I shouldn’t write these things on Friday. It seems like every week I’m saying how long and exhausting the week has been. Maybe if I wrote them on Monday, I’d be all refreshed and collected from the weekend. Nah, I’d just be frazzled to have to write something else with a case of the Mondays.
It was a long week. My wife and daughter are finally getting over the sickness but then the kid had to play catch-up from missing school and there have been loads of extra activities. Luckily, work has been slow so I’m not a total zombie.
This week saw me reading some comics, catching some old movies and enjoying a new show on HBO. Lets get to it.
Batgirl
Gail Simone took over writing duties for Batgirl when DC rebooted all of their comics during the New 52 shakeup in 2011. In this incarnation, Batgirl is Barbara Gordon who became a paraplegic after The Joker shot her (in events that took place in The Killing Joke). After a miraculous recovery, she’s tentatively put the cape back on and is solving crime once again in Gotham.
Her first villain is a dude murdering citizens who previously narrowly escaped some tragic event. Turns out, he is also a survivor but the guilt and shame from that episode has pushed him over the edge, believing that surviving is a cosmic mistake that needs to be rectified.
Simone does a really interesting job of using the story to detail Batgirl’s own survivor’s guilt and whether or not she has the right to become a superhero once again.
X-23
After watching Logan, the best stand-alone Wolverine movie, I became fascinated with Laura, the young girl with anger issues and retractable claws in both her hands and feet. Otherwise known as X-23, she was cloned from Wolverine’s DNA and raised as the ultimate weapon.
I initially started reading her in The All-New Wolverine line. It’s full of action and drama but is light in tone and Laura cracks a lot of sarcastic jokes. X-23, which came out first, is much darker in tone. It’s more violent, and grim.
The first book, Innocence Lost, tells of her time in the lab where she is raised by scientists and treated like an animal, a weapon. She is forced to kill on the whims of her masters and is eventually forced to kill everyone she cares about (as much as she is able to care that is). She escapes but struggles to come to terms with who she is and live on her own. It’s a really good read.
The Philadelphia Story
Fathom Events and TCM brought this classic film starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and James Stewart to the big screen. I got to see it and had a swell time. Read my full review.
The Informant!
Steven Soderbergh directed Matt Damon in this true-life story about Mark Whitacre, an executive at ADM, a global food-processing corporation who blows the whistle on the company’s price-fixing tactics. I don’t want to spoil any of it as it’s a film that is best left to unfold without any prior knowledge. Whitaker is such an odd guy and the way things wind up is so strange that it would be unbelievable were it not true. Soderbergh directs it as a mix of a traditional thriller movie and a spoof of the same.
Alien: Resurrection
Before this week, I’d only watched this film once, when it first hit theaters. I hated it then and vowed to never watch it again. But then after watching the first three films in the quadrilogy, I figured I should give it another chance. I had recently bumped up my rating to Alien3 after watching it again and thought maybe Resurrection would see a similar improvement.
It remains not a very good movie. There are some significant story problems and the tone is weird. Apparently, Joss Whedon wrote the script intending it to come off like a Joss Whedon movie filled with lots of wise cracks, but director Jean-Pierre Jeunet shot it straight giving the jokes a strange reading. The less said about the final alien the better.
Still, it’s got some beautiful shots of the characters walking across these enormous, cavernous interiors and the idea of Ripley being cloned from the blood she lost in the previous movie in order to extract the alien from inside her is a fun idea.
Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town Trailer
MacKenzie Davis stars in this indie-comedy about a flaky young woman who desperately wants to get across Los Angeles so she can crash her former boyfriend’s wedding. Also stars Carrie Coon, Haley Joel Osment, and Alia Shawkat. Looks fun.
