Harlan Ellison Is Not A Fan Of “Saving Mr. Banks”

Harlan Ellison, Angry Man. Est. 1934

I’ve not seen the movie, but Ellison’s rant kind of makes me want to now. He feels that movie is nothing but propaganda that burnishes “Uncle Walt”‘s image and serve as Oscar bait. As an author with quite fervent feelings himself over how his own work is used, he sympathizes with Travers and disapproves of how she comes off in the movie – even going so far as to say that one particular pivotal scene never happened and that half the movie is made up. The movie struck a raw nerve in the man, who has never been shy about speaking his mind on a good day. Check it out after the jump.

I Love You, (Ant) Man: Paul Rudd Cast In Edgar Wright’s Ant Man

So Marvel made it official yesterday: Paul Rudd has been cast as the lead in Edgar Wright’s (The guy who directed The World’s End, which was, bar none, my favorite movie of 2013) movie version of Ant-Man.

When Edgar Wright came to us with the idea of Paul Rudd, we felt a huge sense of relief because the first step in creating any Marvel Studios film is finding the right star,” said Marvel’s Kevin Feige. “We knew early on that we had found the right person in Paul. When he not only agreed to do it but became as enthusiastic as any actor we’d ever met with about doing the work, we knew we’d found the right guy. We couldn’t be more excited for our audiences to see what he’s going to do to bring Ant-Man to life.

Yes. He’s enthusiastic about “the work,” Kevin. He’s certainly not considering Robert Downey, Jr.’s percentage of the gross of Avengers and envisioning finally being able to tell Judd Apatow to fuck off when he calls at 3 a.m. with an idea for a gross, yet sweet, comedy about some experience Apatow lived through at some point.

Look: I like Paul Rudd. But I can’t address whether or not he’ll be a good Ant-Man. Because we still don’t know which Ant-Man he’s gonna be playing.

Don’t Call Me TARDIS, Whitey: Time Of The Doctor Trailer Released

Okay, so here’s the tricky thing: Matt Smith’s final turn as The Doctor will be happening in The Time of The Doctor, which will be the annual Doctor Who Christmas Special because… well, because the British. Sure, there are American news organizations swearing up and down that there is an annual War on Christmas, but over in England, Christmas has been Blitzkrieging all comers for years. Here in the states some might claim that Santa is losing ground to multiculturalism (not that I give a shit; Santa could be a plaid Martian so long as he bring me my annual case of Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale), but in London, old Saint Nick annually marches to victory on a road of bones.

But the relative strength and / or armaments of Santa Clause aren’t the tricky part. The tricky part is that the Doctor Who special is airing on Christmas Day… and that means that the editorial staff of Crisis On Infinite Midlives will be scattered across the country, visiting family. Sure, my co-Editor Amanda will be holding down the fort (and making sure Parker, our new mascot kitten, doesn’t eat every network cable in the joint), but I will be in the southern United States visiting my family, Trebuchet and Pixiestyx will be somewhere in Massachusetts, and Lance Manion will be observing his annual tradition of visiting restaurants in Boston’s Chinatown, screaming for cold tea and trying to Roofie himself.

So the question as to how we will watch and report on the death of the Eleventh Doctor is still up in the air. For last month’s The Day of The Doctor special, most of the staff gathered at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office to watch and drink and live-Tweet the experience. We are considering setting up a Google Hangout to teleconference the viewing experience (and maybe wind up with a podcast in 2013)… but that will involve convincing my parents to voluntarily watch Doctor Who (“Why is this limey mincing across my new flat screen calling me a TARDIS?” “For God’s sake, Dad, we’ll put the NCIS reruns back on in an hour!”).

So whether we can even watch the thing in a way that will allow us to report on it is still up in the air… so it might be that the trailer is all we can address in somewhat real time. And thankfully, the BBC has released the latest trailer for the special, and we can all check it out together after the jump.

They Say It’s Your Birthday

Gotta keep things short today, because it is my Co-Editor Amanda’a birthday. She is Editor’s Note: If you tell people my age, I will divide it by 10 and chop that many inches off your junk, Rob. -Amanda years old today, which means that she gets whatever Italian food she wants, and an evening of movies that do not feature lead “actor” Jason Statham.

So writing time is limited, but since this is Wednesday, that means new comics… for the last time in 2013. Because of Christmas and New Years falling on Wednesdays this year, new comics will be released on Tuesday for the next two weeks. But Christmas is not my concern today, a birthday is, but either way: this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And there are many good comics there (not necessarily including the next two point issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, which are apparently nothing but banked file filler stories left over in case Dan Slott fell behind in 2011… and which are really not very good. Let’s put it this way: last week’s The Amazing Spider-Man #700.2 was the worst Spider-Man story I’ve read since Easy Reader was introducing Spider-Man stories), but nothing is more important to me than Locke & Key: Alpha #2, which is the final issue of that series. And if there is a single comic that I have discovered and fallen in love with since we started this crappy little rag in 2011, it’s Locke & Key. So while I’m sad to see it go, I’m psyched to see how it ends.

But that’s not all; there’s also a new issue of Saga, The Superior Spider-Man, Daredevil, and a bunch of other cool looking stuff!

But you know how this works: before we can talk about any of them, I need time to load Amanda up with antipasto, gnocchi and limoncello, hold her hair back while she yenches, wake up hung over, and then read them. So until that last dry-heave…

..see you tomorrow, suckers!

The Book Was Better: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Neil Gaiman To Produce Sandman Movie

I love comic book movies, but it is a love like John Hinckley Jr.’s for Jodie Foster: just because a feeling borders on obsession doesn’t mean that the object of that affection will ever love you back.

It is a hard-fought love, as I am 42 years old, and therefore lived in a dark time when genre fans hoping for a movie to their tastes would have to bite the bullet and pretend to be excited about things like Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man and then find a way to convince ourselves that we were worthy of sucking breath in the morning. And if you wanted a comic book movie? Well, there was the first Batman movie that opened just after my 18th birthday, sure, but before that? Well, in the five years before Batman, the only comic book flicks that were released were The Return of The Swamp Thing, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Supergirl, and Howard The fucking Duck. That’s a real murderer’s row of movies. In the sense that I want to line them up and shoot them.

So we comic book fans truly live in an amazing time, in the sense that there are many movies based on comic books, and most of them are pretty damn good. Sure, there’s the odd X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 out there, but there are very few real stinkers. Sure, there are still arguments about Watchmen (which I rewatched recently and still like a lot), but that comic was so dense that it would have been well-nigh impossible to do a really killer adaptation of the thing. So while I like it, I can understand the argument that everyone involved should have left well enough alone. After all: some comics should just stay comics.

Which is one hell of a long way to go to report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has announced via Twitter that he has signed on to produce a movie adaptation of Sandman with Neil Gaiman and David Goyer.

Parents And Children: Justice League #25, Justice League of America #10 and Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #2 Quick Hit Reviews

Editor’s Note: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Spoiled.

So between spending the week helping the new cat get used to a life where the searing agony of a shot to the nuts happens to stupid humans, and dealing with the first ice and snow falls of the winter (Three times in eight days! I love New England! And I am apparently alone in this affection, since clearly God has forsaken us!), so I am well behind in reading this week’s comics. You’d be surprised how hard it is to concentrate on a simple piece of graphic literature when the cat is yowling and my co-Editor Amanda is asking if I think it would help if she plunked his sack in a snowbank.

It’s hard being a parent, even to a lower beast who shits in a box, loves the taste of network cable, and thinks a laser pointer is the best thing ever despite not being a seven-year-old boy in 1977. So I found it interesting that the first three books I peeled off my stack this evening – Justice League #25, Justice League of America #10 and Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #2 – all were about, on some level, the relationships between heroes (or anti-heroes) and their parents.

And all three books range from pretty good to excellent, but while I would normally review each of them in depth, well, it is Monday, and to compose my usual type of review for each comic would take me three hours and about 1,200 words to review, meaning there is no way in hell I could get them done before the new comics drop on Wednesday. So for a change, I’ll just write a couple of paragraphs about each, in ascending order of my opinion of them.

Assuming, of course, that this cat doesn’t decide to use my leg to sharpen his claws to remind me that I should be spending my money on scratching posts rather than silly things like neutering. Or comic books.

International The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Trailer Has Some Previously Unseen Footage

Greetings from the snowbound headquarters of The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office! While we spend the day digging out, please enjoy this new international trailer of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. There are some differences from the US version, notably Gwen almost outing Peter Parker’s identity at 1:44 and a good look at the Rhino’s armor at 0:54. Meanwhile, I’m going to try an convince Rob that you can’t clear snow from an icy sidewalk by pouring lighter fluid on snow to light it on fire. You need at least one beefy hobo for that lighter fluid, so that the flames can get some traction in a solid fat source to keep the fire burning longer and melt more snow over a larger surface area. I’m pretty sure that won’t violate the condo agreement, right?

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will open on May 2, 2014.

Descending Again Into Sin: Teaser Poster For Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Released

We are battening down for our first winter storm here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. These preparations are not really rigorous – as a wiser man than me once said, all a man needs to weather a blizzard is beer and toilet paper – but we need to get to it while the getting’s good.

So in the meantime, let’s all reflect on a place where it never snows (although it always rains when you need to take a long walk to ponder the priest you just shot), which is a good thing because the cars are all convertibles and the babes are all wearing exactly enough to avoid arrest… although it doesn’t really matter because the cops are all dirty anyway.

I’m talking about Basin City, or Sin City to the locals. And Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez are taking us back there in the sequel to 2005’s Sin City, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, which is due out on August 22, 2014. And Dimension Films has released a new teaser poster for the flick, which you can check out after the jump.

And Another One Down, And Another One Down: Animal Man, Batman: The Dark Knight Coming To A Close

It’s been a little more than two years since DC launched their New 52 reboot, and while DC still puts a big, “The New 52!” bullet on almost every cover of every book each month, there sure as hell aren’t 52 of those original release titles from September, 2011 still kicking around.

And now there will be two fewer. DC and book creators Jeff Lemire and Gregg Hurwitz have announced the cancellation of two original New 52 books, one surprising, one not (and yet still disappointing).

To wit: Animal Man and Batman: The Dark Knight will be concluding their runs in a few months, each with issue #29.

Forward Into The Past: Justice League 3000 #1 Review

People who know me know that I loves me some 80s-era Justice League International. In a lot of ways, it was the true breakout revelation coming out of Crisis On Infinite Earths: the premier super team of the DC Universe packed with 90 percent B-listers who often didn’t like each other, spent as much time bantering as they did fighting crime, and who seemed to spend about half their time wondering what they hell they were doing there (when they weren’t wondering how to turn a buck from being on the team).

It was groundbreaking, even though it shouldn’t have been – Keith Giffen’s, J. M. DeMatteis’s and Kevin Maguire’s Justice League came right after the horror and debacle of Justice League Detroit, which was also packed with B-listers, wanna-bes and spastics , but was missing little things like entertainment value, or characters you might give a shit about. Seriously: the only person who remotely cares about Vibe is Geoff Johns, and I am still reasonably convinced that he only brought the character back to settle a bar bet with Dan DiDio.

But eventually, all good things must pass. By the mid to late 90s, people began to tire of the humor of the Justice League International books (and to be honest, the balance between humor and action did seem to tilt firmly toward the Bwah-hah-ha-ha side of the scale), and DC rebooted the Justice League with JLA and Grant Morrison’s and Howard Porter’s vision of DC’s Big Five (plus Aquaman, who is only considered a DC A-lister when DiDio asks Johns, “Double or nothing?”).

And it has been with the Big Boys we have stayed for lo, these more than fifteen years. After all, DC launched their New 52 with a Justice League lineup that could have come straight from 1965 but for the inclusion of Cyborg and about 10,000 Jim Lee seams and fine detail lines. And a lineup like that leaves little room for Giffen’s and DeMatteis’s humor and infighting; after all, having Earth’s (Original) Mightiest Heroes sniping at each other as pussies and jackasses would be unseemly to those legendary character and to their owner’s parent company, who is struggling desperately to get a Justice League movie off the ground.

However, you should never count Giffen and DeMatteis out. Because with Justice League 3000, they have found a way to get some conflict and humor out of the Big Five by cloning them, dumping them 987 years into the future, and ripping all the history you think you know about the characters away… kinda like right after Crisis On Infinite Earths.

So the question is: can these guys catch lightning in a bottle twice? Particularly considering they’ve got Howard Porter, who helped revitalized the JLA after they left Justice League International, doing the art?

Well, kinda.