FEAR THE WALKING DEAD recap up at Sourcerer!

On October 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn TelevisionLeave a comment

It’s the finale. And I am displeased! Check it out.

In which I #review things

On October 9, 2015October 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews1 Comment

…a whole bunch of things, actually, none of which are really worth a post on their own.

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #1. Let’s start with this: I’m not a fan of the new armor design, particularly given how awesome the last two suits were. I don’t like the faceplate at all, although I can’t put my finger on exactly why, and the whole suit seems a little too streamlined for my tastes. That said, Brian Michael Bendis is one of my favorite comic book writers, and David Marquez’ art is excellent throughout– I’m just not a fan of the design itself. This first arc is bringing back Madam Masque, who I haven’t seen in a long time, and the villain who shows up at the end is, without spoiling things, a hell of a surprise. I’ve been really happy with Iron Man for quite some time, so it’s good to see the book is still in good hands. My only complaint: BMB is fond of multi-panel layouts that stretch across two pages, but isn’t a hundred percent about doing it that way, so there are occasional moments where it takes a while to figure out the panel flow on any given two-page spread. I attribute this to Marquez not being used to working with him; Mark Bagley, his frequent contributor, hardly has pages like that at all any longer. I’m sure it’ll get better.

DOCTOR STRANGE #1. Doctor Strange is one of those characters who I have historically not been a fan of, but have always sorta wanted to be a fan of, if that makes any sense. And he has an axe on the cover of his new book, which pretty much guaranteed I was going to pick it up. I know little about the character other than what you’d pick up via osmosis after 30 years of buying comic books, so it’s possible Jason Aaron’s take on him as a sort of exhausted, cigaretteless John Constantine is going to annoy longtime readers, but I liked the book enough that it guaranteed a few more issues. Chris Bachalo’s art is superb, too, which doesn’t hurt at all, and the book was way more action-packed than I was expecting. The axe comes in handy; let’s put it that way.

INJECTION TPB, by Ellis, Shalvey & Bellaire. I almost didn’t buy this. I bought INJECTION in single issues as it came out, and by the end of the six-issue run I had no damn idea what was going on at all and was basically only buying the book because I was too lazy to take it off my pull list– which, I think, comic fans know happens a bit more often than it probably should. So why spend more on the TPB? Because I had a hunch that the book would work better if I sat down and read it at a gulp than it would have in singles when I’ve read 30 comics since the last time it came out. And… man. Yeah. That’s exactly what happened. INJECTION is complicated enough that honestly I feel like it should have just come out as a trade paperback rather than bothering with the singles, and I’m glad I jumped at it twice. Warren Ellis doesn’t do bad work, guys. I shoulda known better. Check it out.

EMPIRE, the entire first season. I had to stand up and walk away for a bit before I wrote this part, because I’m still sort of in “What the hell?” mode on this show. Some facts: We watched the first season in maybe three or four big gulps. The acting is, by and large, phenomenal. And the characters and story arcs and quite possibly the entire setting of the show make no goddamn sense at all, especially if you know anything about the music business. Watch this show for Taraji P. Henson as Cookie, because she’s Goddamned amazing, and she needs to win all the awards. Pay no attention to the fact that the show seems to have no goddamn idea what year it is, or to know anything about trends in music at all, and definitely ignore the guy in the first couple of episodes who appears to have been unsealed from a time capsule first buried in 1985. Do not think too hard about consistency, because this is a soap opera, and holy shit is it a soap opera, and it’s probably best if you go in knowing that and don’t have to figure it out like I did. But watch it anyway.

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD recap is live!

On September 19, 2015September 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television

…It has been for a couple of hours, actually, but I didn’t want to step on the #SilerSaturday post. Go check it out!

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD starts tonight

On August 23, 2015August 23, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Television

…and I have a bit of a write-up over at Sourcerer for your careful perusal.

REVIEW: DAREDEVIL, the series

On May 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television5 Comments

maxresdefault tl;dr version: More like Dare-MEH-vil, amirite???

My wife and I finished the last two episodes of the first season of Daredevil Friday night. It took, oh, two and a half, maybe three weeks from watching the first episode to get to the finale– which for us implies a fair amount of dedication, as no adult TV happens when the boy is awake and after that literally every single other thing we might wish to do with our lives competes with watching fictional white dudes punch each other on TV. So I can’t claim I roundly disliked the show or anything like that; I didn’t. But on the whole, having watched the whole season, I’m not super excited about watching more of this.

Let’s start with good stuff:

Casting, at least to a certain point. I don’t remember dude’s name and I’m in no mood to look things up, but I liked the dude they’ve got playing Daredevil, and the casting for Foggy Nelson and Karen worked for me too. Racebending Ben Urich was a good call, and Vincent D’Onofrio certainly looked the part of the Kingpin, but more on him later. I loved Rosario Dawson but we didn’t see enough of her. Madame Gao was also fantastic. In general the acting was effective.
Mood/Direction: Excellent, especially early on. Daredevil was a hard show to watch at times, and I mean that as a compliment; when the show wanted to fuck with your head, your head was gonna get fucked with, and the grit and grime of Hell’s Kitchen left me wanting a shower after a few of the episodes.
Fight scenes. At least early on; the hallway fight in the second or third episode was outstanding and the fight with Nobu later on was a standout as well. That said, all the flippy stuff got annoying after a bit and sometimes the fight scenes got a bit repetitive.
Stick. I loved Stick.
Matt and Foggy’s relationship. The highlight of the series to me, in a lot of ways.

All that said, I have some issues:

Kingpin. There’s lots of folks praising Vincent D’Onofrio’s take on the Kingpin to the high heavens; they didn’t watch the same show I watched. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t need Daredevil. It needed Zoloft. Supervillains shouldn’t be in need of antidepressants, and I expected this dude to end every single conversation with a sigh and the words “I’m sad.” There was also enough portentous speechifying to fill a Lord of the Rings film. I kept expecting to find out that Wilson’s middle name was actually Lenny, too.
Vanessa. Related to the Kingpin issues; Vanessa did not help. Their relationship made no Goddamn sense at all and just served to remind me repeatedly that this Wilson Fisk is a twelve-year-old in an oversized body, which could work with certain villains, but not with the Kingpin. And this show had Madame Gao in it! They didn’t even need to put Kingpin on screen in the first season. Make Gao the villain, keep Kingpin offscreen, and use Wesley, who was way more interesting, instead.
Karen. For the last two or three episodes, I kept yelling “You’ve known them for two weeks!” at the screen. No one could hear me. I know Karen’s a character from the comics and all and so she has to be there, but she’s totally passive-aggressively worming her way into both of the guys’ backstories by the end of the series, acting like they’ve all been friends for years and that their friendship as a group is The Most Important Thing Evar. No. You’ve known them for a month. You don’t get to pretend that you’re part of a we yet. Go ‘way. Also, I swear her hair was a different color in every scene, and for most of an episode it was green. Not actually a problem, but super distracting once I noticed it.

I dunno. If you’re interested in checking the show out and you haven’t yet, go ahead; it won’t kill you. But that’s about as excited as I can get about this show right now.

This post is mostly a test

On May 8, 2015May 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking14 Comments

I am conducting Blog Science! and in order to do so correctly it is essential that I post this at this godawfully early hour of the morning. Which actually means that I wrote it last night while watching Daredevil and trying to decide if I like the show or not, which is something you’d think I’d have figured out by the eleventh episode.

Discuss the UK election in comments. Or Daredevil. Or pants. Whatever, really.

I wrote a thing, I think

On March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television1 Comment

I’m pretty sure I just recapped the last Walking Dead episode over at Sourcerer but as you’ll see I’m not entirely in control of myself at the moment. Hopefully this is actually a link to something.