I received my first issue of The Uncanny X-Men in my Christmas stocking in 1985. I was 10, and it was the comic that all of my friends were reading. These boys were fixated on Wolverine, the cigar-chomping killing machine with unbreakable bones and long metal claws. He seemed to be half wild animal, half…
dvd of the week Probably because of how great Neil Blomkamp’s first film District 9 was, critics were nasty that his third Chappie wasn’t as good. But I can’t fathom the hatred of the film, which I thoroughly enjoyed and found politically astute. Like District 9, Chappie takes place in a near-future South Africa ravaged…
When Neill Blomkamp arrived with District 9 in 2009, he was heralded as the next great science fiction filmmaker. The film about apartheid policies against deceptively scary looking aliens in a slightly futuristic South Africa was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, most deservedly. Because of how good District 9 was, his not…
dvd of the week In Bryan Singer’s latest X-Men movie, his third and the franchise’s seventh since 2000, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is sent back in time to 1973, when shape-shifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is going to kill Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the inventor of mutant-hunting robots called the Sentinels. The film includes every single X-Men…
The X-Men storyline called Days of Future Past appeared in issues 141 and 142 of The Uncanny X-Men in January and February, 1980. I first read it in mid-1980s when I was 12 or so and had just discovered the comic about outcast mutant superheroes. The story has haunted me ever since. It is set…
Hugh Jackman and Paul Dano in Prisoners dvd of the week The daughters of both Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are kidnapped, and when Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) doesn’t work fast enough, Keller takes the law into his own hands. This is mostly at the expense of the mildly retarded Alex…
dvd of the week James Mangold’s The Wolverine is a great leap forward for the franchise, which has yet to reach its potential. Loosely based on a famed 1982 limited series written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Frank Miller, The Wolverine opens with our hero (muscle bear icon Hugh Jackman) living alone and depressed…
Prisoners About half way through Denis Villeneuve’s haunting, absorbing and morally problematic Prisoners, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are screaming at each other. Keller is insisting that he knows that Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is the man who has kidnapped and hidden his and Franklin’s young daughters; Franklin, in tears, keeps…
When I was reading comics as a teenager, I was one of the few readers who did not claim that Wolverine was his favorite member of the X-Men. I found him a somewhat shallow construction, gruff and violent, with a mostly golden heart. The adamantium-clawed, cigar-chomping Canadian seemed obvious to me, the kind of character…
dvd of the week Based on Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 French novel about an ex-convict struggling to overcome his past (among several other plots), the musical version of Les Misérables is one of the few Broadway blockbusters that is as good as it is popular. When Tom Hooper, fresh from winning an Oscar for The…
