Howard the Duck (1986) From Comic Book to Screen

It’s hard to believe that the first Marvel character to make its way to the big screen was something as off-beat and off-brand as Howard the Duck; both Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk had earlier managed to make it to the small screen with varying degrees of success but no attempts at a cinematic venture for them were greenlit for quite some time. Now Captain America did have a Republic Pictures serial back in the 40s but it was Howard the Duck who became the first Marvel character to star in his own big-budget movie, and this was long before Marvel Entertainment existed as a movie studio, for years Marvel Comics was known mostly for selling their intellectual property rights to their characters to anyone who could sign a check. Enter George Lucas, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

A little history on Howard the Duck; he started off his career in comics as a secondary character that Marvel writer Steve Gerber created for an issue of Adventure into Fear, were due to multiple realities colliding poor Howard found himself working alongside Man-Thing, a barbarian and an apprentice sorceress, all in attempt to stop a demonic Overmaster from conquering the multiverse. The Marvel heads at the time asked Gerber to kill off Howard, they thought he was too silly and distracted readers from the main story, but when they started to get flooded with fan outcry they okayed his return, which took place within backup stories in issues of Man-Thing until he was eventually granted a title of his own.

During the making of American Graffiti, George Lucas went to his writing partners and old college mates Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and told them about this very funny, and brilliantly subversive comic book, that he thought would make for a good movie. Flash forward a couple of decades and Universal Pictures greenlit a Howard the Duck movie with Huyck at the helm, sadly, something happened in the years between George reading the comic and the movie finally being made that caused those who thought a movie about a talking duck, one who railed against kung fu revenge films, took on political parties and the media for their blatant stupidity, and remove those subversive elements of the comic, boiling it down to the basic elements of a talking duck who hooks up with a chick, thus forgoing the satire aspect that was intrinsic to Howard the Ducks character. Everything that made the hot-headed anti-conformist nature of Steve Gerber’s creation interesting and relatable was removed and then replaced with generic action scenes and cool ILM light shows.

 

We also got an actor in a $2 million dollar duck suit.

Animation was the obvious medium for such an enterprise, photo-realistic CGI was years away, and it was the format all agreed would be best, unfortunately, animation takes years and the studio wanted a film for a summer release, so Lucas then assured everyone that doing it as a live-action movie was possible. How different this movie would have been if they'd stuck to guns with it being animated we will never know, mind you it would most like have still been terrible, but with the freedom of animation to do anything one can only assume the final product would have differed vastly from what we ended up with.

 

Would Lucas have allowed something like this into his movie?

Even the marketing of the film hinted at something quite different, as the teaser trailer for the film consisted of Lea Thompson lying alone in front of a Sears photo backdrop, extolling the virtues of her boyfriend, ending with her saying, “I would give anything to run my fingers through his…feathers.”   We see her blow feathers off her hand but we don't see Howard, and when I first saw this trailer back in the day I assumed that they would be going the route that Robert Zemeckis did in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Howard being traditional cel animation while the rest of the cast would be live-action actors.

 

Wouldn't this technique have worked so much better?

The movie is your basic origin story, with the movie opening on how Howard the Duck got to Earth - so Man-Thing and the “Nexis of Realities” were obviously jettisoned in favour of a simpler explanation - and thus we no longer have Howard as the hapless duck who was caught up in a fantastic battle for the very fabricate of reality, instead, he is yanked from his Duckworld home by a mysterious power source, one that simply plops him down in alley somewhere in Cleveland.

I will say that the props department for this film must have had a lot of fun creating all the things that makeup Duckworld, such as all the books and movie posters found in Howard’s apartment like “Breeders of the Lost Stork” and “Splashdance” as well as a disturbing look at duck porn.

 

File this under things we didn’t need to see.

On Howard the Duck's arrival on Earth (with Ed Gale in the duck suit and Chip Zien providing the voice) he encounters a nasty group of punks, a lesbian biker gang called “Satan’s Sluts” and then a couple of would-be rapists who threaten the beautiful Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), but Howard being a "Master of Quack Fu" he is able to handily defeat these cretins. Movie Beverly is the lead singer for an all-girl rock band called “Cherry Bomb” whereas Beverly in the comic paid the rent by working as a nude live model, which I personally would have preferred, but that could just be me, now in both movie and in the comic Howard does rescue Beverley but in the comic, she was being held by Pro Rata the Cosmic Accountant, and forced to dress like Red Sonja, while in the movie we just get a scientist possessed by an alien force. So right off the hop, it's clear that the movie is not going in the absurdist direction of the comics, but is instead of keeping most of the elements somewhat down to Earth.

Note: In the comics, Howard didn’t learn Quack Fu back on Duckworld but instead he took a three-hour course at a strange martial arts studio here on Earth, one that mysteriously vanished after he graduated.

In the movie, the relationship that builds between Howard and Beverly is handled with a deft hand, with Beverly teasing Howard into thinking she wants sex with him, but like in the comic it’s clear that she does really care for Howard, and this is the one element the movie kind of nails, but whether or not movie audiences at the time were ready for bestiality jokes is another thing altogether. This is a case of what works in the context of an off-the-wall comic book being a lot harder to translate to a live-action movie. Would this have worked better if the film had been animated who can say, but for me, the “love scene” in the movie is about the closest it gets to feeling like the comic book.

 

The love that shall not speak its name.

The next day Beverly brings Howard to The Natural History Museum and Aquarium to meet her scientist friend Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who she hopes can figure out a way to get Howard back home, unfortunately, Phil is not so much a scientist as he is a lab assistant/janitor. Furious that Beverly would subject him to this overenthusiastic crack-pot, who is clearly more interested in the fame Howard could bring to his career than in getting the duck home, Howard tells Beverly that he doesn’t need any more of her sympathy or charity, “Who needs you? I don’t need anybody!”

Howard quickly realizes that what he does need is food, shelter and a job, two things that Beverly was offering him, but instead of Howard doing the smart thing and swallowing his pride and returning to her the film leads us on an idiotic detour into Howard looking for work, and if you think for half a second about what this would actually entail it completely falls apart. He goes to the Ohio Bureau of Employment Services and encounters a hard-nosed civil servant, who thinks Howard is dressing up in a duck suit to be “controversial” and thus would remain jobless so he could collect unemployment insurance.  She will have none of that.

 

I know this scene is here for simple comic purposes, but it does raise a few questions.

• Did this woman even ask for some kind of identification from Howard? To get unemployment insurance you kind of have to be an American citizen.
• Howard is dressed in the clothes he got from the Little Tykes section of Goodwill, but where did he get Earth money to pay for them?
• And is Howard living in a cardboard box or a homeless shelter? Because without a job he certainly can’t be renting anywhere.

We follow up that scene of comic insensibility with one of Howard working at some kind of sex spa, as some sort of Water Expert, where his boss chucks him headfirst into a whirlpool, one that currently has occupants in it because that's this film's idea of comedy, to fix a broken water jet. Howard quits this terrible job and ends up back at the nightclub/bar where Beverly’s group performs, and after beating up their crooked manager, and getting the girls the money they are owed, he is back in Beverly’s good graces.

This whole bit does not make me sympathetic to Howard’s plight, as he clearly states to Bev, “Listen, I’m sorry we fought. You’re the only friend I got here,” and this kind of implies that if he had any other options he would not have come crawling back to Beverly, and that pretty much puts Howard in the category of being a total jerk. Now in the comics, he and Beverly did have the occasional fight, but he never crossed the line into being the complete dick that he is shown to be in this film.  The movie tries to recover from this moment by having that quirky aforementioned romance scene, and for me, this was the point I stopped rooting for Howard, but who else is there to root for? Well, let’s talk about this film’s main villain…

 

Enter the Dark Overlord of the Universe.

I turns out that Phil isn’t a complete loss as he discovers that Howard was brought to Earth when a laser spectroscope, belonging to local science lab Dynatechnics, went off course and hit Duckworld and accidentally snatched Howard, instead of measuring the density of gases around Alpha Centaury, as it was supposed to.  I’m not sure how a device designed to measure gas density can suddenly become a tractor beam but then again I’m not a scientist. In this film we get scientist Doctor Jenning (Jeffrey Jones), who posits that it is possible to reverse the process and send Howard back home, but later when the gang visits the lab they learn that there has been another accident with the laser, and now Doctor Jenning is possessed by a demonic creature from the Nexus of Sominus (which is apparently some kind of demonic dimension in space), and this creature hopes to use the laser spectroscope to bring more of his fellows to Earth. If this sounds a tad familiar it's because The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension had basically that same plot, and that film came out a few years before Howard the Duck did.

Also other "dimensional monsters" aren't really a Howard the Duck thing, sure his first appearance in comics was him getting mixed up in a fight with the demonic Overmaster, but that guy was more a Man-Thing villain and Howard was just briefly along for the ride.  Howard was mostly known for fighting absurdist creations like Hellcow, a poor bovine turned into a vampire by a desperately hungry Dracula, or the fanatical Canadian hellbent on destroying America’s faith in democracy, called La Beaver, then there was Doctor Reich, a former dentist to Hitler, and of course the terrifying if tasty Gingerbread Man, who was created by a young girl mad scientist.

 

Who wouldn't buy a ticket to see a movie based on this?

At just under two hours Howard the Duck feels a lot longer than it actually is, too many times the film stops cold for an overlong special effects or action sequence, scenes that barely move the plot forward; we get Howard and Beverly’s escape from Dynatechnics, because the police want to arrest Howard for being an illegal alien, then we get an endless scene at a Cajun/Sushi diner where a possessed Jenning uses his powers to explode stuff, and telekinetically toss shit around, and then after Jenning kidnaps Beverly it’s up to Howard and Phil to rescue her before the possessed asshat can stuff one of his overlord pals inside her. This leads to a chase scene between the police and Howard, who along with idiot Phil, steals an ultralight that neither knows how to operate.

 

You will believe a duck can fly.

The film’s climax consists of Howard strapping an experimental “neutron disintegrator" to some sort of moon buggy and shooting Doctor Jenning/Dark Overlord. Sounds like a great plan, what could possibly go wrong?  But sadly hitting Jenning with the disintegrator ray doesn’t quite have the desired effect, for instead of disintegrating the villain it somehow forces the Dark Overlord out of Jenning’s body, and thus Howard must then do battle with the creature in it’s true form. This final incarnation is a wonderful stop-motion rod puppet designed and operated by the great Phil Tippet, but unfortunately by this time in the film I’ve completely given up caring about anything and am just praying for the end credits to roll.

 

Now there are just a couple of questions about this climax:

Stray Thoughts:

• Jenning/Dark Overlord types in the targeting coordinates of his home dimension into the computer and replies, “Laser is now targeting the Nexus of Sominus” but how exactly does that computer know the name of an alien dimension?
• The Dark Overlords cannot exist on Earth unless they grow inside a human body, which is why he kidnapped Beverly, but we see three Dark Overloads coming down the Laser Spectroscope’s beam. Can three of those things fit inside little ole Beverly?
• When the neutron disintegrator knocks the Dark Overlord out of Jenning’s body the once possessed scientists somehow revert to normal. Earlier Jenning tells Howard and Beverly that “Something is growing inside me. It’s replicating and superseding all my internal organs.” I’m not sure how he survived that process, especially when at one point he walked into a nuclear reactor to charge up. Doctor Jenning should be a cancer-riddled corpse.
• During the final fight the now fully realized Dark Overlord hits Beverly and Phil with a beam from its tail that seems to be slowly disintegrating them but doesn’t that destroy the hosts he needs for his brethren?

 

Cool monster but I still would have preferred a vampire cow.

It’s clear that I’ve put more thought into this movie’s plot than anybody involved in the making of it did, and sure this is supposed to be a fun science fiction/fantasy adventure comedy and we’re not supposed to overthink things, but the key element in making an audience buy into the conceit of talking duck from another world is to have your story, no matter how farfetched, maintain its own intrinsic logic. Characters must act and react in ways that an audience can relate to or else it’s all just noise, and nobody will care what happens next.

 

Ending your film with Howard doing a Marty McFly impression doesn’t help.

Needless to say, the movie laid a colossal egg at the box office - Howard the Duck cost $37 million to make, and earned just $16 million in the U.S. - but that doesn't mean there isn’t anything to like about the film, for instance as two million dollar duck suits go the one created for this movie is pretty good, and Lea Thompson pulled off a believable rocker chick who falls for a talking duck, then there is the ILM effects house who did their usual solid work with the special effects, but on the other hand I can’t say I’m fond of the manic comic turn that Tim Robbins gives us with his performance in this film, as it gets old real fast. The real problem of course is that George Lucas took a character that he thought was funny and original and then handed it over to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz so they could remove all that made Howard the Duck funny and original.

 

This was not the Howard the Duck we knew and loved from the comics.

The film has developed a little bit of a cult following, and despite Lucas’s views that over time the film will eventually be appreciated for the masterpiece it is, I'm sorry to say it's still as bad as it was back in 1986, but of course, the big question is will James Gunn give us a real Howard the Duck movie someday? Gunn is a professed fan of the character, and Howard has had cameos in both Guardians of the Galaxy and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, but sadly there are no plans for a movie starring him in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe schedule.

 

Maybe if we all collectively hold our breath Marvel will cave in and give Gunn the greenlight.

Son of Flubber (1963) – Review

With the success of The Absent Minded Professor a sequel was certainly not out of the question but Walt Disney himself abhorred sequels and despite the original making over $25 million dollars a sequel would never have been made if not for the fact that there were several unused Flubber gags sitting on the shelf. I’ve certainly heard worse reasons to greenlight a sequel but one must admit that this one is particularly lame.

The movie opens with absent minded Professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) flying to Washington DC in his Flubber powered Model T, along for the ride is Biff Hawk (Tommy Kirk) who though the son of the nefarious Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn) has become a kind of assistant to the Professor. We learn that Medfield College is in financial dire straits, with Alonzo Hawk ready to foreclose on their loan and bulldoze the place, but with the millions in revenue expected from Brainard’s invention they all assume the school will be saved. Unfortunately poor Ned is given the “Washington Two-Step” as his invention has been declared “Top Secret” by the Pentagon and is told that it will take time to move it through Congress and the appropriations committee, which means he won’t see a red cent for the foreseeable future. This moment in the film is sadly about the only believable one we get.

 

And I’m all for believing in flying cars.

From this moment on the film becomes just a collection of contrived conflicts to justify a series of those “Flubber Gags” left over from the previous film. Brainard’s new wife Betsy (Nancy Olson) is frantic over the fact that they have to search through couch cushions to pay the paperboy, and is almost in tears when she has to tear up a million dollar endorsement cheque because of Ned’s deal with the government. But wait, isn’t the Professor still taking in a salary from the college? Even if the college is strapped for cash don't they still have to pay their teachers? Added to the mess is a company that wanted Ned to sign with them to unleash a flood of “Flubber Products” that made little to no sense; they had mock-up ads for Flubber Enterprises that included such products as Flubbermint chewing gum, a Flubbercycle for exercise, Flubberdent toothpaste, and a Flubberin pain medication.

 

How would that even work?

Things get even worse when a man from the IRS shows up to hand them a $656 thousand dollar tax bill based on the estimated projected earnings from Flubber….wait, what? Now I may not be the most knowledgeable guy when it comes to the ins and outs of the tax system, and maybe in Canada it’s different, but I really can’t see how you can be on the hook for taxes on “potential” future earnings. That’s just ludicrous.

But money problems aren’t the only thing Ned has to worry about as Betsy has invited that, “Double-crossing, miserable, four-flushing snake Shelby Ashton!” over for dinner. I may know even less about love than I do about the American tax system but I must say that inviting your old flame, one who repeatedly tried to screw over your new husband mere days ago, has got to be the dumbest of dumb ideas. Yet that isn’t enough conflict so the script has Shelby (Elliot Reed) show up for dinner with Desiree de la Roche (Joanna Moore) who is an old school flame of Ned’s and who also seems to still be carrying a torch for him. Betsy moves straight into insanely jealous mode, you almost expect a catfight to break out at any moment, but then good ole Ned doubles down on that stupidity by declaring, “No wife of mine is going to work as long as I have a spark of life in my body” when Shelby offers a job to cash strapped Betsy. The love squabble that develops from this dinner plagues much of the film’s running time, it’s not original or all that funny, and isn’t this supposed to be a sci-fi comedy?

 

Enter the weather making machine.

The movie isn’t all financial and relationship problems, it just seems that way at times, but we do get Professor Brainard working on a new invention that stems from the gas that is a byproduct of Flubber. With the use of this Flubber gas he believes he can create and control weather, and he does manage to make the steam from a tea kettle turn into a small rain cloud in his kitchen with the resulting puddle being blamed on the poor dog, but when he tries to make actual clouds do the same not a drop of rain is to be seen. Though unbeknownst to him the weather ray did have an effect but instead of the desired effect of making clouds it instead caused every piece of glass in the beams radius to burst or shatter.

 

Unhappy Hour.

Aside from Ned’s experiments with Flubber gas we also have Biff Hawk working on a side project of his own that will allow the puny football players of Medfield College defeat the giant players of rival Rutland College. If you think that this will result in Flubber being used to cheat in a sporting event, as we saw in the last film, you are absolutely correct. *sigh*

When Alonzo Hawk discovers that Ned is responsible for all the town’s broken glass, which Hawk’s insurance company was on the hook for, he at first wants Ned to partner up with him in a glass smashing scam.  His plan is that they would quietly buy up stock in various glass companies and then Ned’s machine would smash people’s glass, they in turn would then supply the victims with new glass, which of course they would smash again, “We could even start up a quiet little corporation that just breaks church glass.” When Ned refuses to be part of this diabolical plan Hawk declares that he will see Brainard in jail for all the damage he caused, and as for Medfield College, “A year from now people will have forgotten there ever was such a punk little college.” What is Professor Brainard brilliant plan to stop this from happening?  Why its to get a hold of Biff and help the team win the big game so that even if the school is shut down it will never be forgotten.

 

So that justifies cheating?

The football game goes much the same way the basketball game did in The Absent Minded Professor with the superior Rutland team soundly trouncing the puny Medfield players until Brainard, Biff and their guinea pig student Humphrey Hacker (Leon Tyler) arrive with a football suit tricked out with inflatable Flubber pockets. This allows Biff to simply throw Humphrey down the field for a touchdown, or allows Humphrey to bounce past the opposing linemen, and they eventually win the game when a flubber injected football is kicked for a 98 yard field goal. This makes the whole Tom Brady Deflategate seem like a minor infraction. The whole scene is of course there just for some good laughs but when the referee blows off the Rutland coach’s protests stating, “Here’s the rule book. You think there’s something wrong, you find it.”

 

"There's nothing in the rule book that says an elephant can't pitch."

But the whole world knows about Flubber and many of the same people here where ones who witnessed it in action at that notorious basketball game, so how could anyone not realize what was going on and call foul on Medfield’s cheating? Well the movie doesn’t have time to deal with that as Professor Brainard soon finds himself in police custody and off to court to face the consequences for his glass breaking/weather machine, but just before the court can throw the book at him a local agricultural official (Ed Wynn) shows up to inform everyone that Professor Brainard’s ray caused something he calls “Dry Rain” and has made the normally terrible Medfield soil into something supercharged that makes all crops grow to enormous sizes. This somehow results in him being acquitted and the damages he caused forgotten.

Note: The giant crops being paraded into the court as evidence is a complete lift from the letters to Santa scene in the A Miracle on 34 Street.

As sequels go Son of Flubber is a pale shadow of its predecessor, only the great stock of Disney character actors and the fun Flubber moments make it bearable, but as weak as it is there is still Fred MacMurray at the center and he manages to bring his affable charm to bear like no other actor before or since. There is a particularly great moment when in court and he explains to the prosecutor that making mistakes is actually a good thing, “The road to genius is paved with fumble-footing and bumbling. Anyone who falls flat on his face is at least moving in the right direction, forward. And the fellow who makes the most mistakes may be the one who will save the neck of the whole world someday.” That is a pretty great message in what most would call a rather "light and forgettable comedy" proving that even Disney fluff films are worth checking out.

Collateral Beauty (2016) – Review

In between doing films like Men and Black and Suicide Squad Will Smith tries to do films that allow him stretch as an actor, now sometimes this results in films like The Pursuit of Happyness but then other times we get something like Collateral Beauty, a treacly mess that wouldn’t pass muster as poor community theater.

The central character in Collateral Beauty is advertising executive Howard Inlet (Will Smith) who we first meet as he gives an inspirational speech to his staff, extolling the virtues of advertising *cough* bullshit *cough* and how "Love, Time and Death" are three abstractions that connect every single human being on Earth, “We long for love, we wish we had more time, and we fear death.” Then during a nice camera move we jump ahead three years and learn that his six year old daughter has died and this tragedy has left him unmoored. The loss of a child is certainly one of the worst things that could happen to a person, and normally this would put us completely on the side of the film’s protagonist, but then we see that this very successful advertising agency is in danger of losing its clients because the heart of the company is spending upwards of five days building elaborate domino set-ups.

 

Fine, his daughter must have loved dominoes, we get it.

Enter his three friends/colleagues Whit Yardshaw (Edward Norton), Claire Wilson (Kate Winslet), and Simon Scott (Michael Peña) who fear that Howard’s behavior will sink the firm, there isn’t even a domino company on their client list, and the one small ray of hope is that another company is offering to buy them out, but unfortunately Howard isn’t even interested in talking about it. This is where my sympathy began to slide as its one thing to grieve, and with losing a daughter he certainly has earned that right, but to let others suffer because of it is not cool. He refuses to even talk to his friends so we don’t learn if he has some valid reason for not selling the company, two years of moping around the office kind of illustrates he doesn’t give a shit about it, and so Howard moves into the “Damn, what a selfish asshole this guy is” territory and my sympathy for him vanished. His “friends” then decide they have to somehow prove he is incompetent so that they can have him declared mentally unfit to run the company and gain control of his voting rights. They hire a private investigator who steals letters that he has mailed (Note: These people seem really cool tampering with mail which is a federal crime) and in these letters they find out that he’s been writing letters addressed to Death, Time and Love.

 

Get it? Those were his three pillars of advertising.

Unfortunately writing to abstractions could be considered therapeutic and not crazy so when Whit runs into actress Amy (Keira Knightley), and meets her fellow thespians Raffi (Jacob Latimore) and Brigitte (Helen Mirren) he comes up with the brilliant plan to gaslight Howard. Brigitte would appear to Howard as Death, Raffi as Time and Amy as Love and once the private investigator gets video of him arguing with them, and after digitally removing them from the footage so it looks like he is yelling at thin air, they will have the “evidence” to have him removed. My question here is “Are we supposed to like anybody in this movie?” I sympathize with Whit and company for wanting to prevent the company they help build evaporate but this plan is insanely cruel and would most likely land them all in jail if discovered. What's worse is that these actors are apparently doing this to get money to fund their avant-garde play so the danger of them later blackmailing our trio of idiots is very real...if there wasn't more going on of course.

 

Sure, they look like honest people.

The film tries to make us understand the motivations of this trio of Judas Iscariots by revealing that Whit is in financial reunion after a nasty divorce and lives with his mother who suffers from dementia and his daughter hates him, Simon we learn has terminal cancer, so he needs the money from this sale to give his family financial stability when he's gone, and then there is Claire whose biological clock is ticking. Sure Claire occasional protests to the group, that what they are doing to poor Howard is wrong, but as she never outright stops them she has no moral leg to stand on, only Simon is the least bit sympathetic but Michael Peña’s “I’m *cough* *cough* dying" is so movie of the week lame that it engenders more laughs than tears.

 

“Have the producers of Ant Man 2 called yet?”

So we have three dubious friends trying to get rich by making another friend believe he is talking to the incarnations of Death, Time and Love so they can declare him nuts, which all seems like the grounds for a suspense-thriller, but if you saw the trailer to this film you know that was clearly not how this movie was marketed. Nowhere in that ad campaign was there any hint that Will Smith was talking to hired actors and not the incarnations of celestial beings themselves, but to discuss this further I’m going to veer into major spoiler territory.

While Claire, Simon and Whit orchestrate this nasty gaslighting business we also have Howard attending a therapy group for parents who have suffered the death of a child, the leader of the group is a beautiful and attractive black woman named Madeleine (Naomie Harris) whose six year old daughter Olivia was lost to cancer. Like 79% of couples who lose a child her marriage ended, but here we have the added bonus of her husband sending her a note wishing that, "They could be strangers once again." Now Howard’s daughter also died at the age of six and whenever Madeleine tries to get him to tell her the name of his daughter he completely shuts down, this is all blatant set-up for the big twist reveal that Madeleine is in fact Howard’s wife and that Olivia was their daughter. I think even M. Night Shyamalan would have been embarrassed by such a lame reveal, but the twists don’t stop there as in the final scene in the movie we get a shot of Amy, Raffi and Brigitte looking down at the reunited Howard and Madeleine and as the movie then makes it clear that Madeleine cannot see them we now know that they were in fact actually incarnations of Death, Time and Love all along and that they tricked Whit and friends to employ them in “helping” Howard.

 

Later they will visit the set of Touched By an Angel.

This is all utter bullshit as nothing in this film had been introduced to even hint that the actors were actually cosmic beings, and at one point Amy refuses to be involved because she believes what they are doing to Howard is horrible. Does Love really feel that way or is she just "acting" the part of the sensitive actress? The whole actors/incarnations thing is a complete mess and wouldn’t have supported a 30 minute episode of The Twilight Zone let alone a 96 minute movie. The caliber of actors on display here are so monumentally wasted that it is almost a crime against humanity, and forcing Oscar winner Helen Mirren to spout gibberish that would sound overly treacly on a Hallmark Get Well card should at the very least get you kicked out of Hollywood. Collateral Beauty is one of those films that all involved will most likely hope the paying public forgets ever existed. I certainly plan on forgetting I ever watched it.

 

And that's how they all learned the true meaning of Christmas.

The Tick (2017) Season One Review

The superhero comic book character The Tick was the brain child of writer/artist Ben Edlund and it has managed to remain fresh and fun since his birth back in the late 80s; from his adventures in his own comic book to his later animated incarnation for Fox Kids and even later in a live action incarnation starring Patrick Warburton this lovable lunkhead was always finding a new audience, and now Amazon Prime has released their version of The Tick for a new generation. Using the same model Netflix created, releasing an entire season in one go, we get the first season of The Tick that though "complete" it is sadly only six episodes long. The pilot had been released a year ago but now with the full run available we can answer that most important question, "Does it actually work?"  Can this surreal parody of superheroes survive a second live action attempt?

This new series has The Tick’s creator Ben Edlund as one of its producers, as well as Patrick Warburton and David Fury, and Edlund even wrote the first two episodes, but what makes this version of The Tick stand out is that though the show is called The Tick the actual central character is “sidekick” Arthur (Griffin Newman) who as a child witnessed the death of his father when the villainous menace, aptly named The Terror (Jackie Earl Haley), sent the ship belonging to superhero team Flag Five crashing down on the poor hapless dad. Young Arthur was forced to watch his heroes, stricken blind by syphilis, being gunned down by The Terror’s minions, and who now fifteen years later he is a somewhat mentally fragile mess who is obsessed with proving that The Terror is very much still alive.  The world has come to believe that The Terror was killed by the hero Superian (Brendan Hines), this world's version of Superman, when after one fateful fight only The Terror's teeth could be found. One night while investigating what looked to be an illegal arms shipment, which Arthur believed to be connected somehow to The Terror, he runs into The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) the blue clad avenger of all that is good, and with that Destiny makes its first call.

 

Though Arthur does try and hang up a lot.

The first couple of episodes dance around the idea that The Tick may just be a figment of Arthur’s unbalanced mind but as we see The Tick off on his own beating of gang members it’s more of a case of Arthur thinking that The Tick is a delusion and not us the viewers believing that to be the case. It does lead to some nice comic moments with the Tick popping up and disappearing at the oddest moments.

The other key character in Arthur’s life is his sister Dot (Valorie Curry) a med student who pays her bills working nights as a paramedic but she is also making extra cash providing medical treatment to the members of the cities underworld, but despite those "occupations" it does seem that Dot’s main job is bailing her brother out of trouble and insuring that he is taking his prescribed meds.  It's when The Tick enters the picture that all bets are off and things go from crazy to worst for poor beleaguered Arthur, and when The Tick gives Arthur the winged super suit he'd obtained after taking down that arms deal the shit really begins to hit the fan.

 

This is not a costume that instills fear in the hearts of criminals.

Chasing after the suit is the supervillain Ms. Lint (Yara Martinez), ex-henchwoman of The Terror, who has nasty electricity based powers that though quite effective in a fight also create quite a bit of static cling and thus she finds herself often becoming a walking lint brush, thus the name. Arthur is the standard reluctant hero for the most part of this season, he does want to uncover the truth behind The Terror but he also has no desire to don a costume and fight the evil madman himself, that’s what the cops are for, but eventually we will be forced to man up.

Throughout this six episode season Arthur is plagued with henchman trying to kill him, despite his willingness to give back the suit, and The Tick constantly showing up like a cross between an adorable puppy and a boomerang. As each episode is about a half hour long the action and comedy really zips along with Peter Serafinowicz doing a great job as the titular hero, his booming voice is perfect for the goofy-ass monologs that The Tick continuously spouts, and he and Newman really have good onscreen chemistry. Though as good as those two are I must single out Jackie Earl Haley’s performance as The Terror for being so insanely fun and completely engaging that he almost steals the show in those few moments he appears. His brand of off-the-cuff evil is comic gold and I can’t wait to see where they go with this character in the future.

 

Hats off to the character design department as well.

The world of The Tick is presented rather realistically for this iteration, there are superheroes in this world but their existence is rather down played and treated as something matter of fact, and this show is also seasoned with a good amount of dark humor that could catch the unwary viewer off guard. We are told that that there is a government agency called Aegis that is supposed to be keeping tabs on both superheroes and supervillains but people on both sides of the law consider Aegis to be a useless bureaucratic nightmare. This version of The Tick doesn’t quite have the massive cast of crazy heroes that previous versions have had but so far this season along with the all-powerful Superian, who we see can turn terrible coffee into wonderful pumpkin spiced with a mere blast of his eye lasers, we have the armed vigilante called Overkill (Scott Speiser) who is kind of a cross between Marvel’s The Punisher and DC’s Deathstroke.

 

His brutal killing of his enemies has The Tick wanting to give him “The Talk.”

With only six episodes making up the first seasons how exactly this show will work in the long run as a series is still up in the air but so far I love the cast and the tone the showrunners have chosen and certainly look forward to season two.  Hopefully the will introduced his battle cry of "SPOON!"

I will now take the time to posit my own theory about The Tick’s origins; in all version of The Tick he seems to have no memory of his life before being The Tick, and indeed he doesn't have much memory of anything before meeting Arthur; head trauma or clinical insanity have both been posited as reasons for this but I think for this show it could be a bit stranger than that. At first Arthur believes The Tick to be a figment of his imagination, with a flashback of young Arthur’s blue night light speaking to him with The Tick’s voice supporting this idea, but once it’s made perfectly clear that others see and interact with The Tick this can’t be the case, so what if somehow Arthur created The Tick?  If you agree with me on that theory, or think I'm totally insane, let me know in the comment section below.

Final Thoughts:

• Dot balances her time as a paramedic/med student/underworld doctor with being a member of a roller derby team. I simply love Dot.
• Arthur’s stepdad (François Chau) has strange interest in people’s feet.
• Overkill’s lair is his also his partner and is called Deathboat voiced by Alan Tudyk.
• We meet talking super dog Onward the only surviving member of Flag Five and whose master was Christian Soldier.
• Arthur’s super suit has an Armenian control system so he basically has the same problem that William Katt had as The Greatest American Hero when it comes to operating it.

Batman and Harley Quinn (2017) – Review

The character of Harley Quinn was created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm back 1992 for Batman: The Animated series and over the years her popularity has grown by leaps and bounds, she’s pretty much the reason the Suicide Squad movie even exists, but now we get her starring in her first PG13 outing within the DC’s Animated Universe, and to say this entry was a bit of disappointment would be a vast understatement.

Note: This movie’s cool stylized credit sequence is much in the vein of the classic Pink Panther movies, I guess they were trying to set the tone for to the wackiness ahead, but what follows is often far from wacky and instead is simply crude and lame.

The film’s plot is about as thin and nonsensical as possible and barley takes up much of it's 74 minute running time, what Bruce Timm instead decides to focus on are the road trip antics of Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch) as she is forced to team-up with Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester) to save the world. The movie opens with Poison Ivy (Paget Brewster) and the Floronic Man (Kevin Michael Richardson) breaking into Star Labs to steal files pertaining to a formula created by scientist Alec Holland, who comic book fans will recognize as the man who became the elemental known as Swamp Thing, as they hope to use it to turn all of humanity into plant-people. They believe this is the only way to stop mankind from destroying the planet. Batman figures that the best way to find Ivy and stop her diabolical plot is to locate her old BFF Harley Quinn, and so Nightwing is sent out to track down Joker’s old girlfriend.  After endlessly canvasing the city by just showing random people a picture of Harley (did he learn nothing about being a detective from Batman?) Nightwing discovers that she is now working at a superhero themed restaurant called Superbabes that has a solid Hooter’s objectification of woman vibe to it.

 

You stay classy, Bruce Timm.

Nightwing follows/stalks Harley back to her digs and soon finds himself in a knock down drag out fight with a very bitter Harley Quinn, and this led to me asking, “When exactly did Harley Quin become a master of hand-to-hand combat?”  Now I don’t have an issue with them turning Harley Quinn into a bit of a badass but to see her actually win a fight with a dude who was trained by friggin Batman is patently ridiculous, and I don’t care that she technically won because she injected him with Joker venom because that fight still lasted way too long for it to be even remotely plausible.  Of course that whole sequence was really just a set-up so we could get to a scene with Nightwing being tied to Harley’s bed, apparently she got all hot and bothered by his superhero cuteness and decides to have sex with him, with a little light bondage being a bonus I guess.

 

Harley informs Nightwing,“You don’t meet a lot of likely prospects at Superbabes.”

Bruce Timm even brings up the actually real book “Seduction of the Innocent” by American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, which was key in bringing about the comic book censorship/purge in the1950s, as something that Harley had read back in her college days, and because of that she states “I didn’t think you and Batman liked girls” but because she spots Nightwing’s erection she realizes that the author was clearly wrong. It’s at this point one starts to wonder if we are watching a DC produced Batman movie or someone’s fanfiction. Batman eventually shows up, but not before stopping off at Argus where he blackmails one of the agents for information, and then the three of them hit the road to track down Ivy.

Note: Batman actually threatens to out the agent’s sexual fetish if he won't spill government secrets, thus proving that this particular Batman is a complete asshat.

What follows next is not something one expects to find in a Batman movie, and that would be an extended fart joke.  Turns out the food at Superbabes is not the best and Harley really needs to use a restroom, but Batman refuses to pull over so she repeatedly farts in the backseat of the Batmobile. *sigh*

 

Batman responds, “It’s not so bad…it smells like discipline.”

I love Kevin Conroy, and he is still one of the best of all the incarnations of Batman, but he really should have refused to deliver that line. In fact he should have passed on the part entirely because it pretty much pisses on the legacy he helped create during the shows original run.  Also this movie should not have been called Batman and Harley Quinn as it’s more about Nightwing and Harley with Batman solely there to play the stick-in-the-mud straight man to those two.

In fact Batman is so bad at his job in this movie it boggles the mind; the World’s Greatest Detective resorts to the aforementioned blackmail to get information he needs to track down the villains but when he eventually does encounter the Floronic Man, a guy made of planet matter and who is an exile from an interdimensional world, he fails to pack anything useful in his utility belt to combat him. Instead in both of his encounters with the Floronic Man it’s mostly Batman trying to punch the super villain in the face.  Don't forget this is a man/creature who is mostly plant matter and who has plant controlling powers, not someone you'd assume was particularly vulnerable to a fist to the face. Did he forgot to pack the Bat-Weed-Be-Gone in his utility belt?  Batman deserves to get his ass handed to him here.  To add insult to injury there is a throw away gag at the end of the movie that reveals how our heroes eventually defeat the Floronic Man that is such an insult to Batman that Bruce Timm should have been sent to the corner for a time-out.

 

Does Batman hope enough punches will take him down via erosion?

To make matters even worse Bruce Timm decided to waste much of the film’s short running time with a useless scene where Harley takes Batman and Nightwing to a bar where costumed henchmen hang out with the hope of finding one of Ivy’s old associates. Not only does Batman and Nightwing's arrival at such an establishment illicit no response, you’d think at least a couple of them would wisely try and slip out the back door, but then we get two full musical numbers for no bloody reason. The scene ends when one of Catwoman’s old crew eventually does pick a fight with Batman and we get a terrible nod to the classic Adam West Batman series.

 

That’s comedy right there folks, move along nothing to see here.

Batman and Harley Quinn was directed by Sam Liu, whose last two outings were Teen Titans: The Judas Contract and The Killing Joke which were less than memorable, but the fault here I’d say lies squarely on writer Bruce Timm's shoulders as he took a character he so lovingly brought to life in the original Batman: The Animated series and then turned him into a punching bag for a bunch of lame ass jokes. Then as if dragging the Batman legacy through the gutter wasn’t enough we are subjected to a terrible “surprise” cameo from Swamp Thing that is only there as a pointless and awful throwaway gag.

 

Somewhere out there Berni Wrightson is rolling over in his grave.

Finally I will say that though Big Bang Theory actress Melissa Rauch wasn’t terrible as Harley Quinn I see no reason for casting original voice actors Kevin Conroy and Loren Lester and then not casting Arleen Sorkin as Harley, who I’d say is as responsible for the popularity of the character as Bruce Tim and Paul Dini are, but maybe she read the script and turned them down. Even if that’s not the case I will pretend it is.  This is not the lovable ditzy character we all know and love, who back in the original cartoon did actually team-up with Batman in an episode called Harlequinade.  That episode was brilliant and funny, as most of her appearances in the original show were, but what we got here is a poor excuse for fanfiction that is best forgotten as quickly as possible.

 

Dig up the original and treat yourself to something great.

The Defenders: Season One Review

I don’t want to sound too harsh here but in my opinion Marvel’s The Defenders really should have been called “The Reluctants” as this eight episode season spent way too much time with our heroes bitching and moaning about fighting the bad guys. I know the "reluctant hero" is a standard trope of comic book stories but The Defenders took it too far here as it seemed that everyone, with the possible exception of Iron Fist who had other personal issues of his own, really didn’t want to be heroes. This would be a tough starting point for any superhero show but in this case it’s not just where the show starts but where it goes on for several episodes, and on and on. I’m not saying every superhero team has to be as fun as The Avengers, that could become just as boring, but goddamn does this show need to dial back on the angst a tad.

The series opens with Danny Rand aka Iron Fist (Finn Jones) and his partner Collen Wing (Jessica Henwick) battling a powerful member of the evil organization known as The Hand, this member is later revealed to be the resurrected Elektra (Elodie Yung) but we will get into that later. While spectacularly failing to save one of the order of The Chaste (Note: Danny is really bad at his job) he also lets the villain escape, but at least he does learn from the dying dude that the war will be fought in New York City. So that’s something I guess. I will go on record as not being much of a fan of this interpretation of Iron Fist as I find actor Finn Jones to be fairly terrible in the part and his characterization of Danny Rand seems to consist solely of him whining and feeling guilty about failing "his" people. (Note: I so disliked him that I only managed about three episodes of the Iron Fist series.) The shows depiction of the Iron Fist power is also beyond the pale lame; whenever we see him go into combat he only tries for that awesome power after getting his ass kicked for a while (Note: It's never made clear how long he can use the Iron Fist power or long it takes to recharge it) and no spoilers here but the one time he does engage the power early on in a fight he was a complete moron for doing so. I must say that if your show already has badass martial artist Daredevil on the roster you got to bring more to the game then, “I’m billionaire whose parents were murdered.”

 

Can he fend off lawsuits from Batman better than he can fight off agents of The Hand?

Next we have Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) who is still reeling from her encounter with Kilgrave aka The Purple Man and has fallen even deeper into the bottle. She refuses to take on cases until after turning down one particular case involving a missing architect she gets a mysterious phone call warning her to stay away from the case.  This of course has the opposite desired effect and soon she is tracking down the missing architect which eventually leads to her crossing paths with Elektra and The Hand. Then we have Luke Cage aka Power Man (Mike Colter) who has just been released from jail after the law firm that Foggy Nelson (Elden Hensen) now works for got him cleared of all charges. Luke’s love interest Claire Temple aka The Night Nurse (Rosario Dawson) would like nothing more than for her man to stay out of trouble but the two barely have time for some nice “I just got out of jail sex” when Detective Misty Night (Simone Missick) shows up to ask Cage to look into the deaths of a bunch of Harlem youths. Finally we have Matt Murdock aka Daredevil (Charlie Cox) who since his break-up with both Foggy and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) has given up his identity as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen to instead focus on doing pro bono cases.

 

I’m not sure how he pays the rent, but sure why not.

As this season is about the formation of The Defenders these four individuals will cross paths and eventually team-up, which will lead to some damn fine action set-pieces as these guys do know how to kick ass…with the possible exception of Iron Fist who is really a tool that should best be left in the box. We will learn that the architect Jessica was looking for got mixed up with The Hand, the kids in Harlem are dying because The Hand has terrible work ethics when it comes to outsourcing, Danny and Luke Cage will have the standard “Two heroes fight because of a misunderstanding ” cliche and Matt will end up getting involved because he had become Jessica’s lawyer after Foggy is told by his boss (Cary-Anne Moss returns briefly as Hogarth) to keep an eye on her. (I'm guessing Foggy passed the case on to his buddy Matt so that he could maybe pay this month’s rent.) We also get painful scenes of both Foggy and Karen treating Matt’s past vigilante activity as if it were a drug habit and that they are terrified he will have a relapse.

 

“The first step is admitting you’re not just Batman with radar.”

Now let us talk about this show’s villains. This is the fifth Marvel series from Netflix and we’ve had some pretty amazing villains so far; in the first season of Daredevil we had the amazing Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin and then in season two John Bernthal was fantastic as The Punisher, Jessica Jones gave us the chilling performance by David Tenant as Kilgrave and in Luke Cage we got Mahershala Ali's riveting portrayal as the gangster Cottonmouth (the less said about Diamondback the better), but then we get to Iron Fist and though I’m sure it had a villain I’ve pretty much forgotten what little I saw of that show. Now with The Defenders we finally meet the supreme leader of The Hand who turns out to be an immortal woman by the name of Alexandra.

 

Hey look, it’s Sigourney Weaver!

Don’t get me wrong I love Ms. Weaver but to finally meet the head of the all powerful mysterious organization The Hand, who have been popping in out of the Marvel TV universe since the beginning, but then to immediately learn that she is dying from multiple organ failure and only has weeks to live is a tad distressing. She never pulls off being a viable threat, listening to classical music and casually referencing that you are hundreds of years old does not make you threatening or even barely interesting, even the show itself seems to have disdain for her as is illustrated by the writers having Elektra step up to be the main big bad.

Next to our heroes arguing about fighting evil the use of Elektra as the key villain was the shows biggest mistake, she wasn’t interesting in season two of Daredevil and now that she is "The Black Sky" she has somehow become even less interesting. And what about the Black Sky? Wasn’t that supposed to the big thing that Stick (Scott Glenn) and his group where trying to prevent The Hand from getting a hold of way back in the first season of Daredevil?  Yet this show almost immediately jettison its importance with The Hand now really needing the “Iron Fist” power to open up the latest McGuffin.

 

“Sorry Black Sky, your relevance is in another castle.”

I was really looking forward to The Defenders having quite enjoyed Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, and so maybe my expectations were a tad high, but I found the characters I loved in those shows were being totally wasted in this one, and the characters I didn’t like were given too much screen time. They key moment that illustrates how poorly the writers of this show understand the superhero genre is when after our heroes had their first encounter with The Hand, barely escaping with their lives, they seek sanctuary in a Chinese restaurant to figure out what to do next, it's here that we get a moment where Matt Murdock tries to convince the group to not get involved by positing the question, “Imagine if doing something made things worse?" What the fuck kind of question is that? The Hand is going to destroy the city what exactly could they do that would make things worse? I know having conflict among your characters makes for a more interesting story but when we look at say The Avengers we had Captain America not trusting Tony Stark, which made sense for his character and in that situation, while here it’s just lazy and then forgotten almost as fast it was brought up.  The Defenders had so much potential but instead it's a cluttered mess of bickering idiots.

 

“With great power comes great complaining.”

 

Final Thoughts:

• Matt Murdock forgets he has super senses and lets Jessica Jones follow him and take pictures of him doing Daredevil ninja moves.
• Jessica Jones is a fantastic character but is given very little to do here and her motivation for not wanting to get involved in a fight with The Hand was lame, “I just want to find my client’s husband.”
• Misty Knight should have been given something to do or else she should have been completely written out.  It seemed like every two minutes she was being told, “We can’t tell you anything for your own good.”
• The police as a whole were depicted as vastly incompetent in this show.
• In the fights between Elektra and Daredevil they seem pretty evenly matched but then we get scenes where she takes on the whole bloody team.  A little consistency with everyone's powers would have been nice.
• Colleen Wing’s story arc of facing off against her former master was a complete waste of screen time. I just didn’t care.
• The threat of The Hand destroying the city never felt credible, this was most likely due to the shows budgetary constraints.