In Contention

Tag: comic books

  • Who should be on Christopher Nolan’s ‘Superman’ shortlist?

    My RSS feed was absolutely stuffed to the brim with the clamoring re-reporting of the geek press’s favorite story of the week yesterday: OMG! Christopher Nolan is meeting with a shortlist of potential “Superman” directors!

    Except the list is all wrong. The names: Tony Scott, Matt Reeves, Jonathan Liebsman, Duncan Jones and Zack Snyder.  Now, I love Reeves and Jones (the two getting most people excited) as much as the next guy. But they don’t feel thematically right for this material. And Superman boasts a scope that these directors, however talented on a smaller scale, have yet to prove capable of navigating.

    Liebsman, meanwhile, is the intriguing up-and-comer pick, and though I haven’t seen “Battle: Los Angeles,” I feel like this is just a way to insert some in-house cross-promoting potential (“from the director of ‘Clash of the Titans 2,’” you know?). And Snyder, well, I wouldn’t be entirely against it, but I’d know from the start that it would be a stylistic divergence unsuitable to the character.

    Scott is really the most interesting pick of the bunch, and if this were pre-frenetic filmmaking Scott (i.e. pre-“Enemy of the State”), I’d be all about it. I’d say the guy who copped Scott’s early style would be a better pick…

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  • ‘Inception’ prologue comic online

    I was just wondering the other day why Warner Bros. had not taken advantage of a very real opportunity to cross-promote Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” directly to the comic book crowd.  Every other blockbuster film these days seems to have a dubious tie-in book, be it “Transformers” or “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” or “Terminator Salvation,” etc.  Even television frequently embraces it.

    Meanwhile, “Inception” is the kind of thing that would be most interestingly supplemented by a graphic work.  This is a world of high-end caper-type imagery that can go far on the page with smart storytelling behind it.  But I figured it wouldn’t happen.  We didn’t even get a tie-in comic for “The Dark Knight,” the first time that’s happened with a Batman film.

    Well, it looks like a similar plan was in the cards all along.  The studio has released the digital comic “Incetion: The Cobol Job” exclusively at LeonardoDicaprio.com, but it’s also on Yahoo! Movies, so that’s not really “exclusive,” I guess.  It’s not bad, though writer Jordan Greenberg has drastically simplified what is a bit more sophisticated in the film.  But that’s probably a necessity.

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