Following up on The Toys That Made Us (previously reviewed here at borg), Netflix’s surprise hit documentary series leaning on viewers’ nostalgia with a look behind toys of the past, in 2019 the streaming service added a new series based on the same formula, The Movies That Made Us. The series took a new look at four movies in four hour-long episodes in its first season, including Die Hard, Ghostbusters,Home Alone, and Dirty Dancing, followed by two holiday episodes featuring Elf and A Nightmare Before Christmas. The Movies That Made Us isn’t really about the movies and their impact so much as what strange stories lie behind how the movies were created, from idea to release, including production foibles and hurdles. The show is trying to appeal to a broad spectrum of viewers, and it’s done it again with four new installments for its second season, featuring Back to the Future, Pretty Woman, Jurassic Park, and Forrest Gump. And new episodes are on their way featuring Aliens, Coming to America, and RoboCop, and October staples A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th,and Halloween.
Possibly the biggest surprise of Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest action spectacle Monster Hunteris that Milla Jovovich isn’t the title character. That role goes to Furious 7’s Tony Jaa, a Mandalorian-meets-Bone Tomahawk or Predators brand of survivor and monster hunter, who Jovovich and a band of soldiers in our time meet after they get sucked into a portal to a very different place. The plot of this latest adaptation of a video game series is like Planet of the Apes, with a team falling into a world of beasts that are a cross of Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. It has a Ray Harryhausen look, which is good for those who like vintage monster nostalgia, but perhaps not so good for those after impeccable, cutting-edge visual effects. In the opening scenes we meet Jovovich as Captain Artemis, a believable unit commander leading soldiers in Humvees looking for a missing squad. For the most part this is a showcase of the Resident Evil heroine in action mode with bits of goofy humor, with Jaa’s Hunter showing off his stealth survival. But really it’s about framing the star actress in increasingly cooler action shots. Monster Hunter is now streaming on Starz, Hulu, and other platforms, and you might want to check it out.
Get ready for your next immersion into adventure and fun, and it’s in 3D. I love classic storytelling methods that surprise the reader, from the Victorian to modern technology, whether it’s stereoscopic images, View-Master reels, lenticular images, pop-up books, or state-of-the-art digital animation. One of my very first books as a young boy was Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, with 3D diorama artwork and a lenticular cover. I’ve reviewed several 3D movies here at borg, too, from The Creature from the Black Lagoon to Jaws 3D, and Predator and Rogue One. French artist Matthias Picard’s roving young adventurer Jim Curious returns after his debut in 2014’s Jim Curious–A Voyage to the Heart of the Sea in his next book, Jim Curious and the Jungle Journey. It’s a complete 3D adventure using anaglyph 3D, that classic blue-red 3D style and includes two pairs of 3D glasses–just like the kind from 3D movies in the 1920s to the 1980s. The eye-popping images will take your breath away.
If Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg didn’t get paid for the screenplay for the new Netflix kids’ adventure movie Finding ‘Ohana, they should. Usually an homage borrows bits and pieces from the source material. Finding ‘Ohana is different–it is a remake (albeit unofficial remake) of the 1985 classic coming of age adventure The Goonies, updated to bring it into the 21st century and change the setting from Oregon to Hawaii. ‘Ohana, which you’ll know from previous Hawaii-themed series and movies, means family, which reflects the film’s theme of Hawaiian culture and families reunited. Ultimately the effort is a mixed bag–a movie that could be great fun for younger kids, but will make everyone else crave the movies it pulls its ideas from.
If you’re discussing the most compelling and amazing action movie franchise actresses, you’re going to begin with Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton. But quickly you must count Milla Jovovich, whose track record at the box office is hard to match, thanks to her role as Alice in the Resident Evil series. But she’s also revealed her badass prowess in classics like The Fifth Element and Ultraviolet, and she keeps adding to her amped up, tough-as-nails characters. This year that means taking on the role of Lieutenant Artemis in Monster Hunter, an adaptation of the online fantasy-action game. In one word, that overly-used phrase is apt here: Epic. The first trailer for the film (below) is very Starship Troopers meets Jurassic Park.
Back in the 1990s when the dot-com revolution took off, it was difficult to find a telecom, Internet, or other tech start-up business that didn’t have a CEO at the helm who drove us all to accept Hawaiian shirt Fridays as the new norm. I still have a closet full of Hawaiian shirts (historically, “Aloha” shirts, a fashion that dates back to the 1920s, popularized in the 1930s). With this crazy 2020, why not resurrect the fad again? We spotted three online outlets ready to answer the call. One hails from the family of one of your all-time favorite comedians, another is a throwback to all things good and Hawaiian, and the third is where Magnum shops today. This will have you pulling out your Israel Kamakawiwoʻole or Don Ho albums and re-start your next Magnum, p.i. or Hawaii Five-O binge. Make no mistake, despite recent fringe elements trying to usurp this traditional Friday garb and 50th state trademark wear for their own political ends, Hawaiian shirts don’t go with guns or camouflage (see instead #HawaiianshirtsforPeace).
What do a submarine, a space shuttle, dinosaurs, sea creatures from 20,000 leagues, flying saucers, and a female Tarzan have in common? They’re all part of Frank Cho’s Jungle Girl.
Frank Cho is one of our favorite artists and he’s also a great guy, always eager to chat at the next comic convention. He’s a double threat–his artwork is second to none, but many don’t know how humorous his writing can be, as illustrated in his University² series of comic strips and his Liberty Meadows series. He’s also a great all-around writer, and so it’s no surprise that he combined his trademark jungle women art with his love of dinosaurs and spun them into a series that he plotted and handed over to other writers and artists to execute. That 15-issue comic book series coming your way this month in the Jungle Girl Complete Omnibus, a giant 392-page trade paperback edition from Dynamite Entertainment. With stunning visuals and a female Tarzan named Jana born into Earth’s distant past, the only things that would make the book even better would be if Cho wrote and illustrated more than the cover art for it.
Today only, the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA, is offering a free virtual tour of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: World of Myth and Magic, an exhibit scheduled at the Atlanta facility through June 28, 2020, but is now temporarily closed to foot traffic because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Museum director Jill Nash Malool will be presenting the tour online at the Center for Puppetry Arts page on Facebook here. It all happens today, Friday, April 10, at 2 p.m. EST/1 p.m. CST.
The exhibit revealed on the virtual tour features more than 50 props and other artifacts from 1982’s classic fantasy film The Dark Crystal, including the actual Jen, Podlings, Skeksis, and Aughra used in the movie. Original Brian Froud artwork, animatronic prototypes, and other props, artifacts, and ephemera from the film are part of the exhibit.
The museum invites fans of the film and last year’s groundbreaking television series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, into the imaginative world of Thra. The exhibition discusses how the movie was a passion project for Jim Henson and how he needed the fantastical work of Brian Froud to make it come to fruition. It explores the intricate artistry that went into the creation of the world brought to life in the 1982 film that would become a lasting influence on the fantasy genre, including films like the Star Wars franchise, Jurassic Park, and more.
One of the more unusual offerings previewed this weekend at New York Comic Con 2018 is a collectible taking you back to the original Jurassic Park. That’s the good movie, the memorable one that faithfully follows the story of Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel. The one where Dr. Ian Malcolm was supposedly killed in the book, but kept alive in the movie thanks to the spark Steven Spielberg saw in Jeff Goldblum‘s performance. Dr. Malcolm provided the powerful lesson of the movie with the punchline, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
And for whatever reason Spielberg included Goldblum in this GQ-worthy shirt-open pose. It’s the image that would, years later, launch a thousand memes.
Now thanks to Chronicle Collectibles, you can get your own homage to this… infamous (?) scene, the first officially licensed, limited edition 1:4 scale Dr. Ian Malcolm statue.
As you’re planning to attend the upcoming return of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park to theaters, a new book released this week is going to take readers of all ages on a tour of the history of real dinosaurs and the history of the study of dinosaurs itself. A fresh look at the science of paleontology and the resulting knowledge about the life, environment, and structure of the major species of dinosaurs is the subject of Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom. Authors Christine Argot and Luc Vivès, researchers at The French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, use the museum’s own paleontology gallery as the starting point to tell how scientists developed the study and reconstruction of dinosaurs since the gallery first opened in 1898. Everyone has a favorite dinosaur, and whether yours is a stegosaurus, triceratops, diplodocus, allosaurus, iguanodon, brontosaurus, megalosaurus, or tyrannosaurus, you’ll marvel at the spectacular images of their skeletons on display as scientists have updated them consistent with improved knowledge and techniques across the years.
Interlacing the work of paleontologists, geologists, museum curators, and other scientists around the world, and changing views of remarkable fossil discoveries (like placement, stance, and presence of feathers) over nearly 150 years, the authors combine photographs of their collection with images resulting from digs, artists’ interpretations, magazine articles, and museum archives. From tales of dragons and mythical beasts to speculative works from John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, and Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, ideas of fantasy have informed science and vice versa. Movements and individuals have changed our outlook into history, via wealthy benefactors, scholars, educators, and artisans. From lost displays in the Crystal Palace to the artistry of Charles R. Knight, the history of dinosaurs is also the evolution of the thinking of mankind. The result will fascinate both young and old readers, whether Dinosaurs: A Journey to the Lost Kingdom will be your kid’s first book of dinosaurs or a companion book for a high school or college museum studies course, or simply a resource for you to enjoy.
One story recounts the misidentification of an iguanodon finger bone as a nose bone. Another story describes the excavation of a pit in Belgium in the 1870s that netted 130 tons of bones. Preservation and conservation methods are discussed throughout, plus improvements in museum display, like the use of 3D printing to allow an original tyrannosaurus rex from the States to be replicated and put on display at the Paris museum this summer.
