Super-Bad: The Day Costumes Killed the Justice Society

We checked in over at Smallville this week. Been a while since we stopped by, and boy, have things changed. Superboy -- d'ah, Clark -- still refuses to fly or wear the stretchy suit, but Lana's gone and Lois Lane, annoying reporter, is in, and Lex is 'dead' -- uh -- and there are so many characters from the DC Universe running around even veterans of the Comics Division of The Rush International need a scorecard to keep up ... especially when the versions we're seeing here are all funhouse-mirror versions of the characters we know and love.

It's the costumes, y'see. The costumes freak people out, including the producers. And the costumes in the recent episode called "Absolute Justice," starring Smallville versions of the Justice Society of America, including Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Stargirl, and others showed just how bad it could get.  The costume design for the episode pretty much ruined and otherwise promising premise by DC writer-superstar Geoff Johns. Get the details of what went wrong and just how wrong it went (which is filed under "Very"), with the full article in Contrariwise.

 

A Trick of Perception

Popular entertainment is all about manipulating your emotions. That's one of the reasons we like it -- because it can induce that little rush we're always talking about around here.

But it's a pretty powerful skill -- so powerful, as the Firesign Theatre reminds us, that it can only be used for Good ... or Evil.

Consider his odd little artifact we stumbled on over on YouTube a while back.  And see how hard it is not to laugh at this extremely serious scene -- also EXTREMELY NSFW!! -- from the grim and now cancelled cop drama, The Wire.  It reminds us just how suggestable we poor humans are. Which is kind of scary all by itself.

From Water Cooler to Parking Lot at the Mortuary

Remember those TV shows we used to talk about at work the next day?  The thrillers or science fiction or cults shows or action series that everybody was watching then; they were the talk of the lunch room and water cooler and the first ten minutes of any committee meeting you didn’t really want to attend. In the old days it was shows like The X-Files, Friends, and ER. More recently, it’s been Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, 24, Survivor, and Lost. And as this season began, you heard some chatter about V and FlashForward.

But here's the weird thing.  According to our patent-pending mega-scientific Rush Survey, there is exactly one show on that list that people are actually still talking about ... yet all the rest  are still on the air.

What happened?

Check out longer, wider and uncut (?) ruminations over on Contrariwise. Meanwhile ... what did you think of the Lost re-premiere?  The beginning of a satisfying conclusion or Much Ado?

Bye Bye Echo. We Hardley Knew Ye

So Dollhouse finishes up with an episode that's a sequel to a year-old episode that never actually ran on FOX.  And if there was ever pure evidence of an idea wasted by ... what, network timidity?  The shortfall of a creative vision?  Or just the structure of American television itself? ... this is the one.

Usually series like Dollhouse end with no real resolution at all (i.e., Jericho) or a hurried and unsatisfying whip-whap-whup (i.e., the American version of Life on Mars).  Once in a great while, they actually get to finish what they started just as the creators intended, as seems to be the case with the wind-up of Lost.  But rarely -- ever? -- has an essentially failed show -- a show that had obviously failed before its first season was in the can -- actually finished stronger than it began.  Only after its fate was sealed and nobody at the network seemed to give a rodent's rear did Joss Whedon find his voice and move the Dollhouse concept forward, in a dark and relentless direction that left those boring and embarrassing "kick-ass or touching hooker of the week'"storylines in the dust.

You can read a bunch more on Contrariwise, out big-long-essay section. But briefly: Epitaph Two is great.  If only the rest of Dollhouse had been half as challenging, exciting, touching, or just plain cool.  You can catch the finale right here on Hulu, and on Fox as well.  It's good stuff, especially if you saw the prequel, Epitaph One, floating around the net or hiding on the Season One DVD.  Either wait, it's worth it.

Too bad it was too late for Joss Whedon and Dollhouse -- not that a season either way would have mattered; it's more like the timing was always off, from the very beginning.  Still, it's a shame: it could have been so cool.  

The Best thing about Legion isn't in the movie at all ...

... it's Craig Ferguson's recent interview with Adrianne Palicki (pictured at left).  Probably best known for 50 episodes of Friday Night Lights (yawwwn .. sorry, did we drop off for a moment?) she is making a bit of a splash, don'tcha know, in the Rush neighborhood, first by playing the diner waitress who is unwittingly pregnant with the next messiah (jeez, how many times have we heard that one?), and next appearing in the remake of Red Dawn, coming this November (bigger!  Better!  This time it's the Russians and Chinese who parachute in and take over America! Much scarier!)  Turns out Adrianne is not only gorgeous, she's smart as a whip, too; she stands up to Craig's classic, "oooh, I rehlly don't cayah," Scottish 'tude  Brash, funny, uncensored -- a real dame, and we likes her.

And there are plenty of reasons:

• She was in John Woo's unsold pilot of the Lost in Space reboot (ahh, Penny!)
• She was in the also unsold Aquaman pilot
• She was Kara, that is Supergirl, on Smallville
•  She was in a Will.i.am music video
• She was Sam Winchester's immediately murdered girlfriend on the first episode of Supernatural

 Catch her interview here, preserved forever on YouTube.  Meanwhile, her own site isn't much more than a place-holder at the moment ... but we'll be watching for her.

Go, Wolverines!

Bitch Slap: What are you, kidding? (Answer: Yes.)

So a bunch of Bob Tapert's old Xena: Warrior Princess and new Spartacus: Blood and Sand people get together and say, "What the hell, we've got a few weeks to kill, what say we make a really over-the-top girl fight movie?"  And one dude in particular, he says, "Ooh, and I have the perfect name for it: Bitch Slap."

You have to say one thing for this title: it's absolutely truth in advertising.  There's really nothing at all to this movie except a murky yet tissue-thin plot that gives three absolutely stunning women all the excuse they need to beat the living hell out of each other, in between scenes of going rilly rilly, like nuts, you know? and move scenes of girls kissing girls.  This is a 16-year-old punk boy's wet dream, filled with 'splosions and fistfights and BFG's (that's Big Effin Guns to the uninitiated), and one thing's for certain: you won't be bored.  Puzzled and titillated, yes, but never bored.

Some of these folks will be visible, presumably in just as little clothing, in the new Spartacus: Blood and Sand on the Starz cable network.  It even has more of Lucy Lawless than just one teeny little cameo, to which we can only say yay, with a little bit of it's about time.

Buried: Whoa, Intense

One of the great things about really good thrillers movies is their simplicity. They are the home of the High Concept, the simple premise taken to its relentless extreme.

Buried, the little-heard-of new thriller starring hot-potato Ryan Reynolds is a prime example.  It's one of the films tearin' it up at Sundance right now, and judging by the horribly simple and chilling trailer, you can see why.  even the log line works: "170,000 square miles of desert. 90 minutes of oxygen. No way out."

This is the kind of nail-biter we'd like to see more of: simple, straightforward, and scary. 

Check out the trailer ...

The Human Target: A Secret Comic Book (but not really...)

FOX is rolling out a new action/adventure show, called The Human Target, and it's not bad.  Mark Valley, not known as an action star (at least not in Boston Legal or even in his strange dead-partner appearances in Fringe) is remarkably convincing at Christopher Chance, the private operative who protects people who need protecting and elminates threats to the innocent, or semi-innocent.  The show has a wicked sense of humor as well as failry interesting supporting characters in Chi McBride, whom we've loved since Night Court, and Jackie Earle Haley, whom we've loved since he was a child actor stomping people to death in Day of the Locust (and oh, yeah, there was that Watchmen thing, too, but a guy's got to eat).  Anyway: Valley isn't bad, the script popped right along, and it's worth a second look.

You'd never know it was based on a comic book.

The fact is The Human Target has been a C-grade superspy hero in the DC universe since ... well, for more than fifty years, if you go back to his very first appearance in a single Batman story.  He was re-invented by comics writer Len Wein and artist Carmine Infantino as "Christopher Chance," a master of disguise who put himself in the place of threatened innocents, way back in 1972, and he's been skipping around the edges of teh DC Universe ever since. (If you're interested in the complete and almost psychotically details history of this minor faivure, there's an excellent article at http:/at Human Target Online.

In this version, however, FOX and serires devleoper Jonathan E. Steinberg has really retained nothing except the cool name for the series and the equally cool name of the hero: Christopher Chance.  Gone is the 'master of disguise' schtick and any other high-tech or superpowerish elements.  This is just a truly resourceful guy with your typical mysterious past, either in Special Ops or Gangsterland (which will no doubt soon be releaed as episodes progress; they're certainly dropping enough hints about it).  Valley has a couple of good fight seens and plenty of snappy repartee; this doesn't seem so much of a breakout show as it does a competing action-adventure we could all enjoy for a year or three.

Not that he's any Rick Springfield, 'cause, come on, who is?

The thing is, Springfield, back in his light rock "Jessie's Girl" days of 1992, actually starred in a pretty awful version o the same comic for ABC TV.  Barely half a dozen episodes aired (this was from the same production company, Pet Fly, that had perpetrated a couple of other equally horrid action/adventure shows -- Viper and The Sentinel, as well as another comics-based show, the near-career-ending version of The Flash starring John Wesley Shipp and featuring a pre-Munch Richard Belzer.  The "master of disguise" schtick was stil in place for this show, but that didn't help much: it chalked little more than half a dozen episodes before cancellation, and Christopher Chance went back into hybernation for 18 years or so.

It's interesting to note that FOX is not playing up the comic book aspects of the show at all; in fact even the credit to DC comics is buried deep in the end credits, with a card that goes by so fast you're not sure it's there at all.  This is much closer to a James Bond (or Remington Steele, really), and relies pretty heavily on the charm of the key actors and the cleverness of the plots.  Which, after exaclty one whole episode, it has displayed in adequate amounts.

DC, however, is not about to let the connection be forgotten: they've just released a trade paperback of Peter Milligan's re-imagining of the character, and character creator Len Wein, still in there kicking (and making not a dime on all this, we assume, since he created the character back in the days of work-for-hire, pre-creator's rights) has authored a brand new six-issue mini-series -- a kind of back-door pilot all its own -- that premieres in comics stores on February 10.

Any actual relationship bewteen the the Christopher Chance of the comics, the Nineties, and today is almsot entirely coincidental.  But it is a cool name.

Check out the first episode on Fox On Demand

Buy the Trade Paperback of the Human Target's Earlier Incarnation here.

Flash Forward: Illogicallifragilisticexpedalidocious

Here's the opening teaser-paragraphs from a long, exquisitely beautiful piece from Editor in Chief Brad Munson, running in its entirety over on ScriptPhD.  Start here ... then check it out!

It goes without saying that pretty much every work of fiction begins with the "what if" question.  "What if I knew the world was ending tomorrow?" "What if my wife was secretly plotting to kill me?" "What if this article wins me the Pulitzer?"  What separates the great (or simply enjoyable) work from that which cannot be accepted is a second level of consideration: actually thinking about the "what if" and seeing if it has any real value, any weight, beyond that first fleeting thrill that comes with the High Concept. 

FlashForward -- the ABC TV series or the 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer upon which it is loosely, loosely based -- is a perfect example of exactly that: the cool but ultimately unsatisfying idea that really can't stand the stress of storytelling. Because hiding behind the spotty acting and cliche'd characters -- on screen or in print --  the whole concept has a serious problem: it just doesn't make a lick of sense. 

A quick reading of the novel (which is all it warrants) won't provide you with any background or spoilers on the TV series.  In fact, it will only confuse you even more.  The two have almost nothing in common, except the most basic of High Concepts and a character name or two.  But both versions do share one other thing in common: they could have ended just a few pages/minutes after they began.

Want more? Of course you do!  Click Here for the entire experience!

Robert Downey Jr. Won't Be in Cowboys & Aliens ... and that's okay

Of course we love Robert Downey, Jr.  It's kind of required.  He is Tony Stark now, after all, as well as a goofy (and yes, we admit it, fun) alternate-universe Sherlock Holmes. But he doesn't have to be everybody, y'know?  So maybe it's not such a bad thing that Downey has announced that he's passing up the starring role in Jon Favreau's other big project (other than Iron Man 2, that is) -- the big, bad movie adaptation of Cowboys & Aliens. 

Some names are concepts in themselves, and some are just too good to pass up.  Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.  Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  And yes, Cowboys and Aliens.  (In fact, the relative provenance of this whole project is kind of interesting.  Let's see if we have this right: Cowboys & Aliens was actually created by Platinum Studios’ Scott Mitchell Rosenberg; Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley wrote it, and artists Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima illustrated, the original graphic novel of the same name in 2006. And there's no telling how close the screenplay sticks to that story.  This is clearly all about the High Concept, baby.)

In any event, it's bound to be good.  We hope.  It's certainly getting the first-class treatment: a screenplay from the out-and-out amazing team of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek, Transformers, Xena, Fringe, and everything else even moderately cool in the decade gone by), along with Damon Lindelof, who wrote and co-produced a ton of Lost episodes, with the AA+ team of producers on top: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Stephen Spielberg and the aforementioned hot-as-a-repulsor-ray actor/director Jon Favreau.  In retrospect, Downey is almost superfluous -- this is already the gold standard, deal-wise  And Downey already has two major-league franchises to exploit; maybe it's time he gave somebody else a chance. Which makes it even more  appropriate that he's giving this up to do a (rumored, potential, blah blah blah) Sherlock Holmes sequel.

This all just happened, so any speculation about who will be replacing Downey as the cowboy-alien fighter Zeke Jackson (love that name!) is way-way premature. And now there are rumors the whole project will be filmed in 3-D, a pretty inevitable thought given the Avalanche of interest in the tech  (Get it?  It's kind of a pun.)  Either way, it's still scheduled to be one of the biggies for Summer 2011, so things had better start happening pretty quickly. We'll keep an eye out ...