The Batty Vampire

     Well, I’ve decided that I’m done with Angel, since I was never that big a fan of the character in the first place, and I need to save my money.  But I wanted to first read the exciting two-parter about Drusilla, which is partially written about Drusilla’s actress, Juliet Landau.  Sometime after her last appearance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Drusilla was found injured and subsequently taken in by a mental instution, where the doctors believe that she is delusional about her vampireness.  She is totally nuts, but that’s one thing she’s not nuts about.  No amount of medicines work on her either.  She ends up killing the one doctor who believes that all the manpower they use on her is a waste, and she ends up killing basically everyone in the institution.  So now, she’s loose.  However, one of the guards in the hospital seemed to have some idea of who she really was…

     I have not been a fan of Brian Lynch’s work on Angel basically from day one, but maybe Juliet Landau’s superb understanding of the character has overriden his bad writing skills.  This issue was extremely fun, especially seeing how all the doctors reacted to her.  She’s still as bonkers as ever, and Landau definitely understands her own character after all that time working with her.  As for Franco Urru, his work is a lot better than what he normally produces, to the point that I can actually recognize Landau in Drusilla’s face in some of the panels.  Basically, this is a fun little romp with Drusilla that is well worth me waiting two more issues to cancel my subscription.  Fans of the character will love this story.  I’m just so glad that Lynch wasn’t writing this by himself, or it might have just been “a colossal waste of time.”

Plot: 8.3      Art: 7.9      Dialogue: 8.2      Overall: 8.2

Calming Your Inner Werewolf

     The Scoobies have located Oz in the newest issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight.  And it seems a lot has happened to him since they last met.  Twilight, for one, does not believe that Buffy hasn’t just disappeared or died, and it seemse also knows Buffy.  Anyway, it seems that Oz came to Tibet in order to keep his feral nature under control.  It took a lot of work and there were times when things seemed hopeless.  Meanwhile, Twilight and his gang try to locate Buffy.  Thanks to Bayarmaa, a fellow werewolf, he got things under control, and he even managed to help other people do the same.  However, one of the werewolves they once helped betrayed them and started convincing people to give into their werewolf nature.  When said werewolf attacked them, Bay killed him.  The two of them even have a kid.  He agrees to help them deal with their magic, as well as bury their submarine, and Twilight travels to Mongolia instead of Tibet.  He says that the idiot who messed up on locating the Scoobies is going to get it.

     I really liked this issue because of the way it went over Oz as a character, and what he’s done since we last saw him.  Admittedly, Oz was one of my least favorite characters from the show, but it’s Buffy, so I did still like him.  And I really like this concept of “hiding” or “controlling” your magic.  Plus, another cool idea is that Twilight really does know Buffy.  So he’s somebody we’ve probably already met.  I’m greatly enjoying this arc, as well as the comedic potential behind the butter tea and the werewolf situation.  I would still like a tad more explanation as to what precipitated these problems, but that’s really my only complaint.  Jane Espenson is one of the best Buffy writers I’ve ever seen, and Georges Jeanty’s art still fits this title quite well.  At this point, though, I just can’t wait until we find out who Twilight is.  But I also really hope that Oz doesn’t get to lose this really good thing he’s got going for him.

Plot: 9.2      Art: 9.2      Dialogue: 9.2      Overall: 9.2

A Bargain with the Devil’s Head

     Tim Drake, the current Red Robin, continues the search for Bruce Wayne in his eponymous series.  In Berlin, Tim checks out the German Museum of Anthropology, for reasons that somewhat escape me.  Maybe he somehow knows what happened to Bruce, being stuck in the past at the end of Final Crisis?  Anyway, Ra’s al Ghul tries to seduce Tim into coming to the dark side.  Then, Tim gets caught by the newest Wild Huntsman.  In a flashback, Tim visits Bruce’s unmarked grave, and Wonder Girl arrives and tries to convince him he’s not alone.  In the present time, Lucius Fox calls his daughter at Wayne Enterprises in Moscow for some unspecified reason.  Back in Berlin, Tim faces off against the Huntsman and his hounds before getting some assistance from the three members of the League of Assassins who attacked him last issue.  In the past, in Washington D.C., another member of the League of Assassins is mysteriously killed.  Then, in Tim’s flashback, he tells Wonder Girl that he actually agreed with a lot of the Anti-Life Equation.  In another time switch to the present, Tim tells Ra’s to call off his goons, and he manages to stop the Huntsman.  Back in the past, Tim tries to convince Wonder Girl that Batman, that Bruce Wayne is still alive, but to no avail.  Wonder Girl calls Dick Grayson to get help for Tim.  Then, back in the present, Tim travels to Baghdad, where he is once again greeted by the assassin trio, who know call him boss.

     This series continues to be plagued by the problems that were there from day one.  For one, it still seems kind of aimless, despite Tim having a very concrete goal.  We don’t know why he’s going where he’s going, or even what kind of evidence he’s looking for.  Maybe that’s supposed to reflect the very fact that his goal is based on no evidence, but it weakens the plot of the story.  Then there’s the fact that Chris Yost just doesn’t write this series very excitingly.  I mean, there’s fighting.  But it’s just not as dynamic as his work on New X-Men with Craig Kyle.  Maybe they work best together.  It’s all solid work, but it doesn’t quite reach that level that really makes it pop out at you.  Also, Ramon Bachs’ art has already grown stale.  Marcus To, the guy who is going to replace Bachs after this arc, seems to draw a lot closer to what I expected for this series.  I mean, Bachs’ work is good, but it’s just not a good fit for this series.  All in all, I think that, if this series had a different creative team, it would be a lot better.  For now, it’s just stuck as being another series, one that is pretty good, but not good enough to be truly noticable.

Plot: 7.6      Art: 7.5      Dialogue: 7.6      Overall: 7.5

The Blackest Night Reaches the Dark Knight

     Since I am completely supportive of the new Batman status quo, I figured I’d see how Blackest Night impacts Mr. Dick Grayson by picking up Blackest Night: Batman.  Plus, it’s written by Peter Tomasi, so it can’t go wrong!  Anyway, the current Batman and Robin visit Bruce’s grave to find everything completely dug up, referencing Black Hand’s previous visit, as well as Martian Manhunter’s arrival there.  Elsewhere, Deadman tries to keep his body from rising as a Black Lantern, but he is unsuccessful.  He tries to possess his own body, but it’s so painful that he leaps out.  Instead, he flies elsewhere to look for someone else he can trust.  Above Gotham City, Black Lantern rings bring back a bunch of D-List Batman villains, like Magpie and the Trigger Twins, as well as one B-Lister, the original Ventriloquist.  Dick and Damian talk about things not being the way Damian thought they would, and Dick is suddenly possessed by Deadman.  Deadman realizes that he isn’t Bruce Wayne, and that Bruce is dead.  Then he possesses Damian and chats with Dick about how screwed up Damian is and all the Blackest Night stuff that’s going on.  Elsewhere, Dick’s parents and Red Robin’s parents come back as Black Lanterns.  All the evil of these people rising forces Deadman out of Damian’s body, and Dick calls Tim Drake to tell him the bad news.  After all, as Damian says, they’re going to need all the help they can get.

     I really appreciate it when writers take the time to make sure that a comic book that closely ties in with another comic book also fits into that other comic book’s timeline.  Since Peter Tomasi is one of the people working on Blackest Night, he knows the timeline perfectly, so Batman’s story fits seamlessly into that.  This story hits a lot of the same notes as Batman and Batman and Robin, so it feels thematically the same.  Plus, because it’s Tomasi, it also hits all the Blackest Night notes.  Thus, it manages to successfully be both a Batman and a Blackest Night story.  It still seems to me that Grant Morrison is best at the new Batman and Robin dynamic, but Tomasi still does a great job.  I’ve never read anything with Deadman in it, except his brief cameo in Kingdom Come, but I already like him as a character.  Tomasi does a great job making him interesting.  The last time I saw Ardian Syaf’s work, I thought it looked pretty lifeless.  Nei Ruffino’s colors do wonders towards fixing that, but Syaf is still just a pale imitation of Andy Kubert.  It’s good, but certainly not the best.  At any rate, this series is successful in achieving its main goals.  And it does them while still being interesting.  For a miniseries that ties into a major event, I’d say that’s pretty dang good.

Plot: 8.3      Art: 7.9      Dialogue: 8.5      Overall: 8.3

A Movie That Requires Very Little Thinking

     The sci-fi movie of the summer, District 9 is a movie based on a short film called Alive in Joburg.  The premise is that, twenty years ago, a massive alien ship appeared above Johannesburg, South Africa.  Today, the aliens that lived inside it are corralled off in an area called District 9, which is completely fenced off.  The aliens, which look like insectoid bipeds with antennae and tentacled mouths, have essentially no rights, and they live in squalor.  A private defense contractor, Multinational United, is in charge of the district, which also contains a Nigerian gang, which manages a huge black market operation.  It is in this situation that Wikus van de Merwe, an MNU bureaucrat, is placed in charge of the operation to move the aliens from District 9 to a new area nearby, in order to ease popular fears towards them.  However, in the course of evicting the aliens, he gets a bizarre liquid from an alien canister on his face.  This begins his transformation into one of those aliens.  He is taken by MNU for genetic testing and organ harvesting, since the aliens’ extremely powerful weapons are keyed into their DNA, but he manages to escape.  He ends up meeting with the alien who made the canister, named Christopher Johnson by the MNU, and Christopher’s young son, and Christopher promises to cure Wikus in return for the canister.  The canister actually contains fuel for the command module for the giant ship, which has laid dormant under their home for the past twenty years.  Over the course of retrieving the canister, dealing with MNU thugs and the Nigerian gangsters, and generally trying to stay alive, Wikus begins to feel sympathy for the aliens.  In the end, he holds the MNU off while Christopher and his son escape to the ship and leave for their home planet.  He manages to survive the conflict, though he is completely transformed into an alien himself.

     This is a movie that should be so politically rich while full of awesome sci-fi stuff, but the complete and total idiotic simplicity of the plot is so shocking that you wonder how much Neill Blomkamp, the director and writer of the movie, actually thought about it.  Wikus is a complete and total buffoon whose consistently bad judgment makes him almost deserving of his fate.  The blatant anti-alien racism is so completely not subtle that it’s just disgusting, and MNU is just a crude manifestation of the military-industrial complex.  Instead of being taken through the story in a reasonable and intelligent manner, the viewer is beaten over the head with these concepts, as though anything less obvious would be incomprehensible.  The plot has many holes, the least of which is the bizarreness of the idea that fuel can make you into an alien.  The inconsistency of that major plot device is astounding.  Also, why did these aliens even come to Earth?  Why were they malnourished?  Why didn’t they just use their superpowerful weapons to beat the crap out of the humans?  The questions go on.  The vast majority of the actors are complete and total unknowns, and the acting is quite mediocre.  It’s not bad, but it’s certainly not good.  And most of the characters are idiots or assholes.  The only really sympathetic figures are Christopher and his son.  The music is so forgettable that I can’t actually remember there even being music in the movie, and the cinematography is so spastic that it can make you dizzy.  At the very least, I can admit that the aliens look cool.  So, the combination of a bad plot, terrible execution, poor philosophical underpinnings, nonexistent music, snoozy acting, and horrible camera work is that this is a totally unsatisfying movie.  In fact, I’m shocked that anyone would claim that this is a thinking man’s movie.  Said person’s definition of a thinking man’s movie must be rather inclusive.  I’m shocked that Peter Jackson would associate himself with such trash of a movie.  Once again, critics, the general public, and I completely disagree.

Story: 1.5      Cinematography: 2.7      Soundtrack: 0.5      Acting: 4.3      Overall: 1.7