’s New Groove), there were some awful ones (Home on the Range), and there were some that were so uneven that it’s hard to say.  And that’s squarely where Hunchback of Notre Dame falls.

            Quasimodo (Tom Hulce) is the titular hunchback, locked up in the bell tower of Notre Dame by Judge Frollo (Tony Jay), who “protects” him by keeping him away from the outside world.  When he escapes the tower for the Festival of Fools, he becomes attracted to Esmeralda (Demi Moore)…but so does the captain of the guard Phoebus (Kevin Kline) and Frollo, who decides that she’s either going to be his or die.

            OK, let’s talk about this for a moment: there is absolutely no way this movie should have a G movie.  It is almost oppressively dark, starting from Quasimodo’s mother dying on-screen in the first 10 minutes.  The movie is downright nightmarish at times, featuring Quasimodo getting tied up by a mob and a lot of execution imagery.  And then we have Hellfire, which may be the only Disney song about how much the villain wants to have sex with the love interest (seriously).  At times, this comes off less like a Disney movie and more like an independent adult-focused movie.   Not that this works against it.  It’s generally enjoyable to watch, and the focus on drama is a rather different tone for Disney.

            To the point where the comic-relief gargoyles can’t help but feel a little out of place.  There are some comic moments that work, but the gargoyles role in the movie feels forced in.  This is almost a hard realism movie, and having that one element of magic (or hallucination—it’s never really explained, and the movie doesn’t seem to care) is just weird.  Almost as weird as them singing a song about how much Esmerelda loves Quasimodo…while Paris burns and using imagery of people hanging.  The songs in general are…well, they’re constant, and there are some good ones in here.  There’s not that much that’s going to be stuck in your head (besides the aforementioned Hellfire), but the darker they get, the better they fit in with the movie.

            Hunchback of Notre Dame is definitely uneven, and rather out of place in Disney canon, but under the right circumstances, it’s an interesting and enjoyable movie.  If you’re not a fan of the sillier Disney movies, well, this is perfect for you.

The Lego Movie

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Written by Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

            The success of toy-based movies to this point has been…well…about what you’d expect out of toy-based movies, full of merchandising opportunities and not much else.  Meanwhile, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have been on a hot streak, after directing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, two movies that should’ve been awful but were instead hilarious.  And with The Lego Movie, they’re proving that you can throw them any license and it’ll turn out great.

            Emmett (Chris Pratt) is a normal construction worker who follows every rule, every instruction, and is perfectly ordinary.  Then he stumbles upon the Piece of Resistance and gets picked up by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), who believes he’s the Special, the Master Builder who can save the universe.  And all the Master Builders will have to team up if they’re going to stop President Business (Will Ferrell) from destroying the world.

            Let’s start with the obvious necessity of a Lego movie: featuring Legos.  Yes, yes, it’s an obvious point, but it’s the sheer way this movie features Legos that’s incredible.  The characters pass through several worlds based on different sets, all of them distinctly different and interesting, but when they come together true magic happens.  The Master Builder scene (that’s been featured in trailers) is a good example, featuring everybody from NBA players to an 80s spaceman to Milhouse.  It could’ve just been done as a way to show off all the different sets that Lego has, go ask your parents to buy them right now, but they just flow into the movie, creating perfect jokes and great interactions.  And the other plus of this Lego movie is the animation.  It’s computer-generated to look like stop-motion, and crazily enough, it works.  And there’s the fact that everything is made out of Legos.  The Lego games tend to just have characters and important objects, while everything else is realistic.  Here?  The lasers are Legos.  The smoke clouds are Legos.  Hell, when Wyldstyle goes into Master Builder vision, the Lego pieces are marked with their actual piece numbers.  It’s a crazy attention to detail that pays off spectacularly.

            And all the detail would be nothing without a good story and plenty of good jokes, and this movie has both.  The story flows perfectly, with plenty of expected twists for a story like this, and then throwing in more than a few unexpected ones.  And the jokes are as rapid-fire as you’d expect, going from visual to verbal to wherever the movie can take things.  And they’re both helped by an incredible voice cast.  Everybody, from the main cast, to cameos such as Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as Superman and Green Lantern, they’re all doing a perfect job.  Special notice must be played to Will Ferrell, who once again proves that he should probably switch over to voice acting, and Charlie Day as Spaceman Benny, who is quickly becoming one of those people I look forward to hearing in animated movies.

            The Lego Movie is a pleasant surprise for toy movies, and another hit for Lord and Miller.  Witty and interesting, it’s an early must-see for 2014.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Directed by Tay Garnett

Written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch

Based on the novel by James M Cain

            Consider that I’ve seen a good deal more film noir since I wrote my review of Double Indemnity.  Before seeing that, I thought noir was detectives and femme fatales.  At this point, I know that noir is really any crime film, although inevitably, it still falls into two categories: “Who killed her husband?” or “How are they going to kill her husband?”  The Postman Always Rings Twice falls into the latter category, but as with all good noir, it’s a fascinating scenario with plenty of twists.

            Frank Chambers (John Garfield) is a drifter who winds up at the Twin Oaks, a small California diner.  He’s persuaded by Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) to take up a job there…well, Nick and the presence of his wife, Cora (Lana Turner).  And as Cora and Frank begin a secret affair, they also start to plan to kill Nick.

            In most cases, Cora would be the femme fatale here, the one who leads the plot, leads Frank to love her and murder Frank.  That’s not really the case here.  In fact, the love affair is more pushed away by Cora, who seems set on keeping things as normal.  The plans Frank has to simply run away with Cora tend to be ended thanks to Cora wanting to stay at the Twin Oaks.  We’re even given a handwave for why Cora can’t just leave Nick, as if she did, she would lose the Twin Oaks.  She’s also the one more nervous about the murder plans, while Nick stays calm and collected.  But Cora is a woman fighting in a man’s world, and when it becomes clear that she’s losing ground, she has no choice but to go through with the murder.  She’s not a femme fatale.  She’s just someone forced into a situation beyond her control.

            The movie’s other interesting twist is what happens in the second half.  Even though the movie is over 60 years old, I’d feel poorly about giving it away.  Suffice it to say, though, that as usual for film noir, while the murder may succeed, what happens after the murder is doomed to failure.  And the world quickly shows itself to be a chaotic environment.  Nobody can truly be trusted.  Good characters and bad characters become indistinguishable.  It’s all here, and it’s all surrounding Frank and Cora, who become more and more lost as they seems to realize that their affair was nothing but a fling.  The tragic but inevitable ending puts the final mark on the whole thing.

            The Postman Always Rings Twice shows how classic film noir can be, remaining suspenseful and interesting after all these years. 

Lollipop Chainsaw

Developed by Grasshopper Manufacture

Published by Kadokawa Games and Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment

            Suda51 is an incredibly inconsistent game developer, and it’s glorious, if only because each game is different.  His games have gone from third-person shooters to beat-em-ups to…whatever Killer7 was, with bizarre story and dialogue to match.  Lollipop Chainsaw is not his craziest, but it may be one of the most fun ones to play.

            Juliet Starling (Tara Strong) is a normal high school girl.  She’s a cheerleader, she’s got a boyfriend, and she’s a zombie hunter.  On her 18^th birthday, though, things go terribly wrong as her school is infested with zombies unleashed by the resident goth kid, Swan (Sean Gunn).  It’s up to her and the decapitated head of her boyfriend, Nick (Michael Rosenbaum) to defeat the zombies and save the world.

            Most of the gameplay takes a fairly standard hack-and-slash style.  Armed with, what else, a chainsaw, the game throws hordes of zombies at you that you have to slice through before you can move on.  The game does help to avoid the button mashing that can sometimes become too easy in this genre, with a good use of combos required to kill zombies effectively.  You’re also rewarded with extra medals (the game’s currency) by killing 3 or more zombies at once, so it’s in your best interest to line them up and knock them all down at once instead of just making wild slashes.  The game also gives you more abilities as you go through that change up the zombie-killing game.  Even giving you a gun, though, just adds to the strategy instead of turning it into an outright shooter.  It’s smartly done.

            And, of course, there’s a little more than just killing zombies normally.  Right at the edge of getting on repetition, the game will throw something new at you that changes things up.  Playing zombie baseball and basketball, throwing Nick on a headless zombie for a QTE event, arcade games, riding a combine harvester.  Part of the fun of the game is just finding out what you’re going to do next.  And the game also has plenty of hilarious dialogue (adapted for America by James Gunn, the director of the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy), especially between Nick and Juliet.  Their pointless conversations are endlessly amusing, discussing things from Nick’s favorite color to Juliet’s oddball sisters.  There are some repetitive parts where the characters will just keep saying the same thing over and over.  The use of licensed music in the game also has to be praised.  The Runaways’ Cherry Bomb on the start screen, Toni Basil’s Mickey playing during the super mode, Buckner & Garcia’s Pac-Man Fever in the arcade level, and naturally, Lollipop in the shop screen.  It all fits in well and puts a smile on your face, and is perfectly mixed with the game’s normal OST.

            There is one thing that has to be pointed out: the sexualization of the main character.  This being Suda51, it’s entirely possible that it’s all done in jest or it’s meant to be satirical.  People have even pointed out that Nick’s treatment in the game mirrors the normal treatment of female characters in games.  However, there are parts of it that still just feel unnecessary, not least of all being that there’s an achievement for looking up Juliet’s skirt.  Juliet is a badass female character, but just like Bayonetta and Lara Croft, it feels like we still can’t have badass female characters in games without some cheesecake.

            Regardless of those problems, Lollipop Chainsaw is still a fun and funny game.  Plenty of variety in gameplay makes zombie killing feel fresh for the first time in a while. 

The Rocketeer

Directed by Joe Johnston

Written by Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo and William Dear

Based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens

            OK, I don’t need to say how much I enjoy The Rocketeer, so let’s just talk about the movie.  A box office failure when it came out, long relegated to the stacks of forgettable Disney movies.  A recent 20^th anniversary DVD didn’t even bother to add any features to the disc past what was on the original.  So why would you watch it nowadays?  One very good reason: it’s a fun movie.

            In 1938, Howard Hughes (Terry O’Quinn) designs a jetpack for the military, but deciding against using it, burns the plans and the stolen prototype gets destroyed.  Or so it seems to Hughes and the FBI, when it actually ends up in the hands of stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell).  After testing it out and having to save the day when a flight goes wrong, Cliff ends up becoming The Rocketeer…and attracting the attention of the FBI, movie star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) and his gang of thugs, and even the Nazis.

            One of the things that stands out when watching this movie is that, in many ways, this uses a lot of the Marvel method of movie-making close to 20 years earlier.  It certainly helps that Joe Johnston (who would go on to direct Captain America) is in the director’s chair.  But in general, we have the origin story, we have the definitely good hero fighting against the definitely evil villains, and there’s just that sense of fun.  Cliff himself may not be the perfect hero.  He can be a bit of a jerk and his flights as the Rocketeer are just as likely to go wrong, with his first flight out leading to him crashing all over the place as he’s trying to save the day (showing that just like Marvel, every action scene is just as likely to contain a few laughs).  But at the end of the day, he’s going to fight the bad guys and he’s going to do what’s right.  Even when faced with Lothar (Tiny Ron), a thug who’s so imposing and immovable that Cliff can’t seem to put a dent with him, he still keeps fighting.  In the same way, the movie captures the feel of the comics, both Dave Stevens’ original and the revival that has happened since then.

            Of course, for the mood that has held up with this movie, there are some flaws that stand out.  For one, particularly in the second act, it can be hard to tell who’s on who’s side.  It doesn’t help that the thugs and the FBI can look very similar, and Lothar’s role in the whole thing isn’t really clear.  It’s confusing, even though it all gets sorted out by the end.  But then again, it also gives a general feeling of being in Cliff’s shoes.  He doesn’t really know who’s good or bad in the whole mess of things, he just knows what he needs to do to be good.  And there’s also the flying special effects.  Plenty of them are excellent, especially for the 90s.  Some of them aren’t so much.  It’s not a dealbreaker, but it can be rather noticeable.

           It’s a shame that The Rocketeer has gone forgotten as little more than a footnote nowadays.  It holds up well, with exciting action and a nice sense of humor.