Just when you think there may be some hope for a Zack Snyder property, here we are again with another head scratcher. The movie that gave us hope was the trippy, funny, quirky Army of the Dead, a zombie movie with the gore of the genre, but with the light tonal notes of Shaun of the Dead. In short it was a worthy entry into the zombie horror genre, if on the more accessible, mainstream side (check out my review here). The new spin-off film, Army of Thieves, just landed on Netflix, and it is a prequel, but a prequel probably nobody asked for. It might make you think Snyder & Co. longs to have the C.V. of J.J. Abrams (see the Cloverleaf films) or M. Night Shyamalan (see the Unbreakable trilogy). Imagine taking the most obscure–the least likely–character from an action film, and then giving him a sweet, heart-warming, dramatic origin story with romance, and have the actor that played the character direct it. I can’t think anyone would select German actor Matthias Schweighöfer’s safecracker as the character that warranted a spin-off from Army of the Dead, but there it is. And you can watch it right now on Netflix.
For years it seemed like new Christmas classics were few and far between. It usually takes some time for a movie to gain “classic” status, and that itself is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Early on audiences stamped the label on Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and White Christmas. You have your A Charlie Brown Christmas, your How the Grinch Stole Christmas,Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a bevy of Rankin & Bass stop-motion animated shows like Frosty the Snowman. Then more modern fare came along, like A Christmas Story, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,The Muppet Christmas Carol, and Elf. Oh, and we can’t forget Die Hard. All stamped with an anvil as “classics.” If you want to see more movies from cinema history, check out the Turner Movie Classics book Christmas in the Movies, reviewed last year here at borg.
Putting aside the modern made for TV movies, if you’re younger, you may count as a classic something like The Polar Express, with Tom Hanks. It’s that kind of recent film category where you can add in Netflix’s new movie–its first animated feature, Klaus. Both of these movies are animated in interesting ways that will keep you entertained simply from a visual perspective, Klaus from its unique lighting and color choices and a strong Spanish comic art style (as seen in Dog Mendonça and PizzaBoy). They also share a certain traditional storybook look, and their tales also look back to nostalgia for their ideas. Klaus is another origin story take on Santa Claus. Audiences have seen this many times, including in the not to be missed films Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (featuring the voices of Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney, and Keenan Wynn) and in books like L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and more recently, the brilliant Santa: My Life and Times, with artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz (we reviewed it here).
Spain’s Sergio Pablos directed Klaus intentionally stepping away from modern Disney-style CGI animation to traditional hand-drawn art, so it looks more like Disney’s top technical achievement, the Oscar-winning Beauty and the Beast from 1991, and less like The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The story is cute, and contrasting with the traditional visual style, is the inclusion of humorous dialogue told by voice talents famously known for being snarky. We follow a postman named Jesper, who couldn’t look or sound more like David Spade, actually voiced by Jason Schwartzman. Jesper is a non-achiever, and his father sends him to a distant Scandinavian town to learn to be successful at his job. The town ends up like a lawless town out of the Old West. His job is to get people to use the mail service again. Along the way he runs into a Hatfield-McCoy conflict, with one part voiced by Joan Cusack, and an old man with a house full of toys named Klaus, voiced by J.K. Simmons.
Previously only available in a hardcover edition, the definitive look at one of the earliest and most successful comic strips and its creator arrives this week for the comic’s 90th anniversary. The writer-artist is the late Belgian visionary Georges Remi, who went by his initials R.G., pronounced Hergé, his famous character a young reporter, adventurer, and detective named Tintin, and the book is Tintin: The Art of Hergé. If you’re lucky, you’ve already seen Steven Spielberg’s ground-breaking 2011 animated movieThe Adventures of Tintin, the culmination of decades of popularity of a boy and his dog Snowy who influenced and entertained millions of readers across the globe. In the 1920s Hergé had the idea of making low-cost movies on paper, and the result was a comic strip stuffed with visual action that propelled the adventure forward like images pulled from a reel of film. Tintin: The Art of Hergeis available for pre-order here at Amazon today only and arrives in stores tomorrow.
Hergé and Tintin’s stories are intertwined with living history. Sometimes Hergé would be on the right side and other times he wouldn’t. But according to the book Tintin would inspire generations to take on investigative, daring, and spirited careers, and photographs show the kind of fandom in the 1920s that wouldn’t be a regular occurrence for pop culture icons until the likes of Elvis and The Beatles. Readers will see photographs of Hergé from his early days as a boy scout publication artist, and trace the development of his boy hero–a direct ancestor of the animated tales of shows like Jonny Quest–full of a well-established supporting slate of characters that would become archetypes in their own right, like the clumsy and inseparable duo Thomson and Thompson, and Tintin’s odd choice for a sidekick, Captain Haddock. Hergé built his fantasy universe atop the real world and real places, including cutting edge science in his story and art–research and realism factored into his stories. When Tintin goes to the moon 12 years before the real moon shot, his rocket is based on aerospace engineer and space architect Wernher von Braun’s early designs.
Tintin: The Art of Hergé, written and produced by Michel Daubert and the Hergé Museum in Belgium and first published in hardcover in 2013, covers the artist, his life, his famous characters and books, the artist’s influences, the comic’s influences on others, and the modern museum that commemorates the artist’s works and impact. At 480 pages this is the most exhaustive work on the artist and his comics. The finest component is perhaps the depth of original sketches and complete strips reproduced spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, all pulled from the Museum’s archives. The Museum itself, which honors the artist and his works with interpretations of his work by modern artists influenced by Hergé, is showcased in a chapter of the book, along with photographs and interviews.
Here is a preview of the book courtesy of Abrams ComicArts:
