BilmBlog500

So I saw five movies the weekend before Christmas, and am happy to say I didn't entirely like any of them. First up was Barbara, a German movie which has been getting excellent reviews.  It isn't so excellent.  The eponymous lead character is a doctor in East Germany in the early 1980s who has been assigned to work at a new hospital.  We see her working at the hospital, getting attached to another doctor in a romantic way, and to a patient or two in an empathic way.  The German secret police come by every so often to her apartment and search it up and down, then have a female agent come in to search her up and down.  We see her biking all over town, sometimes to have a romantic tryst with a government official.  Well made, yes.  But sometimes I think critics are hampered in their judgment because they go to a movie with the press kit, or they go to a play and are given a copy of the play.  And this is one of those times.  Barbara is so suffus...

Besides all the New 52 books, what else has been in my funny book pile in recent weeks... Phantom Lady and Doll Man, a 4-issue mini-series by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artists Cat Staggs and Tom Derenick.  If I'd gotten around to reading the first issue, I wouldn't have read the second.  It looks really nice, but it didn't cohere.  It seems to be bits and pieces of a story instead of a story, a Zan and Jayna of a comic book. I always buy some Bongo.  Bart Simpson #75 was an OK issue of this title. American Vampire has a great story arc going on, The Blacklist.  I think this is the third arc I'm into since I started reading this DC/Vertigo title, and this might be the best of the three. There's some great artwork by Rafael Albuquerque, Scott Snyder is doing some excellent work.  I don't know why I didn't cotton to this series when it started, but I'm totally into it now. I had two issues of The New Deadwardians.  This is an excellent Vertigo m...

Wherein we come to the end of our exploration of the new DC Universe after its first 13 months of existence... I thought Birds of Prey started off strong and then went off track pretty quickly.  The 0 issue by Duane Swierczynski, Romano Molenaar and Vicente Cifuentes will probably be my last.  It didn't interest me, hard to say why, but it didn't.  Nor did Superman #0 by Scott Lobdell and Kenneth Rocafort. Here, at least I know why.  The art wasn't my style.  And more to the point, I know there that I have zero interest in having another retelling of the Krypton side of Superman's origin.  Been there, done that, got it it one in the opening 20 minutes of Superman: The Movie in 1977.  And for all the reboots of Superman since from John Byrne's in the mid-1980s and onward, it is what it is.  While I'm not likely to  continue with the book with this art team, it's possible there are other story-lines, perhaps with other art teams, that I'll deci...

In part 2 of the New 52 Weeks Later posts there were a lot of 0 issues worth talking about at some length.  Not so much in the third batch... Frankenstein: Agent of Shade started out scripted by Jeff Lemire as intriguingly weird thing, with some intriguingly weird art.  But it quickly got too weird and not near as intriguing, and soon had a new writer in Matt Kindt.  There's still some nice Alberto Ponticelli and Wayne Faucher art, and a script that's just a very prosaic origin that still leaves things weird.  I think I may bow out of this one, once and for all. Green Lantern: New Guardians #0 by Tony Bedard, Aaron Kuder and Andrei Bressan doesn't drown in continuity, it's half of a good comic book.  But eventually it harkens back to this thing that previously happened and that thing that previously happened and isn't very interesting to me.  So the 0 issues got me to give it a second try, but haven't converted me. Nor did Catwoman, which I skipped at the s...

Continuing a series where we check in on DC's New 52 one year after its launch in the midst of their anniversary "0" issues.  The second batch I read gave lots to chew on and think about... Batwing was a pleasant surprise in DC's New 52, fresh hero and fresh setting and freshly written from Judd Winick with some very nice, clean art by Marcus To.  I don't think the totality of the first year has been up to the promise of the first issue.  We got a very attenuated origin that was interesting but which went on too long, a lot of information withheld mostly because, why do in two parts what you can do in four.  A lot of effort given to getting Batman involved because its a bat book, to fitting the Batwing square into the circular Night of the Owls.  But for all my disappointment that the series isn't as good as it maybe could have been, it's been good enough for me to keep buying it every month.  The 0 issue takes us back to that period of time between the ...

The first in a series of posts looking at the first year of the DC Comics New 52, which series have been making the grade, which of the September "0" issues I am liking, that sort of thing... Aquaman:  This is supposed to be one of the big successes of the New 52.  Not for me.  I buy an issue or two, it's a fight scene I don't care about with little text to read and not enough texture to the art for me to spend more than five minutes reading.  So I stop, then decide flipping through to give it another go.  Issue 12 was a "give another go.". And just good enough I want to buy another, just bad enough to do it without much enthusiasm.   Animal  Man:  I had been reading few DC superhero books before the New 52, the one I enjoyed most and which I was saddened to see disappear two summers ago was Jeff Lemire and Pier Gallo's Superboy.   Consolation, that Lemire's Animal Man has been one of my favorites in the New 52.  So far the New 52 has mo...

I ended up going on a bit about Animal Kingdom, let's so some quick takes. Sunday August 22 I saw Eat Pray Love at Clearview's Ziegfeld and then The Other Guys at the AMC Lincoln Square, Aud #4/Olympia. Other Guys had higher highs and lower lows and Eat Pray Love was more consistently mediocre, so I'd give a slight nod to seeing The Other Guys. The best parts of Other Guys are in the first half hour and are often genuinely good and genuinely funny. There's good chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. But as many of the reviews I read quite accurately point out, in the last half hour the movie becomes too much that which it is supposed to be spoofing, and I tuned out totally and completely. It was good to see Michael Keaton with a decent role in a mainstream movie. Where did he go? Eat Pray Love isn't without its pleasures. Julia Roberts, exotic settings, lush feel, eye candy in some ways. But it's flat. The script is kind of flat. I don't...

Maybe I need to get out of town more. In around 33 hours actually in the Washington DC area over the weekend, I managed to see 3 plays, visit 1 B. Dalton, 4 B&Ns, 4 Borders, chow down at 2 Whole Foods and a Pizzeria Uno, do the Saturday NY Times puzzle, two from Sunday, a regular and a cryptic, read 70% of the new Violette Malan book and get started on Tanya Huff's next. I'll talk more about the plays later, but just a few idle observations. I've sung the praises of Georgetown Cupcake before, no doubt I'll do so again, they're some of the only overpriced cupcakes that at least taste really, really, really good. But what is the world coming to when I pop by their new expanded flagship location in Georgetown and see over 30 people curled around in the store waiting to buy cupcakes. It's just a cupcake. It's not worth waiting, sorry, no possible way unless it's your child's bar mitzvah and the caterer's truck with the viennese table pastries...

I go down to Washington DC fairly often, often doing the same things over and over again though trying at some level to always experience something new on each trip, even if it's walking down a different block. On my latest visit I decided I wanted to try very very hard to do some things recommended to me by the Washington Post . So I went to get cupcakes at Georgetown Cupcake .  Now, this whole cupcake craze has me a little befuddled.  Illogically, because I think it's crazy to pay in the neighborhood of $3 for a little cupcake.  Why do I say that's illogical?  Because we all have things we're willing to indulge in.  I pay $6.50 every so often for a slice of Juniors Cheesecake , so why not pay $3 for a cupcake.  But logically, because Juniors is really good stuff (I think so, most people I've introduced it to think so, or have sent as a gift).   But most of these cupcakes are pretty dreary, and paying so much money for a bad cupcake?  Like this little place in Sunn...