August 08, 2010

red hood done right

Batman: Under the Red Hood (DC Animated)

In which DC Animated takes on the origin story of Jason Todd as the Red Hood and makes it make sense.

To be sure, the DC Animated people had both a signal advantage and disadvantage. Feeling that Jason Todd had been rather badly treated (a vote to kill him off, for heaven's sake, and one that seems to have been mishandled, at that), DC Animated gave Jason's origin story to Tim Drake in the Batman animated series of the 1990s, so that Bruce Timm and friends could tell Jason's story they way they wanted -- only without Jason. Of course, that meant that if they were going to keep the movies in the same universe as the animated series, and they wanted to tell this story, they not only needed to introduce Jason from scratch, but make us understand who he was and how he fit in. After all, if all you'd ever seen was the animated series, and then went to this, your immediate assumption of the start is that the Joker is beating on Tim Drake, and that would be quite wrong.

DC Animated seem to be treating the direct-to-DVD animation as though it were almost its own universe, almost but not quite independent of the storylines they'd established with the various series.

As for Jason Todd, he gets his own origin story back. In fact, I would be very curious to see if they didn't simply re-animate, or improve, on the Tim Drake origin story from the animated series; the scene showing how Batman met Jason -- lifting the wheels of the Batmobile -- looked very familiar when it appeared (surprisingly late in the film, actually). Jason also apparently gets Dick Grayson's original Robin outfit to start with, scanty panties and pixie boots included. He winds up with Tim Drake's Robin outfit -- the red sleeves and leggings, rather than the green ones. (What they're going to do if they decide to bring Tim Drake into this version of DC Animated, I'm sure I don't know.) Moreover, he gets a Red Hood origin that actually works. No "Superboy prime punches the universe and Jason wakes up in his grave" nonsense; without giving anything away, let's just say it's about someone trying to make something right that they did wrong. (One of the enduring surprises about the "Lost Days" comic book is that DC Editorial didn't allow the writers to take the opportunity to retcon that storyline; given what they actually did allow them to do, it would have been fairly simple. DC Animated chose to take that simple path that DC Editorial didn't.) Jason does die as he did in the comics, being blown up by the Joker. After that, things get ... different. Except when they don't.

Assuming that the DVD movies don't take place independently, this story takes place before any of the Batman animated series. Interestingly enough, Bruce has a better relationship with Dick Grayson/Nightwing in this movie than he does in the series -- much less hostile on Dick's part. (Dick also has short hair, which he didn't in the series.)

Once DC Animated didn't have to limit themselves to the bounds of what was acceptable for broadcast television, they got much more violent. The sheer number of corpses in this video, while entirely in keeping with the original Red Hood arc, is truly astounding for an animated Batman story. Moreover, the violence meted out is unusually gory. We begin by watching the Joker beating Jason Todd with a crowbar, complete with blood spatter, middle with the Red Hood killing a really startling number of crooks, and end with watching the main characters mete out a couple of jaw-dropping beatings. We also get the same discussion of Batman's philosophy of violence that occurred in the comics, if not quite in the same situation. Interestingly, Batman isn't required to make quite the same sort of choice at the end that the comic book required of him. What happens here makes much more sense, and it shows the very stark difference between Batman and Jason at that point.

The animation is, of course, very well done. Bruce Greenwood takes on the voice of Batman, sounding very like Kevin Conroy, who will be back for the next film -- "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse", the origin story for Supergirl --and has done all but one of those, plus the animated series. (That said, Greenwood will be the voice of Batman for the Young Justice animated series.) They have, for no apparent reason, given Alfred a different character design from the series or anything else. As has been the habit of recent DC Animated DVDs, it contains no extras relating to the actual story being shown; there are trailers for upcoming and different DVDs, but nothing at all about this one. A pity; it would have been nice to have had a secondary audio track, as they did with Return of the Joker, explaining what they did and why. (For no apparent reason, the audio tracks are English 2-channel, English 5+1 channel, and ... Portuguese?)

If you're a Batman fan, and wanted to see the Jason Todd story done right -- or closer to right, anyway -- then this is definitely something that you ought to see.

Excellent; Highly recommended.

Questions? comments? brickbats? Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos?

Posted by Iain Jackson at 01:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

June 22, 2010

ask evans for the secret of easy murder

I'm beginning to wonder if, by some alchemy or disaster, the estate of Agatha Christie is in desperate need of money. What they've permitted to be done to the books and stories for Agatha Christie's Marple, the latest series made first with Geraldine McEwan and now with Julia McKenzie in the title role, is really baffling. And make no mistake: the series that ITV has been leisurely producing since 2004 is, in fact, authorized by the Christie estate.

It's one thing to put Miss Marple in stories where she doesn't properly belong, and to a certain extent, you can even understand that. There are, after all, only so many novels, and the short stories are unfilmable. All of the Miss Marple shorts involve her club of relatives and friends, sitting around and discussing old cases and problems that she, of course, solves just from hearing all the details. But you can't reasonably film that. (That said, they've actually filmed "The Blue Geranium". I would imagine that this goes from being a story told by Sir Henry Clithering to Miss Marple to being a story investigated by Miss Marple with Sir Henry drifting along in the background.)

The thing is ... the current producers change the motives and the murderers, even in stories in which she actually appears. (There is no lesbianism in the novel The Body in the Library, no matter what the series would have you think.) And in several other stories, they've combined and reworked characters, and changed motives and murderers wholesale. (The Secret of Chimneys and Murder is Easy are unrecognizeable .... although at least Murder is Easy keeps the same murderer, although the motives are drastically changed. (Dame Agatha would not, I believe, have ever dreamed of giving the murderer the particular motive that shows up in the episode. She would have been genuinely shocked at the very idea.) The baffling thing is that there are other stories given a straight-ahead narrative filming more or less exactly as they were written. The Mirror Crack'd and A Pocketful of Rye are recognizable adaptations of their source material. (And perfectly cast, besides.)

It is a puzzlement.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 09:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

May 28, 2010

revision 3 and apple (sort of)

Why The Kindle is Better Than The iPad - Penn Point

...So his complaint is that it's a distracting multitasker. (Whereas my complaint would be that it can't multitask enough, but then,if I'm spending that much money, I'd rather have a computer than an appliance, which is what the iPad is designed to be.) And getting grouchy because something is exactly what it's meant to be and designed to be is just a bit silly. That said, I still think they should have turned the Air into something, you know, functional and affordable instead of doing an appliance. I mean, consider: the screen is more or less the same size on the Air and the iPad. If they'd just stuck a central hinge on the Air, made it so that you could rotate and flatten the screen against the keyboard, then you could have something a lot more useful. And then they could bring the price down into something that's reasonable for Apple -- Apple's prices are infrequently reasonable in regular terms -- and people would be plotzing themselves with happiness even more than they are. (And considering as the iPad is reportedly selling a million per month world wide, we're talkin' a whole lotta plotzin' here.)

Practical ideas like this, no doubt, are why I have the money I have, and why Apple has, quite insanely, surpassed Microsoft in the market cap value of the company. (Seriously, you've got software on something like 90% of all computers in the world, most of the hardware is made to work with your system, and the value of your company is surpassed by one that makes a computer that's only used by a very small segment of the population. However, the population LOVES your toys. Not your productivity stuff -- except for a couple of the software programs -- but the toys. Everyone loves iPod! Everyone loves loves loves iPhone -- even though they pretty much universally loathe AT&T, or rather, being bound to the company unwillingly.

And now for a slight veer: Have I mentioned that I love revision3.com? No? I love revision3.com. So far, I watch three shows on their site. In part, I must confess, I watch because it's where Robert Heron and Patrick Norton landed, and as an old-time TechTV/dl.tv watcher, it warms the cockles of my heart to see them gettin' their geek on with HD Nation, even though I only just got any sort of HD anything with the new computer. Sadly, Patrick seems to have retired the kilt from the tech.tv days -- although he still has the tam. He also does Tekzilla with Veronica Belmont, covering computer technology more generally. Veronica also gets her geek on just as much as they do -- even more so, really, since she's a hard core gamer, and Patrick doesn't seem to be.

Revision3 seems to be branching out beyond the merely techy these days. They've got a new show called Food Mob, with Niall Harbison, which is, of all things, a cooking show. Done on what looks like something slightly more than a shoestring budget -- it's got a very static camera style, and as far as you can tell from the way things are handled, it's done primarily by Niall, his cameraman Aaron (who is also the official food taster) and a producer. Each show also gets broken into something called Food Mob Bites, these little 3 minute recaps of each recipe. They're actually kind of annoying; they don't have the chyron notes and things that make up for the fact that, despite that the show is clearly aimed at beginners, Niall never tells you the amounts of anything. You chop some of this, cut in some of that, and if it weren't for the chyron sidenotes that fill in the quantities, beginners could be very lost in trying to repeat some of what he does. But still, it's fun to watch overall. It reads sort of like the concept was, "Hey, let's get a bunch of our mates together and do a cooking show!" The vibe is deliberately homespun, and weirdly Andy Hardy.

Revision3 does do a bunch of other shows, but honestly, most of them are too geeky even for me. Which is saying something, if you think about it. LandlineTV comes as close as they really get to being something that I like -- they do manage the odd moment of interestingly acid commentary (that one will go over the heads of anyone who didn't know about the Lane Bryant bra controversy, however), but it's overally not really my thing.

For Revision3 as a whole: Come for the geekery, stay for the cooking, and, if you like, stay for the gaming and even more geekery and the odd bit of comedy.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 11:21 PM | Permalink

May 04, 2010

singing off

I'm glad to see that "The Sing-Off" is coming back this December. I really enjoyed it the first time through; they managed to get a nicely eclectic group of groups together, and it was very entertaining. (Plus, the right group won.)

Now that it's been renewed, however, I really hope that the University of Oregon's On The Rocks tries out and gets onto the show. Why? Mostly because I want to see them do the number below on national television, just because.

That would play even better with them all dressed in similar clothing, as the groups did last season.

Regardless, I'm glad to see that the show will be back, and that the network didn't decide to overkill a good thing, keeping it down to a very limited series.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 12:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)