You Will Believe a Man Can Turn into a Skeleton Who Also Rides a Motorcycle and is on Fire in “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”
It doesn’t take much to make the Marvel Comics antihero named Ghost Rider look ridiculous: he is, after all, a skeleton (on fire) wearing a leather jacket (not on fire) who rides a motorcycle (kind of on fire).
The architects of the character’s resurgence in print during the 1990s—particularly writer Howard Mackie and artists Javier Saltares and Mark Texeira—tailored their version of the tormented demonic motorcyclist to play to his visual strengths. The character was always in motion, rarely chatty and oftentimes only materialized on half the pages of his own comic book. Of course, the character’s unexpected popularity resulted in Too Much Of A Good Thing, and Ghost Rider found himself awkwardly loitering around with an assembly of horror-themed characters (lumped together in a “Midnight Sons” branding initiative) and talking at length about a backstory that grew more convoluted with each inevitable spin-off title. I was recently re-reading a 1990′s “Fantastic Four” story arc in which Ghost Rider, Wolverine, The Hulk, and Spider-Man take over for the team, and artist Arthur Adams frequently (and somewhat mischievously) draws Ghost Rider with a puzzled and even sad expression on his face. It’s as if he’s asking the editors at Marvel: “Seriously? A Fantastic Four comic?”
Riding “Horse Back” Across Time: The Return of Crazy Horse
The range unfolds immediately beneath a purple, mountain-less sky; the wild cadence of hoofs, the thunder and crunch, the wind parting the mane of one of God’s most beautiful creatures.
Crazy Horse’s Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank “Poncho” Sampedro still kick up their fair share of dust, wind and grit. Joined with the thunderhead guitars of Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young, theirs are kicks both elemental and electric with all the racket and revelation of a natural disaster.
Deceptively simple, and with a major part purely American noise, the Horse returned from pasture on January’s “Horse Back.”
Woody Harrelson: A Man “Rampart”
If “Rampart,” the new film from Oren Moverman, was a song, you would swear that you’d heard it before.
You might even be able to sing along: a police officer gets involved in the wrong end of his business, abuses the law he’s sworn to uphold and protect and deals with unsavory people. And then his pockets are empty and he needs cash so he goes deeper into the fray: he abuses drugs, has sex with everyone, he destroys his professional life and pushes loved ones away with his self-destruction. And then he goes right to the edge.
You Go To See “The Descendants”
You go to see a film about a Hawaiian named Matt King, who is played by George Clooney.
This movie has been directed by Alexander Payne, a director whom you quite like, particularly his “14e Arrondissement,” so you don’t much mind that Clooney strikes you as anything but Hawaiian. And you like Clooney, who has been in — and even has directed — a few of your favorite films, including “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” And, anyways, it’s just a movie and someone has to star in it.
Guided by “Classic” Voices: Let’s Not Go Contextualizing the Factory
It’s time to welcome back Guided by Voices, even if you didn’t have the chance to miss them.
I was too young to catch this version of the band the first time around. With considerable time having passed between their latest release and 1996’s Under the Bushes Under the Stars, the “classic” Guided by Voices’ January return challenges listeners to forget the records and lineups that carried the GBV stamp for the better part of a decade. Although the GBV banner was retired in 2004, many fans felt the truest dynamic died when main man Robert Pollard dismissed Tobin Sprout, Kevin Fennell and Greg Demos after Under the Bushes….
Occupy Harlan: “Justified” and American Economics
One of the funnier interactions from the still-in-progress third season of “Justified” (2012) takes place between our Stetson-toting hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), and Dixie Mafia gangster Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns). At the end of the second season, Givens, the last of the Kentucky lawmen, tells Duffy that the next conversation they have “ain’t gonna be a conversation.” Givens is later forced into retracting his statement in order to help a colleague out on a case, and when he comes looking for words with Duffy, the gangster can’t help but twist the knife into the gaping wound that is the cowboy’s pride. Givens eventually gets the last word in a later exchange: while standing on Duffy’s neck, he drops a bullet onto the gangster’s chest and says, “Next one’s comin’ faster.”
Burning Down the “Safe House”
In an early scene in Daniel Espinosa’s whip-paced, uninspired film “Safe House,” ex-C.I.A. operative Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) pays a South African pimp to dress in his overcoat, scarf, and hat and then the man is instantly felled by a sniper’s bullet from some baddies that were targeting Frost. This tone sets the backbone of the whole film, which traipses its preposterous intelligence thriller/manhunt in and around Cape Town as if the city were a Hollywood back lot filled with anonymous extras and not a thriving, dynamic city of its own. The film rolls up Cape Town and all it’s inhabitants, diversity, and culture and stuffs it inside the chambers of a hundred American guns and then fires them all at Washington and Ryan Reynolds.
Infants Terrible: “Submarine,” Adolescent Boys, and The Art of Teen Angst
This is the sort of boy we’re dealing with in “Submarine” (2010), a film by Richard Ayoade. The film’s title fits its protagonist, 15-year-old Oliver Tate, like a submarine: it’s almost too on the nose (I prefer the original title chosen for this UK film’s American release, “The Slow and The Lugubrious”). But “Submarine” is not just another movie featuring yet another self-absorbed adolescent boy who finds that the world is Just Not That Into Him: it’s a film about these boys, where they come from, and where they’re coming from. When Oliver (Craig Roberts) talks about his own meticulous self-preservation—the remark at the start of this paragraph is made after Oliver reflects on “an atavistic, glorious fortnight of lovemaking, humiliating teachers and bullies” spent with his girlfriend, Jordana (Yasmin Paige)—it is clear that the filmmakers want us to see that he is unaware of just how far up his own ass he is.
Fox News is a Pitiful Excuse For a Journalistic Organization Whose Sole Purpose is to Trick the American Public
Late Thursday morning, Fox News attempted to trick its readers for the 86,230th time by incorrectly reporting that billionaire Donald Trump had endorsed GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich instead of Mitt Romney.
Fire Up the Fire-Up Chainsaw: Celebrating a New Season of “Delocated”
Silly masks and strange voices are a vintage formula for funny.
As the hilarious nigh-vanity project of funnyman Jon Glaser (ex – “SNL,” “Late Night w/ Conan O’Brien”) debuts its third season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim at midnight this Feb. 2, the premiere will be a testament to what has sprung up from the marriage of a ski mask and a funny voice.
Employing a variation on a character that appeared prior to and during his days as a writer and performer on “Late Night,” Glaser plays “Jon,” a witness-protection enrollee and reality TV star (and, yes, the quotations are part of the character’s name). A target of the Mirminskys, a Russian crime family, “Jon’s” face is obscured and his voice modified.
