The Great Wall: The Art of the Film

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The borg.com Best of 2017–The Best in Print

Filed under: Backstage Pass, Comics & Books, Con Culture, Fantasy Realms, Movies, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, Superheroes — Leave a comment

December 29, 2017

Our borg.com Best of 2017 list continues today with the Best in Print. If you missed them, check out our review of the Best Movies of 2017 here, the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2017 here, and the Best in Television here.

So let’s get going. Here are our selections for this year’s Best in Print:

Best New Edition of Previous Published Work – The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame, David Petersen (IDW Publishing). David Petersen’s artwork was the perfect excuse to get Kenneth Grahame’s wonderful classic The Wind in the Willows into the hands of new readers. The new edition from IDW Publishing was the perfect storybook, and Petersen, known best for his Mouse Guard series, showed his understanding of these characters and their natural world full of wonder through his fantasy images.

Best Read, Best Retro Read – Forever and a Death, Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime). Not every good idea comes to fruition. Not every excellent project gets off the ground. Not every great book gets published. The Hard Case Crime imprint of Titan Books came through again, seizing the opportunity to take a lost, never before published work of Donald E. Westlake--Forever and a Death--and brought it to life. And what a great adventure! Originally the story commissioned to be the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the projected was shelved, and only now do we get fantastic characters (like environmental activist and diver Kim Baldur) in a very Bondian situation–destroying Hong Kong as payback for China taking it back from Great Britain. Honorable mention for Best Retro Read: Turn on the Heat, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dragon Teeth, Michael Crichton.

Best Sci-Fi Read – Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis, Bradley W. Schenck (Tor Books). Imaginative, new, and fun, Schenck took us into a timeless world full of nostalgia and classic science fiction. Great tech, and a sprawling story. Interesting characters and great world-building, this novel will be a great surprise for sci-fi readers. Honorable mention: War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations, Greg Keyes.

Best Fantasy Read – An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Curtis Craddock (Tor Books). The plot of this debut novel is labyrinthine and action-packed, full of assassination attempts from all quarters, courtly intrigue galore, grandiose philosophies, and a cast of characters anchored by the strong, smart, resourceful, and eminently likeable heroes. Supporting everything is Craddock’s strong, confident, often-funny, and sharply observant writing that goes from heart-wrenching to hilarious on a single page without missing a beat. A dazzling debut.

Best Genre Non-fiction – Middle-Earth: From Script to Screen, Daniel Falconer (Harper Design). We wish every genre franchise had such a magnificent, thorough, monumental guide. Falconer’s guide to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies is full of interviews at all levels of the creative process, and supported by concept art, photographs, maps, and so much more. Worthy of the six films it covers, it’s the ultimate fan book and a model for any franchise attempting to put everything fans could want into a single volume.

There’s much more of our selections for 2017’s Best in Print and more, after the jump…

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Tags: Abbie Bernstein, Abrams Books, Alex Ross, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, Archie Horror, Batman/Elmer Fudd, Best in Print 2017, Best of 2017, Best of the Best, borg.com Best of 2017, Bradley W. Schenck, Byron Vaughns, Caseen Gaines, Curtis Craddock, Daniel Falconer, David Petersen, David Tipton, DC Comics, Donald E. Westlake, Dragon Teeth, Erle Stanley Gardner, Forever and a Death, Hard Case Crime, Harper Design, IDW Publishing, Insight Editions, J.K. Woodward, Joe Nazarro, Jughead: The Hunger, Kenneth Grahame, Lee Weeks, Looney Tunes, Mark Brooks, Michael Crichton, Middle-Earth: From Script to Screen, Mike Mayhew, Phil Szostak, Robert Hack, Scott Tipton, Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis, Star Trek Beyond: The Make-up Artistry of Joel Harlow, Star Trek: The Next Generation Mirror Broken!, Star Wars: The Last Jedi -- The Storms of Crait, The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Dark Crystal: The Ultimate Visual History, The Great Wall: The Art of the Film, The Wind in the Willows, Titan Books, Tom King, Tor Books, Turn On the Heat

Now streaming–China’s ambitious, epic action film, The Great Wall

Filed under: Fantasy Realms, Movies — Leave a comment

July 19, 2017

Review by C.J. Bunce

It is a study in East meets West, or at least it tries really hard to be. Visually The Great Wall will likely be the most beautiful film you see this year. The worldbuilding is on a grand scale, epic, and worthy of the historic monumental icon of China. The intelligently thought out military structure and interplay of weapons, color, purpose, props, and costumes is second perhaps only to Peter Jackson’s Tolkien world fantasy films. The costumes are exquisite–detailed, rich, stylized, ornate, and simply phenomenal. But like many big movies this year, it is a weak story that keeps The Great Wall from its potential.

If you’re a fan of classic action films from China, you will have no problem jumping right into the action of The Great Wall. But if you’re easily distracted by new things, you probably should skip this one. Its style of storytelling and dialogue are unique for a mainstream Western release so it is understandable why the film had problems attracting audiences here, even beyond all of the politics that accompanied its release (the objection of some in Matt Damon’s lead role, a Caucasian lead in a medieval, epic story about China–whitewashing as discussed with respect to Doctor Strange–similar to criticisms when Tom Cruise was the lead in a Japanese-focused story in The Last Samurai). And if you don’t like subtitles, you probably won’t be drawn to The Great Wall. But you’d be missing something spectacular. So many features make the biggest budget film in China’s history worthy of at least one viewing.

You’ll find much telling instead of showing, something better films of the Western tradition endeavor to avoid. You’ll witness soldiers marveling at what by all counts is an epic military battle, but then they actually state as much. It’s a quirky thing that will probably make the average Western moviegoer shudder a bit. Yet if you look beyond the almost characteristically Eastern movie abrupt dialogue shifts, interspersed tangent story elements and nonlinear style, you’ll find some great takeaways. Like one of the year’s best, badass heroines in Tian Jing’s swashbuckling Commander-turned-General Lin Mae–a powerful dragon killer in command of the entire Chinese army whose cliff-diving daredevilry and death-defying air balloon war machines evoke the best World War II movie action sequences. The martial arts stuntwork is like that of no other movie this year. The special effects are impressive, especially the interplay of set construction and battle scenes and heretofore unseen methods of combat and destruction used to defend the wall. The purely CGI creations–WETA and Industrial Light & Magic’s mythic Tao Tei dragons–look real, and they even have their own layered culture with the ability to plan an intelligent battle strategy.

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Tags: Industrial Light and Magic, kickass women, Matt Damon, medieval fantasy, Peng Yong, The Great Wall, The Great Wall movie review, The Great Wall: The Art of the Film, Tian Jing, Weta, Zhang Yimou

Book Review–The Great Wall: The Art of the Film sets a new standard for art books

Filed under: Backstage Pass, Comics & Books, Fantasy Realms, Movies — Leave a comment

March 6, 2017

Review by C.J. Bunce

The best thing about reading a book about the making of a film, without first watching the film, is that your view of the book is not skewed by your opinion of the film. If you knew nothing about The Great Wall, the new behind-the-scenes look in The Great Wall: The Art of the Film will prompt you to want to see it. Not only will you find incredible concept art, set design, costumes, and props, the book itself is unique. In the past five years “making of” film and art books have vastly improved in quality. Abbie Bernstein’s new book from Titan Books features the best quality images, the best layouts, and the best book design of any book yet reviewed at borg.com–the book itself has a traditional Chinese book binding and gilded edges. It also features an element left out of many film books these days–it includes images of the entire film, and doesn’t remove spoiler elements, such as, in this case, detailed images of the film’s monsters and ending (the art book for Star Wars: The Force Awakens provided no final image of Luke Skywalker and several costumes and props, as an example).

An icon of China cinema, the man behind several “art house” films in China and the opening ceremony at the Beijing Olympics, director Zhang Yimou discusses in the book why The Great Wall is unique and how it became the biggest production in China film history. If you have watched stunning Chinese film work over the years and aren’t a fan of dubbed or subtitled films, the barrier is language–how can you connect U.S. and Chinese film audiences? Yimou intended just that by making a Hollywood-esque film as a Chinese production in English with a cast and crew from dozens of nations, including more than 100 on-set translators. Beyond that goal, the powerful imagery of the film as displayed throughout The Great Wall: The Art of the Film, is the stuff of Academy Award-winning costume design and art design.

Along with interviews with Zhang are chapters featuring producer Peter Loehr, actors Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Jing Tian, and Willem Dafoe. The most visually stunning chapters detail The Nameless Order, with Zhang’s color coding of each fighting corps, including the royal blue Crane Corps–the fighting unit consisting entirely of women. We see frosted plastic pages displaying each corps symbol, and poster quality designs highlight each leader, along with their shields and weaponry. Detailed sections feature the creation and design of the film’s monsters–the mythical Tao Tei–and how WETA and Industrial Light and Magic created them. And each key sequence of the film is revealed with photographs of special effects and the actors in action.

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