Monday 31 August 2015
Your Guide to The 20+ Superheroes And Villains Joining The CW-Verse This Fall
The CW
In the movie world, superhero stories aim high. There are no Marvel execs trampling each other to put a Speedball movie into production. There probably never will be. And for good reason, too, because Speedball kinda sucks.
For superheroes on TV, it’s just the opposite. 20+ episode per year requires a writers room to scrape up the forgotten, crusty bits at the bottom of the comic book world so Barry Allen has someone new to speed-punch (and lock away forever in an bizarrely inhumane super-Guantanamo Bay) every week.
The largest offender by far is the CW’s conglomerate of superhero shows: Arrow, The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. Between the three of them, we’ve got more than 20 DC comics super-players swarming onto TV in just about a month and a half. It’s a lot to handle. Let this giant list of all of them guide you through the madness.
Courtesy of DC Comics
Damien Darhk
Arrow’s bucking a trend this year: instead of picking a major DC Comics adversary for their Big Bad (Merlyn, Deathstroke, Ra’s al Ghul- all heavyweights)- the show’s snapped up Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough), a shlub who terrorized a handful of 1999 “Teen Titans” comics and then nothing else, ever. There’s also the issue of that “h.” Just pretend it’s not there.
On the printed page, Darhk was tech wiz with a dark side and ties to the super villain organization HIVE (Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination- god I hope Arrow keeps the same acronym). That’s more or less the case for Arrow, as Darhk’s running his own version of HIVE, a shadowy villain organization that’s already been name-dropped on Arrow a few times.
According to co-showrunner Marc Guggenheim, Darhk will buck the Arrow Big Bad formula in two ways. One, instead of that classic “villain who thinks he’s the hero” motivation that the show’s other Big Bads all had, Darhk’s just a jerk who genuinely likes doing the cruelest shit imaginable (McDonough’s smart casting, then- he did an extraordinary turn on Justified as a very similar psycho villain). And two, rather than waiting halfway through the season for that Big Bad reveal, he’ll be there right from the start.
Courtesy of DC Comics
Zoom
This could get weird. The Flash’s next Big Bad is Zoom, and The Flash already borrowed from this character heavily to create Harrison Wells last year (“But Harrison Wells is the Reverse-Flash!” you protest. Well, Zoom is also the Reverse-Flash. It’s confusing).
Zoom was originally Hunter Solomon, a police profiler working alongside the Flash, until a freak Gorilla Grodd accident left him wheelchair-bound. Desperate to get the use of his legs back, he tampered with the Speed Force and voila! Super-speed (well, not really- he can actually travel through time in a way that looks like he’s moving all quick-like). Also, the whole “a super-gorilla snapped my spine” thing kinda left him insane, so Zoom thinks he’s “training” the Flash to be a better hero by causing horrible tragedies in his life. Basically Harrison Wells.
But as The Flash exec producer Gabrielle Stanton cautions, “no one will confuse him for one second with what we did last year,” so clearly the CW has considered the startling similarities. Also, Zoom will be “scary as hell,” faster than any other speedster, and as TVLine puts it, “may resemble Eobard Thawne upon first impression.” Considering The Flash has been filming for months and Zoom as yet to be cast, one might assume that one of the show’s two Eobard Thawnes (Tom Cavanagh, Matt Letscher) is stepping in to fill the role.
Courtesy of DC Comics
Vandal Savage
Our third Big Bad for our third CW superhero show- Casper Crump will play Legends of Tomorrow baddie Vandal Savage. He’s a little like Ra’s al Ghul, in that he’s an immortal ruler who’s influenced the world in secret for centuries. Both men also favor distinguished-looking facial hair. Savage, however, is a little more outwardly evil, as his end goal is usually ruling the world rather than sponsoring a secret clan or two.
This much we know from the Legends trailer: time traveler Rip Hunter (more on him later) has seen the future; the future is a total mess because of Vandal Savage; Legends’ assortment of B and C-list super-characters are the only ones capable of traveling through time to stop him. Cue an army of laser-toting soldiers and a robot foot the size of the Epcot dome.
Courtesy of DC Comics
Jay Garrick
We saw Jay Garrick’s lightning bolt-adorned helmet on The Flash last year, so this should come as no surprise: DC Comics’ original Golden Age version of the character, Jay Garrick (Teddy Sears), is also joining the series.
This much we know: He’ll be a mentor to Barry- and a non-evil one, which should be a pleasant change of pace. He’ll be arriving in Central City with news of something all huge and scary that one Flash alone can’t handle (conveniently, season two has already cast two more Flashes besides Garrick). Given that hat-cameo, he’ll probably wear the hat and look completely goofy. And that early image teasing the iconic “Flash of Two Words” cover isn’t just a tease- the show’s going to include the actual “two flashes save dude from falling girder” moment, early on in the season.
Courtesy of DC Comics
Wally West
The second of three speedster heroes joining The Flash is Wally West (Keiynan Lonsdale), who served as Kid Flash from the ‘60s through Barry Allen’s death in 1986, then as the official Flash until DC swapped Barry back in with 2009’s “The Flash: Rebirth.”
Comic book Wally is, as the last name implies, the nephew of longtime Flash love interest Iris West. Wally’s a big Flash fan, and as the Flash explains to Wally how he got his powers- that very shelf of precariously-placed chemicals splashed on me, just as I was struck by lightning– that very shelf of precariously-placed chemicals splashed on Wally, just as he was struck by lightning. Jinx!
Although none of that will probably happen to the TV Wally West. On three occasions (occasion one, occasion two, occasion three), sources close to The Flash have been asked “hey, what’s the deal with Wally?” and the only response anyone’s gotten is total hush-hush secrecy. Suffice to say, TV’s Wally West will probably be some kind of half-human, half-zebra cannibalistic serial killer. Or maybe he’ll just be the Flash of some other multiverse realm.
Keanu Reeves Gets Tied Up in Latest US Trailer for 'Knock Knock'
One night can cost you everything. Voltage Pictures has officially released a full-length US trailer for Eli Roth's latest film Knock Knock, a home invasion thriller starring Keanu Reeves. He plays a father whose home is invaded after he invites in two feisty, nasty girls - played by Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas. This first premiered at Sundance this January in the Midnight category, and it looks interesting enough to give it a shot. This is pretty much the same trailer we posted previously, but that one was pulled down, so we're reposting it now for those who want to watch. The film will be in theaters + on VOD in a few months.
Here's the latest official US trailer (+ poster) for Eli Roth's Knock Knock, in high def from Apple:
Knock Knock is directed by Eli Roth (Hostel) from a script he co-wrote with Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amoedo. Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves) is living the dream. Just look at his beautiful, successful wife, his two wonderful kids, and his truly stunning house—which he designed himself. Things are going so well, Evan doesn't even mind spending Father's Day alone while the rest of his family heads out for a beach weekend. And then there’s a knock on the door, with two young women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) standing on his doorstep. Knock Knock first premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the Park City at Midnight category, and will be released by Lionsgate. Knock Knock opens in theaters on October 9th.
Metrograph Indie Cinema Coming to NYC + IFC Center is Expanding
Long live independent cinema! Good news for New Yorkers, the city is getting a couple of extra screens in the next few years that will be dedicated to showing more and more indie / art house / foreign / doc films. Two separate reports on Indiewire announce details about two theaters: the Metrograph, a two-screen art house being built at 7 Ludlow Street (at Canal Street); along with the IFC Center on 6th Ave, which will be expanding from 5 screens to 11 screens. "To bring glamour, excitement, and prestige back to the exhibition experience has been my longstanding goal," said Metrograph founder and NYC filmmaker Alexander Olch.
The Metrograph is a brand new chain that will open its tiny cinema on Canal Street in February, 2016. It will feature a "restaurant, cinema-dedicated bookshop, café and lounge", and will host (of course) "world-class independent and international movies, repertory films and exclusive premieres." I am looking forward to checking it out once the doors open. Years ago we wrote about a new theater being built entirely for docs, but that has yet to open. The IFC Center is already a very well-established indie cinema in New York City, even allowing in under-17 teens to R-rated films when they feel the MPAA has overstepped their bounds. After 10 years with five screens (three when they opened!), they're expanding (again) to double that amount.
Vanco added, "After years of being the top-grossing venue in the country for many terrific specialized films like 'Boyhood,' 'Citizenfour,' 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' and each annual edition of the 'Oscar-Nominated Short Films,' as well as hosting the nation’s largest documentary film festival, DOC NYC, it’s become clear that the audience for IFC Center's programming keeps growing, so to accommodate them, IFC Center needs to grow, too."
The new plan for the expanded IFC Center is to utilize a vacant lot behind the existing building, extending back from their current location to Cornelia Street. The addition of the six screens will not change the location of the entrance, and the IFC Center's iconic marquee will remain where it is. This expansion was just announced, and they have officially applied for a construction permit though no work has really started yet (via Yimby). As a New Yorker who appreciates every last cinema in this city, this is great news. The more movie theaters, the better, especially more art houses that actually care about the art, the experience, and the people that love movies. We'll be following developments on both of these projects closely. Stay tuned.
How Fandom Documentaries Help Hollywood
Don’t Quit Your Day Job Productions
There’s another new Ghostbusters movie on the way. In addition to the official reboot arriving in theaters next summer, there’s a documentary also aiming for a 2016 release. It’s called Ghostheads, and it’s the latest in a long line of fandom-based docs that have taken over a chunk of the nonfiction film market. Surprisingly, this one is not raising awareness and money through a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo (not yet anyway). I heard about this one from the writer and director of the reboot, Paul Feig, who retweeted the new teaser trailer for the doc last week.
There’s an interesting synergy involved in that simple social media support. Feig is obviously helping the doc by blasting its existence to his 1.44m followers. But the doc is also helping Feig and his movie by ensuring and celebrating the fanbase for the property they’re resurrecting. In his tweet, Feig admits that he’s a member of that fanbase, that he’s a “Ghosthead,” which is all about him selling himself as the right man for the job specifically to its most hardcore fans. He loses me, though, by saying the doc — which seems the sort primarily just highlighting fans of something saying they love that something — looks great. If he genuinely believes that, I’m worried about his Ghostbusters movie.
Ghostheads is described as being about fans and made by fans. It should also say it’s specifically for fans, because that’s a large demographic. The thing about Ghostbusters is that it’s not a cult film. It was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1984. And last year it was re-released and, at three-decades old, was still one of the top 200 movies of 2014, taking in more money than Veronica Mars, The Raid 2 and Obvious Child. The movie has a lot of fans. It’s just not all of them dress up in costume let alone belong to a region-specific fan club charter, which is part of the focus of the doc. There’s no need for a film to uphold its popularity.
When the king of fandom docs, Trekkies, came out in 1997, Star Trek was still a relatively niche property, or so it seemed based on its representation through its most loyal and participatory enthusiasts. For better or worse (i.e. for the sake of ridicule), the doc was more geared to audiences who didn’t attend conventions or understand why people wore costumes based on their favorite sci-fi program. That was before cosplay, Comic-Con, geekdom and especially nostalgia rose up into the mainstream, or close to it, in part through the internet. Trekkies were a real, bewildering phenomenon then. Ghostheads are a subculture at best, but they’re not a phenomenon any more than sports fandom is.
When you look at the kinds of fandom docs making their way to audiences now, mainly through crowdfunding, they’re not about obscure movies and their cult fan bases. They’re for Back to the Future and Star Wars. And I’d include docs that are part of the trend of spotlighting unmade movies, such as those about Superman Lives and George Miller‘s Justice League, because they’re similarly geared to the fans. A common thing about these docs is they can be easily linked to actual Star Wars, Superman (possibly including a Man of Steel sequel directed by Miller, due to the resurrected interest in his take on the DC universe), Justice League and Ghostbusters movies on the horizon. Back to the Future can’t get another movie, but its rights owners have had plenty of other things to sell lately thanks to it turning 30 this year. The more cameras covering the occasion the better.
Of course, these docs do better than others because they get written about more, because their subject matter is an easy sell to readers. But when they are covered on the movie sites and they can be connected to a highly anticipated upcoming Hollywood product, they wind up serving as part of the hype. To write this new Ghostheads teaser without also mentioning Feig’s reboot, maybe even (preferably, to Sony) including the release date, would be bad reporting. It becomes another way of reminding people about next year’s Ghostbusters or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on the days we don’t have a new trailer or set photo to share.
Other than that, Ghostheads doesn’t seem to have much of a reason to exist. Like too many other fandom docs, it’s not likely to reach or be appealing to the millions of non-extreme fans let alone total outsiders. It will tell a number of hardcore Ghostbusters fans things they already know about themselves and their beloved movie. It will give a lot of them screen time in a way that’s basically a form of selfie cinema, especially if they’ve also contributed to the production (while not on a crowdfunding site, the filmmakers are currently selling t-shirts to raise money for their film). That’s fine for them, as extreme fans do like the familiar when it comes to the things they’re fans of.
Don’t be surprised if soon we hear about new fandom documentaries related to other 2016 movies — X-Men and Harry Potter seem obvious choices. And maybe we’ll find out there are Troll Doll conventions so the DreamWorks Animation feature Trolls can have a doc equivalent the way The Lego Movie has A Lego Brickumentary. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the studios start encouraging, maybe even secretly contributing to the crowdfunding of docs that in turn foster and support fans and enthusiasm for their upcoming slates. If nothing else, they might later on be cheap pickups to throw onto their Blu-ray releases of the original or new version of their respective properties.
Check out the teaser for Ghostheads below. The Ghostbusters reboot hits theaters July 15, 2016.
Will Smith Courts Oscar and NFL Controversy in First Concussion Trailer
In Concussion, Will Smith stars as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the brilliant forensic neuropathologist who made the first discovery of CTE, a football-related brain trauma, in a pro player. In this first trailer for the movie directed by Kill the Messenger writer Peter Landesman, we see something we haven’t seen in a while: top-notch Will Smith. The kind of dramatic range we haven’t seen since he was garnering Oscar nominations for Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness. When combined with the hyper-topical nature of the film, it’s not hard to see a future in which Smith is back in the Oscar conversation, followed by a big promotional push as he leads a major comic book movie (Suicide Squad) into theaters. It’s never not true, but nowadays it seems even more true that it’s good to be Will Smith.
It’s not so good to be the National Football League, which has been mired in controversy over the past few years. As a longtime fan of the game, I’ve found myself increasingly disenfranchised. From mishandled punishments for domestic violence cases to over-punishment for something involving deflated footballs, the NFL is in a tailspin. And it’s all a backdrop to the controversy about concussions. For anyone who would like to see some exceptional journalism on the topic, watch the Frontline documentary League of Denial, which is available to stream on PBS’ website. The hope is that a major motion picture will continue to bring awareness to the CTE epidemic and push the NFL and leagues at every level to continue to evaluate the safety of the game.
Concussion is due in theaters on December 25, 2015.
Last Night on Rick and Morty: Stephen Colbert and The Tinyverse Were Awesome
Adult Swim
This is your weekly reminder that you should be watching Rick and Morty every Sunday night on Adult Swim. If you need more evidence, feel free to read my 107 Things We Learned from Rick and Morty Season 1 article, which details the pure insanity of season one and the season one DVD commentary.
Seeing as the show is already in full swing with season 2 and I don’t feel like not writing about it, I’m going to come back here and there to remind everyone that Rick and Morty is some of the top quality television out there right now. There are very few shows that can deliver this kind of consistent humor. It reminds me of Community in its first few seasons, which isn’t a surprise, as Dan Harmon is also involved here.
This week’s episode, “The Ricks Must Be Crazy,” continues season 2’s trend of having major names in the guest star credits. Last week we got Keith David as The President and That 70s Show‘s Kurtwood Smith as a nuke-happy general. Two weeks before we got a sexually charged visit from Christina Hendricks as a world-assimilating hive mind. And in the season’s second episode, Jemaine Clement voiced and sang as a fart. This week came the big one, Stephen Colbert as a mad scientist and antagonist for Rick inside a mini-universe that lives within the battery of Rick’s car.
Both Colbert’s banter and the convention-breaking elements of the story were fantastic. And in the end (you should have watched the episode by now), I can’t help but wonder if Colbert’s character will become a sort of Khan character for Rick. The dark humor — between the protective action of Rick’s car and the way things ended with Rick’s enslaved mini-verse — was cranked all the way up in this episode, to the point where I would add this to the growing list of essential Rick and Morty episodes. Right up there with Meeseeks and Destroy and perhaps Lawnmower Dog, these episodes define the sort of dark webs that are weaved so perfectly by this show.
Watch the episode for yourself on AdultSwim.com. Let’s take a ride on The Slow Ramp, then we’ll hand out some episode awards:
Best Character of the Episode: Rick’s Car.
At this point, there might not be a non-Rick character that is quite as dark as Rick’s Car. It’s like GLaDOS from Portal, programmed to think with the logic of a mad scientist. Something so simple as “Keep Summer safe” turns into a situation in which babies are melting, psychological warfare is waged and a peace accord between humans and mind-controlling spiders is possible. Before this episode, it would have been hard to imagine that an episode that included such an awesome antagonist voiced by Colbert could get beaten out as best character of the episode, but this car was crazy fun.
Best Quote of the Episode: “You ruined ice cream with your boobs out!”
My favorite quotes are always the ones that are barely heard in the background. Like Principle Vagina’s “Don’t come to the dance if you’re sick. You wouldn’t bring a dead baby to Passover.” line in the flu episode. This one is great and it sneaks in right as the camera is pulling away from Rick, Morty and Summer in the ice cream parlor at the end. Rick is always blaming things on Summer’s boobs.
Best Background Item of the Episode: 3 Brothers Movie Poster
“It’s just called 3 Brothers…”
Best Randomness of the Episode: The Mortimous Prime.
Best Not Giving a F*ck of the Week: Gettin’ Schwifty on Tinder.
GIFs via /r/rickandmorty.
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