Sunday 22 January 2012

Films

Ironclad (2011)
[#8 in 100 Films in a Year 2012]
Eight is the number I need to see in January to stay on perfect target, so that's a solid opening to the year. With nine days to spare, there's still time for it to turn in to a great one. We'll see.

Comics

And that catching up continues apace...

Daredevil #7 by Mark Waid & Paolo Rivera
Christmassy one-and-done in which Daredevil has to save a bunch of blind kids after their school bus crashes in snowy mountains, killing the driver… except they end up rescuing him. How heartwarming. Didn't much care for it myself.

Uncanny X-Men #2 by Kieron Gillen, Rodney Buchemi, Jorge Molina & Carlos Pacheco
A bit twiddly-thumbs-y middle-part-y. Some beautifully drawn pages -- no idea which of the three pencilers, four inkers and four colourists are responsible for those ones, but they do look good -- but the story almost treads water for most of the issue.

Uncanny X-Men #3 by Kieron Gillen, Rodney Buchemi, Paco Diaz & Carlos Pacheco
That was better -- a conclusion to the current threat, but leaving other things open for the future. And relatively subtly laying things in for this summer's big X-Men event.

Wolverine and the X-Men
#2
by Jason Aaron & Chris Bachalo
#3 by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Duncan Rouleau & Matteo Scalera
This book, however, is just bags of cartoony fun -- and utterly fantastic because of it. Enjoying it immensely.

X-Men: Regenesis by Kieron Gillen & Billy Tan
A one-shot prequel/bridging book for all the newly-relaunched X-Men series. Having read the first issues of the two main books, I thought it might be worth a look. It's a neat way of telling a story that could just be a list of people saying "I choose A" or "I choose B", but a great deal of it doesn't make sense to a newbie reader -- need a little list of backstory explanations to go alongside it.

this week on 100 Films

This week I forgot I'd snuck The Spider Woman in on Sunday, so not as many reviews as I'd intended. That said, there were still 2 new reviews posted to 100 Films in a Year this week, and they were...

Hotel for Dogs (2009)
Judged as simply a movie, on its story and its characters and all that regular palaver, I can see why Hotel for Dogs attracts so many poor scores. But as a kids' film I think it works well enough, and as a delivery system for cute dogs I loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever “aww”ed so much in a single film. Yep, I’ve gone all soft.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
this entry jumps back in time several hundred years for an origin of sorts, fleshing out flashbacks and backstory from the first two films. Unfortunately, we learnt pretty much all we needed to know in those flashbacks, and so in terms of both story and world-building Rise of the Lycans has little to add to the Underworld franchise.

More next Sunday.