Static Thoughts - Beauty and the Beast (2012)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

Back in March, I took a look back at the 1987 Beauty and the Beast live action TV show.  If you need a refresher on that I said that it had some charming elements but was ultimately too much of a product of its time.  At the end of that article, I mentioned that there was a reboot of the show in 2012.  Well, now seems about the right time to tackle that particular piece of bizarre TV ephemera, especially given it’s the anniversary of the release of the animated Beauty and the Beast adaptation. 

However, the show itself has left me a little stymied.  It’s not exactly a bad series it’s just not interesting enough on its own to actually discuss so this will be less of a review than the previous article.  Instead, think of this as a retrospective as I think the way Beauty and the Beast (2012) actually happened is way more interesting than the show itself.  It’s a strange one-shot of a series that embodies the last moment in time when its various trends could come together in this way. 

Filmland - The House at the End of the Street

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

This Friday marks the premiere of Darren Aronofsky’s latest opus to surrealist quasi-horror Mother!  The film promises to be another bizarre and terrifying offering from Aronofsky, who has built his career on similar works like Pi and Black Swan, but it also seems like something of a return piece for Jennifer Lawrence.  I’m hard-pressed to think of an actor that embodies the kind of rise and fall we only really see in New Hollywood like Lawrence.  

First emerging onto the critical radar in 2010 with Winter’s Bone she managed to claw her way into the realm of true movie star thanks to starring roles in X-Men: First Class and The Hunger Games.  However, her fame was not really to last as almost immediately after 2013 everyone started getting a lot sicker of her. 

Partly it was roles, I don’t think Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle really did her any favors, also the Hunger Games series abruptly dropped in influence and importance after the second film.  Really though, it was Passengers that sapped the public interest in her, partially from the content but mostly it’s because this seems to be where we all soured on her projected persona as America’s platonic crush/bff.  

Since then she’s rolled back a ton on her public image and Mother! looks to be taking her style of films in a radically new direction…well, maybe not entirely new.  Yes, back in 2010 before anyone really knew who she was Jennifer Lawrence made another horror film and we’re going to look at it today with The House at the End of the Street. 

Cover Story - Top 13 Strangest Sports Story Covers

So, at the time of writing Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is blowing up theaters with its only major competition the quickly rising star of the boxing film Creed, a spin-off/follow-up to the Rocky franchise.  The fact that November is being essentially dominated by sports films (wasn’t there a James Bond movie this month? Does anyone remember that?) isn’t really a surprise but it does leave me in sort of a rut covers wise.  There are plenty of sports based comics, mainly from the ‘50s when superheroes didn’t dominate the medium, but they’re all pretty generic.  However, in the ‘60s when Marvel comics was born and fundamentally changed the comics landscape forever something strange started happening. 

In an attempt to compete horizontally with Marvel DC started producing stranger iterations of its ’50s comic line.  Now fundamental characters like Flash, Adam Strange, and Martian Manhunter emerged from an attempt to reintegrate superheroes into the weird science books that had been DC’s stock and trade for so long.  DC also applied this idea to the all purpose manly adventures they published like cowboys, war stories, and sports.  So, in 1963 the quasi-brand of Strange Sports Stories was born.  It didn’t last long at the time but DC has always sort of obsessed over it, even resurrecting the brand in the ‘70s and in recent years. 

Ant-Man Holds #1 Against Pixels

Well this is a surprise.  Last week I reported that Ant-Man had enjoyed a strong weekend opening and beat Minions at the #1 spot by a small enough margin to indicate I wasn’t at all hopeful for a sequel.  From there I had assumed, like a lot of other critics I think, that Ant-Man would respectively slip from #1 this week and settle into the middle tear slots before exiting theaters in later August.  Instead Ant-Man held the #1 spot for a second week, passing the 100,000,000 mark on projections and is currently ranked as the 16^th highest grossing film of the year.  That might seem like a high number but similarly offbeat oddities like Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Marvel’s own Thor have managed to turn top 20 success into decent box office clout.   

Obviously the year still has time left for Ant-Man to get bumped from its holding, especially given that Hunger Games, Goosebumps, Spectre, and Star Wars are all waiting in the wind but this is still big news regardless.  Meanwhile Adam Sandler’s Pixels may not be dead on arrival but it’s a strong statement of development that his movie couldn’t overcome a middling Marvel product in its 2^nd week the way Grown Ups 2 beat Pacific Rim two years ago.