BilmBlog500

DC Comics is doing many things these days that sound really interesting but too often aren't living up to my expectations. Which I could be happy about; bailing out of disappointments is keeping me from going back to the days of 18 or 25 years ago when I read dozens of comics a month. But honestly that would be a happy problem to have. I'm seeing that a lot with Brightest Day and its many tie-ins. Brightest Day itself had an interesting 0 issue with an interesting mix of heroes coming back from death or obscurity but by the second issue just a lot of fights and nothingness. Same with JLA Generation Lost. Nice premise, evil mastermind has wiped memories of him from everyone but a few JLA characters. Who just end up fighting with everyone. Boring stuff. I have been sticking with Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal. This is part of a big Green Arrow revival being undertaken as part of Brightest Day. Solid straightforward stuff as a grownup GA sidekick deals with the death of h...

So the Father's Day advertising war for various e-book devices, including the Kindle, Nook and iPad, was followed by the after-Father's Day price war. B&N came out with a bare-bones Nook that sells for $149 but has only Wi-Fi access, i.e., no 3G or no downloading a book anywhere with a cell phone signal. The fully-equipped Nook was also given a price cut. Amazon immediately responded by dropping the price of the Kindle to $189. Borders was already starting to sell some e-book readers, including first shipments in time for Father's Day, for $149. They're now offering a $20 gift card with that, and double Borders R Reward bucks. Since you get $5 for $150, then buy this and a truffle ball and your net price for the Kobo eReader becomes $120. One article I read says that B&N is now making more Nooks than Amazon is Kindles, so they seem to have some quiet success leveraging their store presence to sell the e-reading device. And Apple has sold over 3 million iP...

The third movie I saw this past weekend was Solitary Man. If Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work benefited from a good trailer, Solitary Man suffers from a bad one. It got across the point that the movie starred Michael Douglas and had three other actors who usually do interesting work: Susan Sarandon; Danny Devito, and Jesse Eisenberg. But it also made the movie seem dull, filled with boring talk about boring relationships. In fact, the movie is quite lively, and Michael Douglas gives a nuanced and energetic performance of a role that isn't easily played. His character's that of a car dealer named Ben Kalmen who took a wrong ethics turn and ended up paying a huge fine. He's trying to get back in the game, but he also has a thing for self-destructive behavior which isn't helping. In particular, he's very fond of hitting on women 30 years younger than he. He's on somewhat decent terms with his ex-wife played by Susan Sarandon, but not on very good terms at all wi...

Winter's Bone is a well-crafted well-acted film, the Frozen River of 2010, and I can recommend for that which is good about the film. But it also has one gaping problem, which is that the premise of the movie doesn't work for me at all. The film is set in the Ozarks. Now, I readily admit to knowing nothing about the Ozarks, not in 2010 or 1990 or in any year you choose. I know there are backwoods parts of the US like Appalachia and maybe the Ozarks are like that but worse. The film doesn't just postulate the backwardness of economy, though. Its version of the Ozarks is a heavily clan-based version of seeming in-breeds with no ambition for better to be found where everyone answers to big daddy hidden atop like the old man of the mountain. And maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. I could buy the vision of the society. In this society we have a man whose put up his house and property for a bail bond and is now gone missing. His 17 year old daughter, two younger children...

Besides the excellent Toy Story, I saw three other movies over the weekend, and all of them are worth seeing. First up, at the IFC Center screen 4 on Saturday June 19 was Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. I've never been a Joan Rivers fan but I haven't been opposed either. I've seen her as a personality famous for being a personality, kind of like what Harlan Ellison is these days. The movie shows enough of the early Joan doing actual comedy and enough tribute to her accomplishments in the field to give her some context. But it doesn't overdo it. It avoids the common documentary mistake of assuming the appropriateness of the subject without defining within the parameters of the film -- I.e. if you don't know why the subject is important before taking your seat you won't know after. And it avoids the other mistake of becoming hagiography. We see her current act and she's actually quite funny. We also see that she is a nest of insecurities. If she isn't work...

Dear Mr. Biederman: I have never missed a year at the HBO Bryant Park Film Festival, but on account of your new security procedures, which cannot be justified, this year I will not attend. Let me be blunt, here. In 2002, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, all years after 9/11, I was able to take a seat on the lawn and enjoy the film festival without going to an armed camp. Which is the way it should be. The line for the bag check is a soft target. Like people coming off a train at Grand Central or Macy’s on a busy day or the Sheep Meadow or the subway. I don’t feel more secure because you turn the Lawn into a barricaded camp, I wonder why there’s so much security and start to think it must be dangerous. To me, the Film Festival is a more menacing and dangerous place in 2010 than in any year before, because Bryant Park is acting like it’s a dangerous and menacing thing. Did I worry occasionally over the past ten years sitting on the Bryant Park lawn once or twice a year for a movie that I c...

Toy Story 3 may be the best movie I've seen so far in 2010. It demonstrates that if Hollywood were to try, if it were to care, that it could make movies that were actually good. The people at Pixar care. They don't always succeed, and I haven't been as big a fan of Up or Wall-E as others. Not that either of them was bad, but I just didn't think they were as good as some of the fuss and bother had them to be. And when I see Toy Story 3, I'm seeing the difference between true greatness and some nice tries. Why do I love this movie so much? Well, the most important thing might be the characters. They're toys, but we really and truly and deeply care about them. There's something about the performances of the voice actors that goes a little bit deeper than the usual. Way back when the first Toy Story came out not every actor was lined up for these animation voicing jobs like it is now. That's a long time ago, it is, and we were just getting to Robin W...