‘Joes and Jetpacks’ with E.C. Yi
For the newest Shelf Conscious, Keith is joined by comic artist and toy enthusiast, E.C. Yi!
Tag: The Dark Knight
NOC Exclusive Interview: ‘Mortal Kombat’ Star Chin Han
Heyyy! It’s Kuya P back again with another NOC EXCLUSIVE! I was lucky enough to sit down for a quick conversation with Actor, Chin Han who will be appearing as Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat premiering in Theaters and HBO Max this Friday!
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‘Black Panther’ Breaks the Oscars’ Superhero Ceiling
History was made this morning when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled its list of honorees celebrating the films of 2018 and named Black Panther as one of the nominees for Best Picture. While plenty of comic book films have received nominations over the decades, no superhero film had ever been nominated for the most prestigious prize of the night. The Dark Knight came closest in 2009 — winning a posthumous Best Supporting Actor award for Heath Ledger and prompting the Academy to expand its nomination list from five to ten the following year.
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Hard NOC Life: The Year in Superhero Media
For the last Hard NOC Life of 2018, Keith is joined by actor, writer, filmmaker, and professional nerd Jon Lee Brody to recap the year in superheroes in film and television.
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Hard NOC Life: Remixing the Classics
On a new episode of Hard NOC Life, Shawn and Keith Chow have another talk about the week in Nerd Pop, with a special focus on rebooting and reimagining classic shows.
Ten Years Later, ‘The Dark Knight’ Returns to Theaters
On July18, 2008, The Dark Knight was released in theaters and changed things… forever. Ten years later, Warner Bros. is re-releasing Christopher Nolan’s seminal superhero film in select IMAX theaters for one week only.
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Chin Han on ‘Skyscraper,’ Filming in Asia, and Joining the Academy
Let’s be real. You’ve seen this actor before. He’s that Asian guy who played in that blockbuster movie. No, he played that actor in that other film. You’re right. He’s been in all of them.
Ng Chin Han, known simply as Chin Han, is a face you may recognize in blockbuster films like The Dark Knight, 2012, Contagion, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Independence Day: Resurgence, Ghost in the Shell and now, in this weekend’s Skyscraper. The actor is no stranger to the Hollywood life, but also stays true to his Singaporean roots.
Chin Han was also recently one of 928 inductees invited to join The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences governing board in an effort to increase diversity and also honor him for his success in Hollywood.
We got to chat with him on the phone about his work on Skyscraper, what his invitation means to him, and why Hollywood is opening its doors to Asia.
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Forget the DCEU: Warner Brothers Should Embrace the Multiverse
It has not been a great couple of weeks (years?) on the DC Films front.
After Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad failed to live up to most people’s expectations last summer, Warner Brothers looked like it was starting to right the DCEU ship. Triumphant teasers for Wonder Woman and Justice League made DC the talk of San Diego, and fans were stoked for directors like James Wan, Rick Famuyiwa, and Ben Affleck to lend their visions to DC supeheroes. Well, less than a year later, 60% of those directors have been dropped and now, Ben (maybe?) doesn’t even want to be Batman anymore. And in the most WTF move yet, Warner has approached an actual misogynst, anti-semitic racist to helm a movie with the initials S.S.!
But, taking a page from Vulture’s always awesome
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‘The Dark Knight’ Changed the Way I Watched Movies
by Benjamin To | Originally published at BANDtogether
In the summer of 2008, there I was: A fresh-faced, 19-year-old pharmacy school dropout, a few months removed from stepping off the plane from humble Oregon and on to hopeful California soil. I had no direction of where I was going or knowledge of how to accomplish my lofty goals, but I knew I wanted one thing and one thing only: I wanted to be a part of cinema.
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Things Other Movies Did Better Than Batman v Superman
I didn’t hate Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I walked into the theater last night fully expecting to hate it. Two and a half hours later, I ended up merely not liking it. That’s progress, I guess?
That said, there were a couple things I actually liked (most having to do with Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman) and I can’t deny that Ben Affleck looks like Batman (even though he sure doesn’t act like him). But the thing that distracted me throughout the movie was the fact that it contained a lot of elements that were executed better in other live action adaptations.
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Scored Too Soon? The Career of Michael Jai White: A Retrospective
In most sports, scoring early is a good thing. If you’re a soccer player or fan, though, you know the woes of scoring too early. If any of you listen to or watch Men in Blazers, you’ve heard this all before from Roger’s unending sadness with his Everton routinely scoring too early. This has happened to me both on the pitch, but mostly watching my beloved teams pay dearly for going up 1-0 in the first five minutes of matches only to be smacked down with three or four unanswered goals once the final whistle blows. It’s part of the roller coaster of emotions that is the world of football. I feel like this could be a metaphor for Michael Jai White’s career.
I recently had an evening to myself and while scrolling through the ever expanding Netflix streaming queue, I noticed a couple of recent Michael Jai White flicks I hadn’t yet seen. Double feature? Sure.
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Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Hot Toys?
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. It is the holidays after all. Speaking of which, I Just happen to be abroad at the moment and just had to share some pics from a recent pilgrimage to the Hot Toys Secret Base in Hong Kong. Check out the photos after the break.
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Why So Serious? Of Course DC has a “No Jokes” Policy
Earlier in the week, Drew McWeeny at HitFix sent the internet into a tizzy when he reported that Warner Brothers and DC Entertainment had mandated a strict “no jokes” policy for their entire slate of upcoming superhero movies. As per usual, much handwringing ensued, followed by several reports debunking the original one.
Whether that no joking policy was true or not is irrelevant. The mere fact that so many people believed it in the first place shows just how different and far apart DC and Marvel are in their approaches to superheroes. For decades, DC has embraced grimdark — in both their comics and their movies — to their benefit as well as their detriment.
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Legend of The Dark Knight: More with Michael Uslan
In Part One of our conversation with Michael Uslan, the Batman movie uber-producer recounted his decades-long journey to bring a “dark and serious” version of the Dark Knight from the comic pages to the movie screen, a journey that is the foundation of his memoir, The Boy Who Loved Batman. After a string of Hollywood studios and financiers initially rejected the idea, the Batman film franchise has gone on to earn billions of dollars in box office and merchandising and solidify Batman as a cinematic legend, with even more big screen adventures on the way.
After the jump, Michael and I continue our discussion of what makes the Batman such an iconic — and enduring — character.
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Capes and Quivers: Superheroes on TV
Keith (@the_real_chow) brings on Rodrigo (@rscspokenword) and ODU prof ‘Shawn to talk about superhero televisions shows, specifically the upcoming Iron Fist on Netflix and The CW’s Arrow.
As a special guest, we have Arrow costume concept illustrator Andy Poon to talk about designing the superhero look of the Arrow-verse.
Why ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ is Better in English
Yeah, I said it.
Look, like any good nerd, I normally prefer watching a foreign movie as it was originally intended. When Disney scours Hollywood for top-level talent to overdub their vast catalog of Studio Ghibli titles, I’m not their target audience. And unlike most Americans, I actually don’t mind reading my movies if subtitles are required.
But let me get back to my original point. Of all the Miyazaki movies that have been dubbed in English, I believe Howl’s Moving Castle is the only one that works. Before I get into that, though, I want to talk about what’s wrong with dubbing foreign movies in the first place.
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How Avengers is Ruining the Superhero Movie
As of April 2013, The Avengers had grossed more than $600 million dollars in the US, a box office performance that has nearly tripled its (already bloated) production budget. It would be fair to say that if you’re a Hollywood movie producer, The Avengers makes you very, very, very happy. In fact, you’re hoping to make as many Avengers franchises as you possibly can.
Against this backdrop of undeniable success, it seems major Hollywood production companies are hoping to do just that. For the last few months, the Internet has been a-buzz with casting rumours for Man of Steel 2: first with news that Ben Affleck was being tapped to play an aging Batman, and last week with the announcement that virtually unknown actress Gal Gadot (of Fast and Furious franchise fame) was assuming the mantle of Wonder Woman. Although fans have long clamoured for a live-action Justice League adaptation, the fact that all three members of the heralded DC Trinity will be making an appearance in Man of Steel 2 — a movie that we all expected would be just another Superman solo vehicle — is clear indication that WB/DC has drawn inspiration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is looking to fast-track the Justice League movie by rapidly introducing other characters to the silver screen. Fans have since speculated that while Gadot might make a minimal cameo in Man of Steel 2, it’s likely that she will subsequently headline her own Wonder Woman movie that would further stoke the fires for a full Justice League film.
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Nolan’s Batman Should Be in the Man of Steel Sequel
Let me start by saying that this post is not intended to be a rant against Batfleck. I’m actually on board with the idea of Ben as Batman, so his fitness to be the new Dark Knight Detective is not what the headline of this article is implying. Instead, as the rumors continue to swirl about the Man of Steel sequel (I refuse to call it Batman vs. Superman because that’s just a dumb title — though these are even dumber), I keep feeling less and less inclined to be happy with the movie. It’s not the sequel we deserve, but it’s the one we’re getting right now. And this from someone who actually really sort of liked Man of Steel.
Of course, all of the leaks and rumors that are currently flooding the tubes right now could all turn out to be massively wrong. But there was one report that surfaced last week that really made me reevaluate just what DC and Warner Bros. are trying to accomplish with this new, shared cinematic universe.
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Breaking Bats and Monkeys
Earlier I wrote about the endless narrative possibilities available in the superhero comics genre. Of course, comics are not the only medium to enjoy the fractal narrative. Philip Marlowe, the Continental Op, and Sherlock Holmes are ageless detectives forever solving crimes in short stories and novels. If Jet Li had so desired it, Tsui Hark would probably have made fifty more Wong Fei-Hong movies. And the Brits have the idea down with James Bond and Doctor Who.
But while the fractals can expand forever, artists given to make their own new stories and interpretations can sometimes make changes that are so drastic that they change the nature of the character the audience has come to know. Artists should of course be able to bend and experiment with characters to find new avenues, but there must be limits, no? Because the danger in the course of bending a character is the potential of breaking it.
A Series of Carefully Selected Moments Over the Course of 35 Years
In all sincerity, I actually attempted to construct this in a more conventional narrative form, with the initial phase being the following series of roughly dated bullets. Upon completion, I realized the bullets actually covered my “nerdom coming-of-age” origin tale better than any formal composition.
So yeah, in all it’s abstract glory, here you go:
- 1980s… My Saturday Morning line-up for a decade was (in no particular order): Spidey and his Amazing Friends, Captain N: The Game Master, The Get-Along Gang, Pole Position, Fraggle Rock, The Gummi Bears, Danger Mouse, Inspector Gadget, Mighty Mouse (The New Adventures), Garfield and Friends, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, ReBoot…
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