Entertainment Edition:

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, April 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

WINNERS

Batman
Batman and Superman recently went toe to toe and settled the age-old debate over superhero supremacy. The battle, though, was recorded only in the chequebooks of wealthy collectors. Late last month, a copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first to feature Superman, was sold for a record US$1 million in a private sale in New York City. Three days later, the first comic featuring Batman hit the auction block in Dallas, and sold for US$1,075,500.

Jennifer Aniston
Lawmakers agree Aniston played a major role in getting California’s new paparazzi law approved. The law calls for fines of up to US$50,000 against media outlets that buy and publish “unlawfully obtained” photos. Aniston told legislators she’d had as many as 30 photographers charge her on the sidewalk and been followed through L.A. streets at night in SUVs. Politicians agreed: there’s something truly deranged about having that much of an interest in Jennifer Aniston.

Christopher Plummer
After 55 years in show business, Canadian actor Christopher Plummer finally had a reason to show up at the Oscars this year when he was nominated for his role in The Last Station. Plummer didn’t win—the award went to Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds—but one suspects he won’t mind having to find something else to do next Oscar night if he’s not nominated again. “It’s a flesh-peddling business,” he said, prior to the show. “And I don’t always like the feeling on the red carpet.”

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Look, I’m a sexy straight shooter

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Please enjoy this excerpt from my tell-all memoirs, Going Vogue: An American Life, about my recent failed attempt to win a certain prestigious position in the public eye.

I’m a straight shooter from up north. I’d lived a simple life dedicated to faith, family values and eradicatin’ the g’s from verbs. But my world changed forever when I was approached to run for People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.

What followed is a blur. Within days, I found myself caught up in the whirlwind of a national campaign. I was in pursuit of an office that had been held by George Clooney (twice), Jude Law (once) and Nick Nolte (an accounting error). I was standing before thousands of people—and, doggone it, I was wearing short shorts.

But from the start, forces conspired to undermine my candidacy. Some claimed that I wasn’t “qualified” to be Sexiest Man Alive. They pointed to my lack of a cohesive policy agenda and my 30 lb. of belly fat. But these were elites caught up in the conventional idea of what made someone sexy enough to serve. Neither I nor my thick, thick unibrow had any intention of playing by their rules.

Thankfully, I was supported in my candidacy by my spouse and our 17 children, each of them named after a Batman sound effect. I’ll never forget when we took a family vote over whether I should run. “Do it,” Biff said. “Go for it,” agreed the twins, Pow and Oof. (The moment was spoiled when our oldest daughter revealed she was pregnant by the town halfwit. How could you be so careless, Thwack?)

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Batman's Rich History

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 1:48 PM - 3 Comments

The most recent episode of the Cartoon Network show Batman: The Brave and the Bold was a pretty interesting one. Bizarre, but interesting. I don’t know when it will be shown in Canada; Teletoon now airs the show, but they only recently started, so they still have to show some other episodes before they get around to this one.

The new episode was called “Legends of the Dark Mite!” written by Paul Dini, who is famous for writing many of the best episodes of the ’90s Batman series, but has also contributed freelance episodes to Warner Brothers’ later superhero shows (Justice League, The Batman, and now this one). The idea of it was that Bat-Mite, the floating Batman-fan who wants to hang out with his hero (Batman’s answer to Mr. Mxyzptlk) pops up, having decided that Batman isn’t acting enough like a real superhero, and tries to use his powers to make Batman into his own conception of the character. The episode climaxes with Bat-Mite trying to become Batman himself and winding up in a tribute to the Daffy Duck cartoon “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery,” but not before he goes to a Fifth Dimension comic-book convention, where the Batman fans complain about the light and silly version of the character (echoing complaints of real Bat-fans), and there’s a cameo from Dini and Batman: The Animated Series producer Bruce Timm. Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Rubens guest-voices as Bat-Mite.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold is a show I like very much in conception, not quite as much in execution. The idea is fantastic, and very, well, “bold” considering that it came out after the Christopher Nolan movies. The producer of the show, James Tucker (a producer-director on Justice League), has said that the Batman he always thinks of as the definitive version is the one he grew up reading and watching, the one who had all the goofy villains and crazy sidekicks. So in defiance of the Nolan version, he came up with a Batman show that is a tribute to the ’50s and ’60s comics. Though Batman himself (voiced by Diedrich Bader) has the raspy voice and no-nonsense manner we now expect from the character, every episode is filled with goofy plots, often sci-fi oriented, and with Batman usually teaming up with other DC characters. Every episode also features appearances by obscure characters, many of whom turned up in Batman comics in the “Silver Age.” Some of the characters turned up in other incarnations — Bat-Mite was in the ’70s Filmation series and Ace the Bat-Hound, who appeared in the Bat-Mite show, was used in Timm and Dini’s Batman Beyond — others, like Catman, are answers to geek trivia questions. When Bat-Mite meets a gallery of Batman villains in the ”Duck Twacy” sequence, not only are there obscure villains, but Mr. Freeze is referred to by his original name from the comics, Mr. Zero. The whole show is  a tribute to an often-scorned period in comics history and an affirmation of the fact that, as the above clip explains, the light version of Batman is no less valid than the dark, angsty version.

My problem with the execution is twofold. One, I think the scripts are often weaker than they should be. (Even Dini’s script for the Bat-Mite episode is not as funny as his Mxyzptlk episode on Superman in the ’90s.) Two, and perhaps even more importantly, the show just doesn’t have the money to do everything it wants to do. The animation shows signs of corner-cutting all over the place, the music is all electronically-generated, the backgrounds look too computerized. To really make a show with the feel of those old comics, they would need to have a higher budget than they do, something closer to the ’90s show — but of course, that’s not their fault; that’s just the reality of working in TV animation today.

Superheroes are starting to bug me

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 118 Comments

No disrespect to Wolverine, who’s the hottest Canadian at the box office since Mary Pickford (even if they do need an Australian to play him), but I wonder about this superhero business. They’ve been cleaning up at the multiplex ever since the dawn of the millennium: Spider-Man. X-Men. Batman. Iron Man. The mid-20th-century long-underwear guys are bigger than ever in the 21st. Truly this is the Age of the Superhero. And it’s beginning to bother me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love comic books. Meeting Stan Lee was one of the great moments of my life. Read a zillion of his masterpieces as a kid—although my grasp of the details decades later is generally frozen circa issue No. 22: Jean Grey will always be Marvel Girl to me. Please, no need to write to point out that she subsequently became Phoenix, and then Dark Phoenix, and then died, and then turned up in a pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, which was given to Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, and then she died again but implanted her psyche in the body of the comatose Emma Frost . . . I’m just skimming the CliffsNotes here, so, alternatively, don’t write if my précis has omitted many fascinating plot twists over the decades. My point is that keeping up with these guys is a full-time job. And even the fellows whose basic bio doesn’t change much get “reinvented.” The reinventions are invariably the same: out with the breezy guy swinging through the streets of Gotham to a ring-a-ding-ding Neal Hefti theme tune; in with some morose misanthrope hunched on the rooftops brooding and riddled with self-doubt. In the sixties, the TV Batman was camp. Then he got dark in the eighties movie. But then by the nineties sequels the dark Batman had mysteriously camped up again. So now he’s darker than ever. I think the concept of reinvention could do with reinventing.

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Weekend Viewing: Penguin vs. Batman, the Full Episode

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 17, 2008 at 4:57 PM - 0 Comments

Since blogs and even TV shows this week were showing that clip of the Penguin debating Batman, why not watch the whole episode? Well, episodes, actually, since as you know, each episode was divided into two separate parts airing on consecutive nights. I think the popularity of this episode has helped to remind a few people of how intelligent this show was at its best; how many action shows are there where all the laughs are intentional, where the writers and the lead actor actually (but subtly) make fun of the hero for being such a goody two-shoes, and where actors as good as Burgess Meredith turn in some of their best work? The political jokes still land, even the dated ones (“Harry Goldwinner”). Plus the basic story is good enough that Batman Returns ripped it off.

Part 1, “Hizzonner The Penguin”

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Click here to see the rest of the episode.

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Hefti, Hefti, Hefti

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 5:25 PM - 1 Comment

On a day when everybody, and also me, is linking to a clip from the ’60s Batman, the composer of that memorable theme song has died. Neal Hefti (1922-2008) was an arranger, bandleader and composer who composed several of the best-known theme tunes of his era; his theme music for the movie version of The Odd Couple was used for the TV series, and became probably his second most-popular tune. As the obituary notes, the Batman theme was one of the most difficult for him to write, because he needed to come up with something that would convey two things at once: that this show was not to be taken seriously, and that Batman and Robin took themselves and their adventures very seriously. What he came up with was a tune and an arrangement that perfectly captured the two-level appeal of the show; an action-adventure theme and a tongue-in-cheek theme at the same time.

I’m also fond of his very weird surf-rock theme for George Axelrod’s brilliant movie Lord Love a Duck, a vicious satire of teen movies, Southern California and the ’60s in general.

There Will Be No Mudslinging in This Campaign!

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 1:12 PM - 2 Comments

Oh, my God. I know other, bigger blogs have already posted this clip, but this is such an uncanny prediction of the U.S. 2008 Presidential campaign that I can’t resist. It’s the Mayoral debate between Batman, the young, mysterious candidate, and Penguin, the old guy with the hardball campaign tactics.

Babe-of-the-Week Shows

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 4:58 PM - 0 Comments

John Rogers is excited that It Takes a Thief is available on Hulu. I would be excited except Hulu isn’t available in Canada. You can get it by installing something like Hotspot Shield, which disguises your IP address to fool the Hulu server, but I can’t officially advise you to do something like that. Anyway…

This post at Cinema Retro gives a good run-down of what It Takes a Thief was and why it was fun, but I’ll add that It Takes a Thief was one of the last of a type of show that was quite common in the ’60s and hasn’t existed much since then, which I might call the “Babe Of the Week Show.” (That may sound a bit chauvinistic and Rat Pack-y, but so was that entire decade of popular culture.) That is, a show where part of the formula Continue…

Bright Knight

By Paul Wells - Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments

A few thoughts about Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I finally saw last night, nearly two full days after it opened:

• It’s kind of amazing that everyone talks about what a dark movie this is. Psychologically it’s not that dark; one of Nolan’s themes is that the decent ordinary folk of Gotham are at least as plucky and help-thy-neighbour as, say, the plucky decent ordinary folk of New York City in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man II. In fact, if Nolan’s two Batman movies have anything in common, it’s the resistance of the big city to perverse influence. This one doesn’t even work very hard to establish the crime wave that’s supposedly sweeping Gotham at the outset. Brian Da Palma’s Chicago crime wave at the beginning of The Untouchables was much more convincing. I think, nearly 20 years after Tim Burton’s Batman, it’s now simply de rigueur to describe a reasonably straight-faced Batman movie as “dark.”

But that’s actually not my main point. Visually, this is one of the brightest movies I’ve seen since — well, since the last time I saw a Christopher Nolan movie. Continue…

Weekend Viewing: Mark Hamill's Joker

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, July 18, 2008 at 9:06 PM - 0 Comments

Since this is Bat-Weekend, here’s a bit of perhaps the best Joker adaptation ever, the animated version voiced by Mark Hamill (who voiced the character as the perfect combination of crazy, scary and funny), as written by Paul Dini (famous for episodes that were serious and darkly funny at the same time). Within the limits of what he could do on kids’ TV — obviously he wasn’t allowed to actually kill anybody, at least not onscreen — this Joker was pretty scary, but also an interesting character, often done in by his vanity and his obsession with getting Batman’s attention.

An excerpt from Dini’s first Joker episode, and the one that introduced his psychotic henchgirlfriend Harley Quinn, probably the first TV show to really get what the Joker does best: terrorize innocent people in bizarre ways. In this case, he pulls over some poor slob on the road and forces him to perform one unspecified favour for him if he wants his family to survive.

And the next clip is Joker and Batman’s final battle, a flashback sequence from the direct-to-DVD movie Continue…

Clean vs. Family-Friendly

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 4:37 PM - 0 Comments

When I wrote a review of The Dark Knight for the website, I had some trouble coming up with a word to describe the movie’s resolutely sexless, bloodless content. I went with calling it “the cleanest Batman movie ever,” but as some people pointed out to me, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. (Who describes a gritty crime thriller with a zillion murders as “clean?”) But I couldn’t call it “family-friendly” either, because this movie is not family-friendly, and in fact people are arguing over whether it’s too intense for children. “But,” it was pointed out to me, “you’re saying that it could be shown on CBS at 8 pm; doesn’t that mean you’re saying it’s family-friendly?” Not really. Few broadcast network TV shows today are really “family-friendly,” yet all of them, because of FCC regulations, have restrictions on violence, language and sex. And it’s the same with Christopher Nolan’s Batman, though the restrictions are self-imposed (even within the limits of a PG-13 rating, you can get away with more than he tries to get away with).

The Dark Knight has violence but hardly any blood — even the pilot of the Batman cartoon showed Batman with a trickle of blood down his mouth — and because Nolan has no real room for sex or sexuality, it not only doesn’t show Bruce Wayne gettin’ any like he did in Tim Burton’s movie, it doesn’t suggest that anybody would even want to have sex in this universe. It’s like a film noir that was made under the old Hollywood production code: the violent, dark story is not for family audiences, but it doesn’t have anything that the censors would actually strike out. More so, actually, since the old films noirs had more of a sex element.

I’m not asking for Nolan to make his movies any other way, you understand; I just find it interesting as an example of what’s happening in the content of movies as compared to TV. TV has severe censorship restrictions, even on most cable channels (only a select few channels, like HBO, don’t censor or bleep anything). Movies, in theory, have no censorship restrictions; they just have to be prepared to accept an R or NC-17 rating depending on how much naughty stuff they put in. TV censorship has gotten even more severe in the last few years because, in Chuck Lorre’s words, “Janet Jackson ruined everything.” And yet mainstream movies don’t actually seem to have more violence or sex, on average, than mainstream TV shows. If anything it’s the other way round. A movie like Batman Begins, where there’s no sex, almost no cursing and almost no blood, has the type of content you might have found on a TV drama about thirty years ago: no matter how intense the subject matter, it’s presented in a very chaste way. Today’s prime-time TV, on the other hand, has plenty of blood and guts; people go to bed with each other, and characters say naughty words (they just get bleeped when they do it, but PG-13 movies don’t use bleeps). If you put an episode of 24 in theatres, it would probably be PG-13, but it would be a more violent, bloody PG-13 than most “action” movies today. And Two and a Half Men probably has more sex jokes than most PG-13 comedies (though not the R-rated comedies of Apatow and co.). It’s like television, where producers are determined to slip stuff by the censors, is still a little freer than PG-13 movies where the producers are busy censoring themselves.

As for my review of The Dark Knight, I want to add that while I think the movie is flawed, it’s an entertaining Continue…

Bat-Addendum

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, July 11, 2008 at 10:56 AM - 0 Comments

When I wrote my post on the ’60s Batman show, I didn’t realize that Lorenzo Semple Jr. himself had a great article in Variety about the origin of the show and the approach he took.

Nothing epitomizes the difference between our Batman and that same hero in the Warners franchise as clearly as the treatment of his backstory. The movie “Batman Begins” is obviously dedicated to that (for me) wholly inconsequential matter. In the TV pilot, I followed the guide of the comicbook and disposed of the hero’s origin very simply … Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered by criminals. This naturally caused the angered heir to devote his life to crime-fighting. It required only minimal research to discover that criminals live in deadly fear of the flying mammal microchiroptera, more commonly known as the bat. The rest of his arc follows with mathematical precision.

It’s too bad that the show has no prospect of being on DVD, due to endless legal wrangling between Fox, which owns the show, and DC/Warners, which owns the character. (As Semple indicates, things were different back then; Fox licensed the rights from DC and he never heard from anyone at DC when he was writing the show.) The spinoff movie is out on DVD, with a commentary from Semple and another commentary from Adam West and Burt Ward, but the movie is not as good as the TV series, partly because it was rushed into production and partly because Julie Newmar was unavailable, replaced by that destroyer of ’60s TV worlds, Lee Meriwether. (Of all the ’60s Hot Chicks who specialized in looking hot in every prime-time TV show, Meriwether was one of the few whose ability to find work was totally inexplicable.)

Reed teh wh0le thing! (That’s internet speak for “Read the whole thing!”)

Bat-Stuff

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 2:52 PM - 0 Comments

Coming up on next week’s Bat-premiere, I have a couple of Batman-related pieces floating around:

- This article from the print magazine about how there’s no one “authentic” take on the Batman character (the print version includes some panels from the famous “Joker’s Boner” story).

- A web-only piece about some of the dumbest, weirdest, jaw-dropping-est Batman stories ever. The “Critters” episode of the animated series, Bat-baby, “I’m the Goddamn Batman” — the usual.

As I said in the introduction to the web piece, I didn’t include anything from the ’60s Batman series because it was intentionally silly. Though you could certainly make an argument that “Critters” was also intentionally silly (I agree, but I didn’t find it funny), and furthermore that some of the Batman episodes from the final season go beyond intentional campiness and are just bad, so maybe “The Joker’s Flying Saucer” should make a list of worst Batman episodes ever.

Still, my point is that comparing the ’60s Batman to a really bad Batman incarnation, like Batman & Robin or some of the doofier late ’50s comics, is unfair. The ’60s Batman show was a great series at its best, and more than that, it was in its own weird way the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever made for television up to that point. That’s because in order to mock the comics, producer William Dozier and head writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. had to actually capture the tone of an actual Batman comic book, a tone that they then exaggerated and pushed into absurdity.

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The pilot and some of the early episodes were based on then-recent Batman stories (the pilot was from a 1965 story called “Remarkable Ruse of the Riddler”) And the director of the pilot and the early episodes, Robert Butler, made the show look like a comic book come to life, with the bright colours, stark angles and, Continue…

The Big Bad

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 7, 2008 at 3:49 PM - 0 Comments

Before writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis struck out with Bionic Woman, she’d already struck out with another much-hyped but short-lived show about posterior-kicking babes: Birds of Prey, a mish-mash of DC comics mythology about a trio of hot lady crimefighters protecting “New Gotham” after Batman bugs out: Helena (Ashley Scott), the daughter of Batman and Catwoman; Dinah (Rachel Skarsten), a waif with some kind of power to see stuff and create big whooshing “vision” special effects; and Barbara Gordon (Dina Meyer), aka Batgirl, aka “Oracle,” who became a wheelchair-bound crimefighter after the Joker shot her (this comes from the comics). Warner Brothers is releasing a DVD of the complete 13-episode series this week, in honour of you-know-what, and the DVD set gave me a chance to get re-acquainted with an ancient time in TV history: 2002.

See, I could have sworn, before I checked, that this show was much older than it is, because I remembered it as being on a long time ago. It wasn’t that long, but it feels like a long time, because the first few years of this decade somehow seem like a different time, culturally. Comparing the culture of 2008 to the pop culture of 2002 is not as jarring as comparing 1962 to 1968, but it’s a similar thing: it just feels like a slightly different world. Especially so with a show like Birds of Prey because it’s a show on and of the WB network, a network with a very distinct style and culture, which no longer exists. The fashions, music (some of it), the obsessive emphasis on reaching young viewers at the expense of just about anyone else, the treatment of computers as such magical things that we’re expected to be mesmerised by watching Barbara search through Internet databases — it’s all a relic of the ancient time of 2002, when Blue Crush was playing at a theatre near you and Toby Keith was threatening to put a boot up somebody’s ass.

The show itself failed, and pretty much deserved to, since it’s a mess, Continue…