STAR WORDS: Shattered Empire

Leave a Comment
Romance - Issue 1 - Morning Kiss

A tender goodbye between Shara and Kes.

Journey to the Force Awakens – Shattered Empire, a four issue comic mini-series written by Greg Rucka (Smuggler’s Run) follows A-Wing pilot Shara Bey and her husband Kes Dameron, a Pathfinder specforce commando, through the months following the Battle of Endor. The comic achieves a surprisingly grand scale in just four issues.  It tackles many themes and questions – honor, duty, and the personal cost of war among them – that are typically addressed in lengthier novels or films. It is an incredible piece of work. I’ve spoken highly of Princess Leia and Lando here on STAR WORDS before but Shattered Empire surpasses them both as an artistic achievement.

Accompanying Rucka on this odyssey is a small collective of artists – Marco Chechetto took the lead and was featured in all four issues; playing backup were Angel Unzueta and Emilio Laiso. Their work on Shattered Empire cannot be overstated. The book succeeds because the art and prose are knit together seamlessly, supporting one another and creating a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Chechetto has an uncanny ability to convey complex emotions in the characters he draws. The range of emotions Shara displays can be heartbreaking at times. The dialogue is fairly minimal at times with the emotion of the drawn characters carrying the narrative. [Read more…]

Thoughts From The Dugout: World Series Preview

Leave a Comment

Image of Eric Hosmer

At this time last year, I was alternating between performances of a show at Second City (I was one of six co-writers in the Advanced Writing program) and running to the nearby Old Town Social or catching the Clark bus to walk to Murphy’s Bleachers to catch the tail ends of a thrilling postseason. It was a fantastic time to be writing, and a splendid time to write about baseball – and like many other Americans, I fell in love with the Royals. Which made the climax of the World Series that much harder, as they were stifled by the heroics of Madison Bumgarner (still the best postseason pitching performance I’d seen since probably Josh Beckett in ’03 and ’07.

I didn’t think the Royals could come back. Too many things worked against them. Their success was a fluke, a combination of momentum and luck that couldn’t be equaled.

[Read more…]

Paved With Good Intentions: Beasts of No Nation

Leave a Comment

Image of Beasts of No Nation Poster

Last week, Alex wrote an enlightening article about the traditional portrayal of Africa in Western Cinema here. The impetus of the piece was the arrival of the film Beasts of No Nation, adapted and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga from the novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. It’d be a lie to say that many of Alex’s thoughts and observations about the Africa of Western cinema didn’t color my reading of the film, but as with all good writing, it helped me to take notice of several things that might have been missed.

What was unmistakable to me, however, is the fact that Beasts of No Nation, in spite of its ambitions, fails to succeed on several different fronts. It is not without merit – but there’s a great deal missing that could have made this a great movie instead of another mediocre portrayal of an often-overlooked region of the world.

[Read more…]

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: A Well-Made Play

Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Steve Jobs

During high school English, I learned the meaning of the term “well-made play:” an updating of Aristotle’s classical principles of drama that mostly came from the mind of French playwright Eugene Scribe. The well-made play is based around tight structure, plenty of off-screen action, a unity in time and place, key information that only certain characters know, and a fall-and-rise plot leading to a triumphant climax.

It may be about an innovator who helped build the world as we know it, but Steve Jobs is at its heart a filmed version of a well-made play, and this unusual choice makes it transcend the multitude of controversies concerning its journey to the screen, for the result is an unforgettable picture.

[Read more…]

J&STAC: Talking Cap (and Other New #1s)

1 Comment

-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”

It’s a very Marvel J&STAC this week, with a special appearance by Image. We normally don’t do back-to-back new #1 reviews, but there are a lot of them, one of which got a lot of media attention. You can probably guess which one based on this tweet from Kurt Busiek:

Let’s start with Cap, shall we? [Read more…]

Beasts of No Nation and How Western Cinema Sees Africa

Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 3.25.32 PM

Editor’s Notes: Beasts of No Nation is currently available to watch on Netflix. 

Netflix’s first foray into the feature film market, Beasts of No Nation, has attracted a sizable amount of acclaim and anticipation this Fall. Directed by Cary Joji Fukungawa, who lent True Detective‘s first season its visual panache, and head-lined by rising international star Idris Elba, its recent release will be a test run for how much popular and awards attention Netflix can attract as a nascent movie distributor.

Beasts of No Nation is also being released in the midst of an on-going social and political maelstorm about identity politics. I’m not here to bury or praise the film as a part of that on-going discussion, that’s the purview of our reviewer. But I did think it was worth noting that Beasts fits into the long-standing Western perspective that Africa and its inhabitants as being unusually uncivilized and barbaric. [Read more…]

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Remember When I Found Out I Had a Daughter?

Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

 Moore Page

Carrie Nelson warned me about Freeheld.

Carrie and I have been friends since we attended Emerson College together, and among many things she is a terrific documentary filmmaker who is steeped in the language and lore of cinema. I say “among many things” because she is also a regular contributor to The Daily Dot and an outspoken voice on LGBTQ and feminist issues. She has taught me a great deal, and thus when she revealed she had seen Freeheld I eagerly asked her opinion on this early Oscar contender.

She looked at me with a grimace.

“It is such a bad film. I wanted to like it so much…but all the dialogue is pretty awful. Very literal and expository.”

I have now seen Freeheld…and it is even worse than that.

[Read more…]

STAR WORDS: Lando’s Five

Leave a Comment

Lando No. 1

Marvel is producing fascinating character studies for the notable characters in the galaxy far, far away. Darth Vader delves deeply into the Dark Lord of the Sith’s psyche, dredging up the pain and torment behind the inscrutable mask. Princess Leia showed her heroic quest to save her people and come to grips with the loss of Alderaan. Continuing this trend is the Lando mini-series, which follows everyone’s favorite scoundrel on a heist that doesn’t go as planned. Words by Charles Soule, drawings by Alex Maleev, colors by Paul Mounts, and lettering by Joe Caramagna. [Read more…]

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Cinematic Science of “The Martian”

Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Last month, Travis wrote about staying up until four in the morning to finish Andy Weir’s novel The Martian in what could only be described as an endorsement for a compelling story. This month, 20th Century-Fox released their blockbuster film adaptation of Weir’s self-published debut, and the result is something more than compelling. The Martian is a triumph for not only science fiction cinema but cinema in general. It is a movie in which every part works, adding up to an extraordinary whole.

The-Martian-viral-teaser

For the purposes of this column, I don’t need to probe the plot (Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars and, with NASA, makes a plan to get home…what else do you need to know?) and will only briefly touch on the themes, which are most eloquently described by Devin Faraci in his review which I urge you to read. Suffice to say that The Martian made me tremble with joy as a film about the very best of humanity: if 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favorite sci-fi film of all time, uses space as a metaphor for the remarkable potential of human beings, The Martian is its natural sequel in its inspirational depiction of how humans use that potential in our gifts of intelligence, creativity, and problem solving. It would not have had such an effect had it not been so outstandingly made. Therefore, in something close to Watney’s philosophy, I’m going to concentrate on The Martian’s components and how they work together.

[Read more…]