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When it comes to fan films (as opposed to other media), resource constraints tend to impose upon the creativity a little more heavily, since the creation of an aesthetically successful motion picture requires a delicate alchemy combining the best of every kind of artistic medium invented to this point. It can be expensive, and it can be even more difficult to find collaborators whose enthusiasm for a project is matched by their skill. That’s why a fan film as tremendous as Grayson, directed by John Fiorella, is a major accomplishment. Beyond being such a great example of the fan film, it arrived at a pivotal moment in pop culture, emerging as the quintessential superhero film of the decade.

Seriously, my world just turned upside down.
Early in the year I forced myself to sit through Christopher Nolan’s painful but much hyped follow-up to the dreadfully mediocre Batman Begins.  You know Christopher Nolan, the guy who made the brilliant and ambitious movie, Memento, following it with one of the decade’s smartest American movies, The Prestige.  As a Batman fan, sitting through The Dark Knight was a physically painful affair: dire, clichéd rubbish, an overly traditional man vs terrorist setup soaked to the brim in an unquestioning philosophy a mile or …

Huge lot of comics fans that we are, the Playtime Staff sat down for a roundtable on Zach Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Matt Kessen, our resident Watchmen expert was tapped to conduct the discussion, especially in regards to how the film differed from Moore’s graphic novel. The following takes place over the the week before and after the film’s release. If you are interested in continuing the discussion, feel free to jump into the fray on the forum.

Page One: Quis custodiet ipsos custodis? The Pre-Game
Page Two: Why I Am Not Seeing …

A surprisingly sturdy, mildly provocative 105 minute movie is hiding somewhere in Watchmen’s gangly two and three-quarter hours running time. Dense with shockingly unnecessary exposition, this story about the nature of heroism and identity indulges in a great deal of introspective character study between bouts of flamboyant brutality and fleeting moments where director Zack Snyder’s technical prowess and filmmaking ambition coincide. As a messy, sprawling adaptation, the product of marketing, focus-testing, and the instincts of a young would-be visionary still learning his craft, the inchoate professionalism of the production serves the film’s gargantuan ambitions and readymade stature, rather than completely defeating it. From the perspective of the film’s own history, it is a miracle that it got made at all.

Responding to a call for Playtime writers to talk about their favorite authors and the works that shaped them as writers, I decided to elucidate my fascination with Medieval Literature — specifically Arthurian Literature and its most enduring female writer, Marie de France.
International flavor train?
Superman, Coca-Cola. If you were asked to draw up a list of the shared cultural heritage and imagery of Western society, you might present some variation thereon — imagery that taps into brand recognition as much as actual cultural heritage. A Coca-Cola can in Hebrew or …

Here’s the best part about being a film geek: you can become genuinely excited about the stupidest things, and it profoundly impacts the way you see a movie. Like a certain actor showing up. They don’t even have to do a good job; the quality of the performance may even be tertiary to your glee. You’re just amped that they showed up. Push is full of faces that bring me joy; joy for no other purpose than to know that they are getting work in troubled economic times. Even if times weren’t troubled, I’d be happy these actors were working, so that I could just soak up their onscreen charisma from my theater seat like a roly-poly incubus.

It seems as though 2007 and 2008 are mirror images of each other.  2007 was a year in which blockbuster summer entertainment hit an all-time low, with unimaginative sequels and threequels failing creatively left and right.  However, there were a lot of great films that came out outside of the bloated summer mold that were fantastic, so many that putting together a list of my favorites that year was almost impossible and actually ranking them was out of the question.  This year was the opposite, the summer movie season was …

Original illustration by Michael Sean Hansen.
“It a choice, Wesley, that each of us must face: to remain ordinary, pathetic, beat-down, coasting through a miserable existence, like sheep herded by fate - or you can take control of your own destiny and join us, releasing the caged wolf you have inside. Our purpose is to maintain stability in an unstable world - kill one, save a thousand. Within the fabric of this world, every life hangs by a thread. We are that thread - a fraternity of assassins with the weapons …

The latest opus from Garth Ennis (author of Preacher, Hellblazer, The Punisher) is a brutal satire entitled The Boys.  It charts the exploits of a group of thugs clandestinely employed by the CIA.  Their task is to control, by any means necessary, various teams of high profile superheroes, whose carelessness, stupidity, arrogance and selfishness cause far more damage to society than the antics of the supervillains they oppose.  Controversially, the comic mixes harsh brutality with its uncompromising anti-superhero polemic, with graphically violent illustrations from DC illustrator, Darick Robertson.  Famously, Ennis …