Bruno Mars loves Mary Jane: Zendaya from Spider-Man: Homecoming accidentally resembles vintage MJ in the "Versace on the Floor" video

This is the 11th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

WARNING: Spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming ahead.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Oscar-winning Room star Brie Larson has had a killer year as a dramatic performer, so it's time to revisit my March 5, 2015 discussion of an offbeat cult movie in which Larson got to revisit her little-known past as a teenage pop singer, as well as experience a taste of her future. In this 2010 movie, Larson briefly dabbled in the same kind of pulpy material she'll be tackling soon as the star of the forthcoming tentpole blockbusters Kong: Skull Island and Captain Marvel. This 2010 movie has also been on its director's mind lately. When it aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, the director live-tweeted a bunch of crazy behind-the-scenes details about the movie.

The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.

I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."

Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzz did go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.

While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Faking Miracles"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



In "Faking Miracles," the Monarch--the failed Venture Bros. supervillain who thinks he possesses an intellect equal to that of Phantom Limb, his wife's ex, or even Wide Wale, but he's hardly in their league and is also currently without both an army of henchmen and the floating cocoon he and his minions used to call home--reacts the way you'd expect a wanna-be supervillain to react to discovering his father was a superhero: not very well. His reaction is akin to a white supremacist finding out one of his parents was actually Jewish.

On the other hand, Gary is fascinated with both the Blue Morpho--who based his crimefighting persona on the tropical butterfly known as the morpho, just like how his son is a butterfly-themed arch--and the state-of-the-art-for-the-'60s cave the Morpho kept below the Monarch's childhood home in Newark (color design supervisor Liz Artinian and her color design crew nicely recapture the bold late '60s network TV colors of Batman and Star Trek in their color schemes for the Morpho's cave). Gary tries to get his boss to see that being the son of the Morpho is actually a cool thing, even though the Morpho appears to have been a second-tier superhero who was often drunk on the job in the '60s flashback that opens "Faking Miracles." In Scaramantula's lair on Spider-Skull Island, the Morpho and Kano, a future Team Venture member, are seen rescuing the kidnapped members of the original Team Venture roster, including Jonas Venture Sr., who dislikes the Morpho. His second-rate quality seemed to affect even his own merchandise: the comic book that was based on the Morpho's crimefighting career tanked after only six issues ("Not Kirby's best work," notes Gary, who probably isn't too fond of Jack Kirby's strange 2001: A Space Odyssey comic from the '70s either).

(Photo source: Liz Artinian)

Voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, whose mustache happens to resemble his character's stache, the Morpho is a hybrid of the '60s William Dozier versions of Batman and the Green Hornet. Hank's Adam West-style Batman Halloween mask established that the '60s Batman show exists in the Ventureverse, so that means the Morpho wasn't the Batman or Hornet of this universe and was instead the Monarch's socialite dad ripping off the lead characters from Batman and its much less comedic sister show (a Batman/Green Hornet crossover was Dozier's attempt to get Batman viewers to catch The Green Hornet). Dozier was, by the way, the Greg Berlanti of 1966, but while Berlanti has been able to build an empire out of his network TV adaptations of Green Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, Dozier found success only with Batman. Based on an old radio drama that oddly took place in the same universe as The Lone Ranger's, The Green Hornet didn't become a popular TV show until a few years after its cancellation, when Bruce Lee's popularity renewed some interest in his role on the show as Kato, while Dozier's 1967 attempt to bring Dick Tracy back to TV failed to get past the pilot stage.

I'm looking forward to whatever Gary and the Monarch will be doing with all the equipment the Monarch's Dozier-style dad left behind. They're going to need to arm themselves with more than just the Monarch's tranq dart shooters now that Wide Wale followed up his act of ousting the Monarch from the position of arching Dr. Venture with the act of framing the Monarch for the violation of Guild of Calamitous Intent arching policy. In another nod to the '60s, "Faking Miracles" writer Jackson Publick has Wide Wale turning to none other than Dean Martin (Toby Huss), who had a cameo in "All This and Gargantua-2," to impersonate the Monarch and ruin this Level Six Guild member he finds to be a nuisance to the Guild, perhaps as retribution for the Monarch killing his brother Doug, a.k.a. Dr. Dugong, out of anger over the first time the Guild took away his arching rights to Dr. Venture.

In the Ventureverse, the Rat Packer never died and is known in the New York arching community as Copy-Cat, a supervillain whose superpower is similar to that of Jamie Madrox, a Marvel character who briefly caught my attention when writer Peter David relaunched him in 2004 as the star of Madrox, an inventive noir-style miniseries under the Marvel Knights imprint. Madrox reintroduced Jamie, a mutant who has the ability to create duplicates of himself, as a promiscuous and less-than-virtuous private eye who has trouble getting his dupes to cooperate with him, and the Marvel Knights mini led to David rebooting the X-Men spinoff X-Factor as a series about Jamie's detective agency (despite enjoying Madrox, I never got into X-Factor or any other post-1992 X-Men spinoff comic because like Deadpool says in his eponymous hit movie, these X-Men timelines can get so confusing). I love how Publick merged Madrox with Dino. I next want to see Peter Lawford drunkenly having trouble getting his adamantium claws to open another bottle of vodka.

Madrox (Photo source: Arion's Archaic Art)

At a party Wide Wale invited Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, the rest of the Council of 13 and a bunch of Manhattan socialites to attend, Wide Wale's requirement that none of the Guild members can bring their henchmen along with them is clearly intended to allow Copy-Cat to take down the Monarch, who's at his most vulnerable when Gary isn't there to protect him. Copy-Cat and his dupes trick Dr. Mrs. the Monarch into thinking her husband betrayed her and stood her up to illegally arch Dr. Venture in the middle of the party (when actually, the Monarch arrived at the party and was on his best behavior before Copy-Cat tranqed him). Dino appears to want the Monarch's wife all to himself. But she's immune to his charms, even though the show established that she and the Monarch have an open marriage.

At one point, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch tries to shoo Copy-Cat away by saying, "I'm not sure we need someone whose superpower seems to be bad pick-up lines." And I'm not sure we need marital discord as a storyline for the one couple on the show that soap opera viewers would refer to as the supercouple of the franchise, because I like how this one pair, aside from gay-for-super-science-but-not-gay-for-each-other roommates Billy Quizboy and Pete White, has managed to remain together amidst all the failure that surrounds them.

Dean Martin in "All This and Gargantua-2"

Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino and Dino in "Faking Miracles"

But then again, I don't tune in to The Venture Bros. to see relationships with no problems and stories with no stakes. Everyone on this show, except for Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, Triana Orpheus, Shoreleave and maybe Brock, is a huge fuck-up (as well as the kind of fuck-up who speaks like a recognizable human being, instead of like a Chuck Lorre-style joke machine), which is the thing that's kept me intrigued with The Venture Bros., in addition to all the funny references to things like CHiPs, Iggy Pop lyrics, Duran Duran and the LP version of Wu-Tang Forever. But while the Monarch's past mistakes as a Dr. Venture-obsessed arch continue to haunt him and are now affecting his wife's standing in the Council, as well as their marriage, it looks like things are moving up for Dr. Venture and his new Ventech employees Billy and Pete. They might be about to find some Apple-style success for a change, thanks to their discovery of an example of what Dr. Venture refers to as "the miracles": the not-quite-ready-to-be-unveiled-yet inventions J.J. kept stashed away in his company's inventory before his death.

Billy accidentally lets loose a bio-bot, a liquid metal entity composed of nanobots, in Ventech Tower. The bio-bot can be programmed to enhance the strength or brainpower of whatever human body it's injected into. But before Ventech can make gazillions off selling bio-bots to the public (or maybe exclusively to the military-industrial complex as a weapon?), Dr. Venture, Billy and Pete have to deal with a few bio-bot-related mishaps, like the ones that take place while they figure how to control the bio-bot, which seeped into Dean's body when he was in the shower.

I'm glad Publick spared us from seeing the orifice the sentient goo chose to climb into during Dean's shower. Hearing Dean's off-screen scream from the bathroom is unsettling enough already.

Unaware that the body the runaway bio-bot chose as its host belongs to Dean, Billy and Pete disrupt Brock's study session with Dean, who asked Brock to help him prepare for his SATs. They program the bio-bot to cause Dean to puke on Brock, gain enough superhuman strength to lift up a shocked Brock with one arm and speak in Babylonian, which causes Brock to think Dean needs an exorcist. All that's missing from this scene is Billy and Pete trying out on Dean that clever Innerspace tactic in which a shrunken Dennis Quaid uses his ship's tech to transform Martin Short's facial features into Robert Picardo's.

Despite the moments of body horror slapstick Dean experiences with the bio-bot inside him, the bio-bot miraculously provides Dean with enough brainpower to ace the SATs and get accepted to Stuyvesant University, his school of choice. His brother makes some progress too--with water-breathing Sirena (Cristin Milioti), that is. She ignores her dad Wide Wale's feud with Dr. Venture over his refusal to comply with the mob-connected Crusaders Action League's shakedown in "Hostile Makeover," and she agrees at the end of "Faking Miracles" to go out on a date with Hank, who's taken a job as a pizza delivery boy. Publick sets up a joke early on in "Faking Miracles" about the side effects of driving the GoPod, J.J.'s experimental floating car, and nicely has it pay off later when Hank drives the GoPod to deliver a pizza to Sirena. Of course Hank would pay no attention to the Pirate Captain's warning that the GoPod causes its drivers to become sterile.

Had the guest shots in "Faking Miracles" consisted only of Tompkins the podcast veteran as the Monarch's dad and Huss, the former King of the Hill regular who starred in a series of '90s MTV promos as Frank Sinatra, doing a decent impression of Sinatra's pal, "Faking Miracles" would still be a satisfying half-hour. But Milioti's first guest shot as Sirena elevates "Faking Miracles" to "Bot Seeks Bot" territory, if not "Victor. Echo. November." territory (2006's "Victor. Echo. November." remains my favorite Venture Bros. episode). Last season's Publick-scripted "Bot," a surprisingly tense Brock-and-Shoreleave-on-a-stakeout story, and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Victor" are both my favorite kind of Venture Bros. episode: they follow the characters around on a night out on the town that goes south late in the story, especially for Dr. Venture, but the spycraft or the mayhem isn't what makes either episode soar. The hilarious dialogue before the mayhem erupts--a huge chunk of the dialogue is delivered over restaurant tables, so at times, it feels like we're watching Diner, but with supervillains--is what makes them soar.

In "Faking Miracles," the kind of nighttime partying that energized the proceedings in "Bot" and "Victor" isn't so energetic because it's confined to the rather drab 18th birthday party Wide Wale throws for Sirena, and Dean and Hank's separate storylines aren't destined to become classics like their double-date storyline together in "Victor," but Milioti just steals both the Wide Wale and Hank storylines with the raspy, foul-mouthed Jersey Shore voice she came up with for the frequently irritable Sirena. She exclaims "Maron!" (maa-ROAN) at one point--Sopranos fans might remember that phrase, which is basically "Madonna!" or "Dammit!"--and in my favorite bit of Italian slang, she complains about how the thugs her dad has assigned to guard her are buttagots (it means "annoying idiot"). Milioti was a standout on Fargo this season as Betsy, Lou Solverson's dying wife, and after her charming voice work in "Faking Miracles," she's already a standout recurring guest star on this show too.

Oh yeah, and besides Milioti's guest shot, Donald Trump makes a mute appearance in the background at the party. This episode was made long before Trump started running for president and angering both progressives and conservatives alike. I'm tired of both reading about this buttagots and hearing him squawk like a race-baiting Oswald Cobblepot on the mayoral campaign trail, but his cameo in "Faking Miracles" makes a lot of sense. Of course he would hobnob with supervillains.

Is it me or is Wide Wale more likable as a Venture Bros. adversary than Phantom Limb or the Investors? The dichotomy of a ruthless gangster turning out to be a compassionate and understanding dad to his offspring is hardly new to the gangster genre, but it adds some flavor to Wide Wale as a Venture Bros. foe. He has a sweet little moment in "Faking Miracles" where he takes a break from trying to impress all the legitimate businessmen and notices a grumpy Sirena is uncomfortable at her own birthday party, so he tries to cheer her up with an order for some pizza (and he succeeds--but he's unaware that Sirena's attraction to Hank, which is bound to piss him off, also has a lot to do with her shift to a more content mood later that night). This moment already makes Wide Wale a better dad than his party guest Captain Combover, whose vomit-inducing desire to bang his own grown-up daughter and whose taste for women who are young enough to be his daughters are beautifully ridiculed by Robert Smigel in his uproarious Triumph's Election Special 2016 on Hulu.

If there's one thing I dislike about The Venture Bros.' sixth season as deeply as I dislike all things Trump, it's Publick's decision to leave Dr. Orpheus out of the Ventures' move to New York. Steven Rattazzi's bit part in "Faking Miracles" as Hank's Italian boss at the pizzeria makes me miss both Rattazzi's voice for Orpheus and his presence as an additional (and rather sane, in spite of all his melodramatically delivered incantations) member of the Venture household. Plus New York could use some help from Orpheus. The best person to deal with its problems with rats, bedbugs and pigs would definitely not be a Blue Morpho type. It would have to be a person who was trained in the black arts. Unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, they're no strangers to miracles.

Other memorable quotes:
* Scaramantula: "If you think you can just waltz in here and muscle in on my racket, you've got another thing coming! [Faints from being shot with a tranq dart by the Blue Morpho.]"
The Blue Morpho: "It's 'another think coming.' God!"

* "He shows up again in issue 36 when they team up to fight L. Ron Hubbard."

* Hank: "Aw, c'mon, Brock! Why not?"
Brock: "Because it's like cheating, Hank."
Hank: "But so is flying in an airplane or having a fake leg when you think about it, which I do."
Brock: "For the last time, no! You cannot have anabolic steroids!"

* Dr. Venture: "Let's toss this baby into production and call it a day!"
Pirate Captain: "Yeah, well, don't punch the clock just yet there, Doc. She's been known to cause sterility and heart murmurs in rhesus monkeys."

* Brock: "Aw jeez, Dean. Your essay reads like a suicide note."
Dean: "Everything I wrote was true."
Brock: "Yeah, but you gotta turn the gas down a notch, Sylvia Plath."

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/139357533252

Wow, the already-dead Vertigo comic iZombie is hardly like the hit CW show it unleashed

iZombie--the first CBS procedural outside of Elementary that fortunately doesn't feel too much like "a Dad show" (it airs on the CW, a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros., so that qualifies it as a CBS show)--was one of network TV's most pleasant surprises last season. I don't care for the "Dad show" writing of most procedurals, and the case-of-the-week structure that's such a fixture of those procedurals initially made me doubtful about latching onto iZombie when it debuted. But the farcical and mildly supernatural elements iZombie added to that structure--like how whenever assistant medical examiner Liv Moore (Rose McIver), a zombie who must snack on brain matter to keep herself from going full zombie, wolfs down a murder victim's brains to grab clues from the victim's memories, she also absorbs the victim's personality traits--immediately won me over as they freshened up a walking corpse like the tired case-of-the-week format.

What's a Dad show, by the way? It's any procedural with an alphabet-soup title. The forensic heroes in these interchangeable procedurals quip a lot but aren't all that compelling when Daddy takes their one-liners away. It's "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV that doesn't require so much attention from exhausted, pooped-out and drowsy dads who find Mr. Robot or Rick and Morty to be too taxing for the brain or too morally ambiguous as light entertainment. It's fast food TV.

Criminal Minds is particularly shitty and unwatchable: it plays into every 92-year-old Fox News viewer's fears about how the world outside his door is going to hell in a handbasket. It fetishizes serial killers and is full of everything I despise about both the serial killer genre and torture porn, so it bugs me that smart comedic performers like Paget Brewster and Aisha Tyler have attached themselves to a dour, pretentious and repugnant show that's so beneath them. And I know the Asian American blogosphere worships the modern-day Hawaii Five-0 because the show gives juicy roles to Asian American actors--sure, as an Asian American, that's a nice thing to see--but I otherwise don't understand the worship: Five-0 is essentially another right-leaning Dad show from CBS.

Loosely based on a comic DC's Vertigo imprint published from 2010 to 2012, iZombie is, like any other CBS procedural, full of forensic experts who quip and often drop geeky pop-culture references, but it's far from a Dad show. The sharp writing and not-so-dour-and-pretentious sensibility of Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and frequent Veronica Mars writer Diane Ruggiero-Wright, iZombie's showrunners, are among the reasons why iZombie never feels like I'm spending a week inside the mind of a 92-year-old Fox News viewer. The elderly murder victim whose racist personality traits Liv acquired in "Grumpy Old Liv," the second-season premiere, is clearly Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright's way of mocking the 92-year-olds who eat up Criminal Minds or CSI: Cyber.

iZombie may be imbued with the DNA of Veronica Mars--Liv is the same kind of plucky detective heroine who, during Veronica's run, captivated fans of neo-noir, feminists, feminist fans of neo-noir and neo-fans of noir feminists--as well as the DNA of what Ruggiero-Wright has cited as the part of The Matrix where kung fu skills are uploaded into Neo's mind, but a bit of Orphan Black seems to have also been slipped into the show like the chunks of brain matter Liv slips into her lunch. The show is a weekly acting exercise for the New Zealand-born McIver--and she's been killing it, whether as an immature frat boy, an extremely sensual artist, a stoner who talks to imaginary friends or, this week, a melodramatic, stiletto-obsessed "Real Housewife of Seattle"--like how the scenes where Tatiana Maslany has to play either a clone impersonating another clone or a clone impersonating another clone impersonating another clone are a crazy exercise each week for Maslany.

It also features the best ensemble on a Thomas show since Party Down. There isn't a weak link in the iZombie cast. Sure, Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), the Seattle cop who turns to Liv for help on his cases, is a tad underwritten as an audience surrogate, but he's an effective foil to both the personality changes Liv experiences (Clive has, like the Santa Barbara Police Department on Psych, been led to believe her visions stem from psychic abilities rather than zombie ones) and the morgue humor of Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), the supervising M.E. who keeps Liv's zombie side a secret from the rest of the police.

As drug dealer Blaine DeBeers, the now-former zombie who got high on his own (tainted) supply of a drug called Utopium--the cause of the underreported emergence of zombies in Seattle--and was responsible for Liv's transformation into an Undead American, and Vaughn Du Clark, a narcissistic energy drink magnate who's perhaps even more ruthless than Blaine, David Anders and Steven Weber, respectively, are the best kind of villain for a show based on a comic: they're blessed with comedic timing, but their performances are also carefully modulated and they're never prone to treating the material like camp or pantomime. Anders' turn as Blaine, the machinations of Blaine and the downward spiral of Major Lillywhite (Robert Buckley)--Liv's amusingly long-suffering ex-fiancé--from idealistic social worker to completely broken, Utopium-addicted killer of zombies are key to why the non-procedural half of iZombie is rarely "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV.

Before penning YA novels and creating shows with both passionate cult followings and unfortunately short life spans, Thomas was a member of several Texas rock bands--which is funny because people who aren't familiar with his TV work frequently confuse him with Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas, so his past as a musician in Texas hasn't exactly helped to distinguish him from the Matchbox 20 guy--and his not-so-hackneyed tastes in music led to a lot of well-chosen existing songs on Veronica Mars. Those same tastes have also been integral to the existing song choices on iZombie. The show opens each week with a great forgotten tune, "Stop, I'm Already Dead" by the now-defunct Deadboy & the Elephantmen. The scoring work of regular Thomas show composer Josh Kramon is equally solid, like whenever it emphasizes the primal nature of Liv's zombie side with just the use of percussion.

Professional hat tip to #iZombie music supervisor Kasey Truman for Stop I'm Already Dead http://t.co/V2G6dklyUP @DaxRiggsFans @chopshopmusic

— Joel C. High (@cre8ve_ctrl) April 3, 2015

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Vixen, "Episode 1"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

At only five minutes per weekly episode, the six-part CW Seed miniseries Vixen, an animated reintroduction of a black DC Comics heroine who previously appeared in animated, Gina Torres-voiced form on Bruce Timm's beloved Justice League Unlimited, is hilariously short. I expected Chris Rock to channel his old SNL character Nat X and joke about how a black superhero can only get a five-minute webtoon because the Man won't give her a two-hour movie. So I was surprised to discover that Rock has been raving about Vixen.

The best superhero I've seen all summer is #vixen http://t.co/MV9C7fmgAu @megalyn pic.twitter.com/8MMqJKJAKJ

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 25, 2015

In a summer that's consisted of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man on the big screen (we'll just forget the whole Fantastic Four fiasco, and, oh, by the way, the only Fantastic Four that matters is these guys), that's huge praise for a superhero webtoon. So is Vixen--which takes place in the Arrow/The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow shared universe and will feature the voices of Arrow stars Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards and Flash stars Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes in upcoming episodes--as terrific as Rock implies? Animation-wise: yes. Storytelling-wise: it's too early--and too short--to tell. So far, I'm not in love with the presence of the ubiquitous in medias res device--an old storytelling favorite of the Arrow writers, who also scripted Vixen--and the clunky-sounding exposition during a diner conversation between aspiring Detroit fashion designer Mari McCabe (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who's about to discover that a family heirloom she's been wearing can grant her the power to mimic the abilities of animals, and her white foster dad Chuck (Neil Flynn, a.k.a. the dad on The Middle) in this first episode.

My least favorite aspect of Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti's now-defunct DC Animation show Young Justice comes back to haunt this new DC Animation project. Early on in one episode of Young Justice, Miss Martian was seen explaining to a skeptical and typically monosyllabic Superboy why she used her shape-shifting powers to disguise themselves as her uncle J'onn J'onnz and Superman at a press conference that just took place, more for the sake of bringing the audience up to speed than for her ex-boyfriend's sake. "Conner, you know we have to maintain the illusion that Superman, Manhunter and the other Leaguers who went into space are still on Earth. We can't let our enemies know how short-handed the Justice League is right now," she said to Superboy, who, in addition to being miserable about his life as a teenage clone of both Superman and Lex Luthor, has to go to work each day with a pro-torture ex-girlfriend who's fond of speaking in IMDb plot summary-ese.

Arrow veterans Wendy Mericle, Keto Shimizu and Brian Ford Sullivan (all paired up with Lauren Certo, who co-wrote another Arrow-related webseries, the live-action Blood Rush) are a little more skilled at handling exposition than Weisman and Vietti because of the experience they've had writing dialogue for a live-action prime-time show that can't really get away with that type of Saturday morning cartoon exposition too often. So Vixen is slightly more cognizant than Young Justice about how people who know each other well actually talk to each other and is a little less ridiculous and awkward about the exposition--we learn Mari is looking for her birth parents, the difficulties of finding the fashion design job she wants have left her with an understandable temper and she's closer to Patty, an absent and most likely ailing member of Mari's foster family who's presumably Chuck's wife (and will be voiced by Kari Wuhrer), than she is to Chuck--but much of it is still unnatural-sounding expository dialogue. The opening action sequence is much closer to what I want out of an animated sister show to Arrow, The Flash and the forthcoming Legends of Tomorrow, and that would be nicely staged action that's full of visuals an animated show can pull off with more panache than a live-action one, with minimal dialogue during the action. But that rooftop sequence in which Mari outwits the Arrow (Amell) and outraces the Flash (Gustin)--only to accidentally slip and fall--actually goes one better by containing no dialogue at all. It's a wise stylistic choice by both the Arrow writers and miniseries director James Tucker, who previously directed the 2013 DC Animation movie Superman Unbound and showran Batman: The Brave and the Bold, the surprisingly good DC Animation show that proved a light-hearted take on modern-day Batman doesn't have to suck like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie.

The effective animation for Mari's escape from Oliver Queen and Barry Allen, a sequence in which miniseries co-composer Blake Neely gets to restate his main themes from Arrow and The Flash, is mainly what earns the Vixen premiere episode the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week title. But there are a couple of extra touches that elevate Vixen and will make it worth following on CW Seed in the next few weeks.

The show's dialogue recording team is clearly made up of fans of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was distinctive for having its vocal cast record their dialogue outside the recording booth and outdoors in order to make their stop-motion-animated movie sound naturalistic. I'm not sure if the Vixen sound team actually did venture outside the booth to record Mari's reverby scene in jail, her diner scene with Chuck and an upcoming S.T.A.R. Labs scene between Barry and Valdes' lab tech character Cisco that was included in the series premiere trailer, but the Fantastic Mr. Fox approach to getting Mari and the other characters to sound like they're actually in reverby and chilly rooms gives this DC Animation project an interestingly grounded feel and makes it a seamless part of the live-action Arrow/Flashverse.

Oh yeah, and there's the simple fact that Mari is the first female superpowered hero of color in the Arrow/Flashverse (Katana, a heroic swordswoman played on Arrow last season by Rila Fukushima, doesn't have any powers). The character is an appealing middle ground between the fantasy-based heroism of the supers on The Flash and the more flawed (and non-superpowered) heroism of the street-level crimefighters on Arrow (the time frame of the miniseries begins with Mari in jail for self-defense, and the episode implies that the man she attacked was such a disgusting perv that she didn't deserve to be put behind bars).

I'm curious to see how Echikunwoke--whom I remember from her eye-candy roles on The 4400 and House of Lies and is an ideal choice to play Mari if she becomes a live-action character--will tackle both voice acting, especially in a setting that's way more family-friendly than House of Lies (but still salty in the dialogue department, in a CW kind of way, of course), and a heroic character who, like Static from DC's Milestone imprint, clearly means a lot to African American DC readers. So far, the premiere episode has shown that Echikunwoke is a great screamer. I never read the Justice League Detroit comics. I don't think Vixen screams like Mel from Doctor Who in those comics.

I'm also curious to see how Vixen will handle what's essentially a story about a black adoptee raised by white parents (she appears to be embarrassed about it)--and in search of both her heritage and her purpose in life--that happens to be dressed up in superhero genre garb. Will it handle that kind of story with the same kind of aplomb Penny Dreadful has demonstrated as a story about identity that's dressed up as a Gothic horror drama? Or will it drop the ball like 2011's Green Lantern, which Arrow creators and Vixen co-executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti both co-wrote, and turn into another unimaginative--and emotionally flat--daddy issues-driven origin story?

Chris Rock's praise of this webtoon's premiere episode, as well as Flash cast member Candice Patton's similar endorsement of it--even though she's not in Vixen and she didn't get to reprise her role as Iris West--and black viewers' interest in it on Twitter, all remind me of when I was involved in the creation of a similar female superhero of color for an indie graphic novel about Asian American superheroes. I noticed a glint of excitement in the eyes of both male and female Asian American readers who were fans of that novel back in 2009. It was a glint that said, "I've been hungry for this my whole life."

I'm unable to glimpse that same glint on people from Black Twitter for obvious reasons, but judging from Vixen viewers' #DatTotem hashtag and enthusiastic tweets from the likes of BlackGirlNerds and the hosts of The Fan Bros Show, that glint is definitely there in their writing. Everyone's getting tired of superhero movies starring white guys named Chris. There needs to be more Chrisiquas and Cristinas up in this piece.

Times are changing, and the increasingly inclusive Arrow/Flashverse appears to be responding to the frustrations younger viewers have expressed about the presence of underrepresented groups on the screen, but it's responding in mostly sensible--and now with the arrival of Vixen, fascinating--ways. For instance, on The Flash, the police captain isn't an old, pasty Irish guy like it always used to be on cop shows and superhero shows before the '90s (neither is the captain some African American authority figure with no inner life). He's a younger and openly gay Indian Canadian guy. And now the Arrow/Flashverse is boldly placing a black woman at the center of the action instead of behind the action like spymaster Amanda Waller or on the sidelines like Iris. The five-minute webtoon format may make Vixen seem like a small step towards progress, but this step's a big one.

Hawkeye: L.A. Woman makes any attempt at a Rockford Files remake, including Vince Vaughn's planned Rockford movie, pointless

(Photo source: Entropy)

I think beaches are overrated, and so are swimming pools and waterslide parks. Look, I'm no neckbeard who hates to go outside, but at around college, I outgrew the beaches, pools and waterslide parks I used to spend time in as a kid during some summers and just completely lost interest in the concept of them as enjoyable places to be.

That South Park episode where Cartman gets frustrated about first-graders continually pissing in the pool triggered my latent germophobia about pool water, and then decades later, an episode of Ben Schwartz's Disney/Titmouse cartoon Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja that used kids' leftover snot from waterslide parks as a plot device (don't ask) confirmed my growing suspicions about the grubbiness of waterslide parks. When you're a kid, you're unconcerned about such things. When you're an adult, splashing around in water for hours to keep the heat from killing you loses all its appeal after you discover better and cleanlier ways to keep the heat from murdering you, like a cold beer or an iced tea. Even California-loving Best Coast frontwoman Bethany Cosentino has said she gets creeped out by the idea of swimming in the ocean. I believe I have a clip of her thinking about having to do that.

Hello there, Dubsmash. And so long, Dubsmash. Whenever The Today Show starts acknowledging the existence of an app or meme, its 15 minutes of coolness are immediately over.

So I may not care anymore for beaches and pools, but I'm always running into escapist literature that's ideal for beachside or poolside reading. One of my favorite recent trade paperback collections of a comic book storyline is especially ideal for beachside or poolside reading--or summertime reading anywhere--because of its summertime setting. I highly recommend it also because it's simply an entertaining arc from a superhero comic that's special for not being a typical superhero comic and for being tailor-made for comics readers like myself who find most superhero comics to be either puerile or unreadable due to overly complicated backstories or convoluted and clumsily written tie-ins to unwieldy crossover events.

(Photo source: Errant Critic)

You don't need to have read prior TPB collections of issues of writer Matt Fraction's excellent (and recently concluded) Marvel Now! title Hawkeye to get into Hawkeye: L.A. Woman, although the prior issues are all worth reading, especially Hawkeye #11, an inventively told detective story written from the point of view of a dog and cleverly illustrated by David Aja (with minimal and mostly garbled dialogue by Fraction). The 2014 TPB, the third collection of Fraction's Hawkeye comics, collects Hawkeye Annual #1 (the only issue in the collection illustrated by Javier Pulido, whose minimalist artwork I enjoyed during the Vertigo title Human Target) and issues 14, 16, 18 and 20. All you need to know about Fraction's incarnation of Hawkeye prior to L.A. Woman is that there are two non-superpowered archers who share the mantle of Hawkeye: one of them is recently divorced Avengers member Clint Barton (who, in the Avengers movies, is happily married to a civilian played by Linda Cardellini and raising kids with her out in the Midwest), and the other is the much younger Kate Bishop, a Young Avengers member who may be much better at this hero thing than her mentor Clint. The series alternates between Clint and Kate as the protagonist and follows what both of them are up to when they're not Avengers, and those adventures range from espionage-related peril to slightly more mundane matters like Clint trying to get his apartment building's broken satellite dish to work during a holiday season that's disrupted by tracksuited Russian thugs whose every other word is "bro."

The Russians' addiction to "bro" and the reduction of dialogue in issue 11 so that it's down to only a few words the one-eyed, pizza-loving dog known as Pizza Dog understands (like "collar" and "ex-wife") are hallmarks of the offbeat sense of humor of Fraction, who envisioned Clint as "the Marvel Universe's Jim Rockford" in his update of Hawkeye (the decision to alternate Clint's stories with Kate's is reminiscent of the two-or-more-stars-sharing-the-same-title-role format of another James Garner show, Maverick). Like The Rockford Files, Hawkeye is distinguished by both tongue-in-cheek humor and a bemused hero who'd rather be enjoying a rooftop barbecue with his neighbors (or a show on his DVR he's been itching to catch up on) than stopping trouble, but he always winds up helping out the downtrodden anyway. The Fraction series' parallels to The Rockford Files are particularly visible during the L.A. arc, in which Kate tires of Clint's uncaring attitude and self-destructive streak, packs up everything that belongs to her, like that purple Emma Peeler catsuit made famous by the non-Marvel Avengers (as well as one thing that doesn't belong to her, Pizza Dog), and escapes from New York to L.A., where she starts a private investigation business from her laptop and housesits for the summer a beachside trailer that looks exactly like the Malibu trailer Rockford called home on the show.

That's not all that's borrowed from The Rockford Files. Fraction takes two of Rockfish's occasional sidekicks--Gandolph "Gandy" Fitch, an ex-con who was played on the show by Isaac Hayes, and Marcus "Gabby" Hayes, a private eye who was played by a toupeed Louis Gossett Jr. (and was also a precursor to Tom Selleck's Lance White, a sharp-dressed rival of Rockford's)--and turns them into a newly married gay couple who lives near Kate and tags along with her on her cases. Gandy is renamed Finch, while Marcus gets to keep his name but loses the rug. Finch and Marcus help out Kate as she makes mistakes as a detective along the way but eventually blossoms into both this weird cross between Katniss and Rockfish and a self-sufficient person with a life away from the two father figures who have alienated her (Clint and her actual father, an oily businessman named Derek). Kate's youth and inexperience as a gumshoe might remind Rockford Files fans of another occasional sidekick of Jim's: Richie Brockelman, played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to direct all those terrible Adam Sandler movies that sound like fake Hollywood turkeys David Chase would have made up in one of his Rockford Files scripts that poked fun at SoCal living or how much SoCal pizza sucks ("This ain't a pizza. It's a grilled cheese sandwich").

L.A. Woman also reminds me of the high-quality writing of both Veronica Mars and Terriers, two SoCal P.I. shows that are worthier successors to The Rockford Files than any past or even future attempts to revive Rockford without Garner, whether it's David Shore's unseen and rumored-to-have-been-terrible Rockford reboot pilot with Dermot Mulroney, which failed to get picked up by NBC a few years ago, or the Rockford movie project Vince Vaughn wants to star in and produce. The late Garner's classic show was a once-in-a-lifetime, lightning-in-a-bottle thing that was so infused with Garner's distinctive personality and the late Stephen J. Cannell's equally distinctive creative voice, which is why I'm always skeptical of Universal's attempts to recapture that lightning. When not even the creator of House can get it to work, that's how difficult it is to revive Rockford.

Initially, I was mildly skeptical of the idea of Vaughn playing one of my favorite TV characters. But now I'm way more skeptical. I just can't buy Vaughn anymore as the everyman that Garner was (it would be like getting The Hard Way/The Specialist-era James Woods to play Rockford). Also, ever since Vaughn has become more upfront about his political views, I've been concerned about a Republican who worships guns and has equally strange and bothersome views about race playing a far-from-conservative hero who didn't care for guns (but wasn't afraid to use one) and whose attitudes towards race mirrored those of Garner's in real life, because he's likely going to alter the reluctant-about-guns aspect of the character so that it would be more aligned with his politics. If he does that, then the character's not Rockford anymore. He might as well be Mike Hammer. Now if Vaughn were playing Mike Hammer, that would be a more interesting and perhaps more worthwhile movie.

So now that True Detective's second season has emerged as an unwatchable disaster and is far from the career boost Vaughn must have expected, this Rockford movie project--which, when we last heard about it, was being given a rewrite by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi screenwriter Chuck Hogan--is threatening to become more of a reality. If this fucking reboot ever gets made, I wouldn't be surprised if L.A. Woman turns out to be--just like Veronica Mars and Terriers before it--the better Rockford update. Kate may be female and extraordinary with a bow and arrow, but she's already more convincing in the role of an everyman detective than Vaughn will ever be, due to the relatability and humanity both Fraction and a terrific guest artist, Annie Wu, a Venture Bros. storyboarder and the current artist on DC's reimagining of Black Canary as a goth-y rock musician, bring to the character of Kate.

L.A. Woman is such a loving ode to the '70s SoCal P.I. genre that even Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe from another great '70s SoCal P.I. genre piece, the Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye, shows up in the form of a new mentor for Kate, an obscure '70s Marvel reporter character named Harold H. Harold. Like Gould in that classic movie, Harold, reimagined by Fraction and Wu as a rumpled P.I. who resembles Gould, is seen shopping for cat food in the supermarket. L.A. Woman is essentially a regular P.I. story about both the alluring and corrupt sides of L.A. that happens to have a masked supervillain as one of the bad guys: Kate's nemesis Whitney Frost, a criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Madame Masque.

Frost's recently announced first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an adversary in the upcoming second season of Agent Carter makes L.A. Woman worth picking up for Agent Carter fans who have never read Fraction's Hawkeye and may want to familiarize themselves with Madame Masque, who will be reimagined as a '40s Hollywood actress on the Marvel Studios show. Just like how Agent Carter is a spy show that pits its non-superpowered protagonists against larger-than-life villains straight out of a superhero show and is extremely accessible for people who don't like the superhero genre, Hawkeye, especially during Kate's L.A. arc, is a crime comic where the only superhero comic-ish things about it are the presence of Madame Masque (at one point in the arc, Kate wonders, "What if Madame Masque is the reason why everything in L.A. sucks?") and the occasional cameos by Spider-Man and Wolverine.

With Hawkeye, Fraction wanted to reinvent the superhero comic--and largely succeeded by not approaching it as one. Hawkeye arose from Fraction's frustrations with the inaccessible storylines of most present-day superhero comics. "I think we as an industry fell into this pattern of not caring about new readers anymore," said the Casanova and Sex Criminals creator to the L.A. Times in 2013. "There's a way that you can do it that isn't the clumsy, awkward way that it used to be done where characters refer to themselves in the third person, thinking back on who they are and how they came to be. You don't have to write every comic as if it's the first comic someone's ever read, but you do have to write as though you would like new people to read your comic--which is kind of what Hawkeye is all about."

Artwork by Annie Wu (Photo source: Wu)

The series also arose from Fraction's changing views on heroism and his boredom with dourness in superhero comics, which made him long for what he's described as "the Stephen J. Cannell-ness of it all." Fraction was interested in presenting a counterpoint to Batman. "The older you get, the more you live in the world, it's impossible not to look at Batman through class and race," said Fraction to Paste last year. "Batman is a rich white billionaire who beats up poor brown people and the mentally ill. That's weird, right? Kinda weird. A billionaire, punching poor people. But the idea of a guy who came from nothing and stayed just a couple steps away from it, but can't not help you move a couch, that's interesting."

L.A. Woman is a great example of the down-to-earth hero who "can't not help you move a couch," embodied by Kate in this particular arc. She's also a hero whose adventures benefit from a killer soundtrack that's not of the typical John Williams kind. In the letters section of Hawkeye, series artist David Aja would provide a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Hawkeye. For example, two of the musical selections Aja listed for Hawkeye's Christmas issue were cues from Sergei Prokofiev's rousing score to the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein epic Alexander Nevsky. For the arc where Clint's ex-wife Mockingbird, Spider-Woman, Black Widow and Kate have to pull Clint out of trouble when he gets himself entangled in the latest predicament of his current girlfriend, a hot, Bridget Regan-ish thief named Cherry, Aja curated a mix of Frank Zappa, surf-rock and fusion tunes like Lalo Schifrin's 1976 disco instrumental "Black Widow" (intended to accompany Black Widow's Grand Central Terminal pursuit of Cherry), Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie's 1977 collabo "Unicorn" (intended for Kate's badass fight with a pair of Russian thugs) and Herbie Hancock's 1976 jam "Spider" (chosen for the pages where Clint gets slapped around by a plainclothes Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman). As for the classic Pizza Dog issue, Aja's soundtrack consists mainly of jazz to enhance the detective story vibe for Pizza Dog's hunt for a murderer.

Disappointingly, the TPB editions of Hawkeye omit the playlist info. I have no idea what sort of tunes were intended as the soundtrack for the L.A. arc, but I discovered that re-reading the L.A. Woman TPB with tons of La Luz tracks in my headphones works like gangbusters. Or maybe it should be La Luz tracks together with one of Best Coast's love letters to California needle-dropped for the moment when Kate adjusts to SoCal life. There's a propulsiveness to the all-female Seattle band's surf-rock sound that makes their tunes the perfect soundtrack for Kate's arrow-slinging adventures in L.A. and the vibrant visuals of both Wu, who cites Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn as among her storytelling influences, and colorist Matt Hollingsworth, who brings a consistency to the palette of the arc, despite the many differences in penciling styles between Wu and the more minimalist Javier Pulido.

One of the few complaints from readers about Fraction's Hawkeye was that the wait between issues would frequently take too long for them. The advantage of reading comics in TPB form, which is how I mainly read comics these days, is that TPB readers like myself don't have to worry about waiting. I don't know what it was like for Hawkeye readers to sit and wait for months for the L.A. Woman issues to come out when they were first released. But that would have definitely messed around with the momentum of the arc and prevented me from enjoying the arc in the manner I got to first enjoy it and the manner I recommend to anyone: as light summertime reading, like so many other well-crafted crime novels I've read in the past, whether they're graphic novels or prose novels. The craftiness of L.A. Woman and other equally satisfying crime novels just like it outdoes wading in snot and chlorine any day of the week.

Jack Sheldon's rendition of "The Long Goodbye" from the Altman film of the same name, a film L.A. Woman pays tribute to, is in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

The Game of Thrones "Hardhome" massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?

Paul Nice, the beathead behind one of my favorite mixtapes, 2005's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, dropped an enjoyable (but not exactly danceable) Shaw Brothers tribute mix full of Shaw Brothers movie soundbites and Shaw library music cues last week. His tribute to everyone's favorite movie studio with a logo that clearly was filmed against someone's office door window has got me thinking that unless Marvel Studios tops the Raid-inspired fight choreography on Daredevil with even more impressive choreography on its planned Iron Fist martial arts project for Netflix or in the Daughters of the Dragon adaptation I've been wishing for, I doubt anyone's going to assemble a similar tribute mix about Marvel Cinematic Universe filmmaking 40 years from now, in the same way that the Poughkeepsie DJ sampled The Daredevils and Masked Avengers about 40 years after their release.

Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla and Marvel Studios' harshest critics might be onto something about the MCU movies not holding up as action filmmaking 15 years from now. But if they ever YouTube how Universal Television shot Captain America in the '70s, they'd probably be like, "Wow, that was wack. It makes the studio that brought you Sharknado look like Spielberg. Okay, Joe Johnston and the Russo brothers for the win."

In the '80s, Marvel Comics published a Larry Hama G.I. Joe story about Snake Eyes and Scarlett that contained no dialogue and is still remembered as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. If Marvel Studios wants to be remembered for more than just snappy banter or one-liners and the transformation of Andy Dwyer into an action star and be thought of as an innovative action movie studio like Shaw Brothers, they're going to have to do something ballsier than even single-take fight scenes in a hallway or in front of a blind Chinese guy singing in Mandarin. I think they should make a silent action movie like that classic G.I. Joe issue and goddamn commit to it like Hama did.

(Photo source: Mars Will Send No More)

Mad Max: Fury Road is nearly a silent action movie. The guy from Skins is chattier than either Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron. The enthralling 15-minute White Walker/wight attack on the Free Folk and the Night's Watch two Sundays ago on Game of Thrones--in which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically knocked on The Walking Dead's door that night and said to Scott M. Gimple, "Try and top this"--isn't exactly chatty either. I'm surprised no one outside of the TV industry has attempted to do a silent action flick like Buster Keaton's The General, which George Miller cited as an influence on his latest Mad Max installment. Think of all the Akiva "My Best Work Was on the Underrated Fringe" Goldsman-penned blockbusters that would have been improved--or all the post-1996  two of the  one of the  all the three-fourths of one of the post-1996 Michael Bay blockbusters that would have been improved--if they'd been completely scrubbed of dialogue.

Oh yeah, there's director J.C. Chandor, whose 2013 film All Is Lost, with Robert Redford alone on a boat, almost contains no dialogue--Chandor said he wanted to see what Redford would be like as an actor if his voice was taken away--but All Is Lost is a survival drama, not an action flick. Whether part of the action genre or not, a huge part of what makes Fury Road, the "Hardhome" massacre sequence and All Is Lost riveting is their minimal dialogue and the performers' reliance on their physicality to carry the story. Before Fury Road, Game of Thrones and All Is Lost, a few writers and directors--all working for TV--were aware of how riveting depriving their actors of their voices could look, especially in a dialogue-heavy medium like TV, so they experimented with near-silence.

Some of Breaking Bad's most memorable cold opens were done as mini-silent action movies. Genndy Tartakovsky, who drew storyboards for Iron Man 2, did a silent action movie a few times on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars (the minimized dialogue is why I always preferred Tartakovsky's cel-animated Star Wars prequel tie-in over George Lucas' actual prequels, which, at their worst, turned into C-SPAN in space). The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron himself did it once for almost an entire hour on Buffy, and it remains one of the show's most popular episodes. I'd make a silent action movie if I had the money and the connections. So what's stopping the studios from experimenting with wordless action sequences for two hours?

Sure, The Artist was one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winners, but a modern-day silent movie isn't exactly box-office poison. People (who are open-minded enough to put aside the notion that a silent movie is too old-timey) will go see such a movie if they're fans of whoever's going to be doing all the non-talking. Mel Brooks' star-studded Silent Movie was a hit in 1976, and I bet that if IMAX theaters show for just one week the "Hardhome" massacre sequence--and only that sequence--droves of Game of Thrones fans will roll into those theaters that week like that creepy "Hardhome" zombie avalanche.

With their one-act or one-episode experiments, Vince Gilligan (and his Breaking Bad army of imaginative directors like Michelle MacLaren), Tartakovsky and Joss Whedon proved once again that far braver creative souls have been emerging from TV. So maybe a silent movie would be too bizarre for the playing-it-safe (and now Joss-less) film division of Marvel Studios. Someone said Jackie Chan, who worships Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, should be the one to tackle a silent movie, but I doubt Chan would get that experimental these days: he's in the "Steve Martin shifting back and forth between Father of the Bride and more serious movie roles" phase of his career, not the "Steve Martin doing weird shit like recording banjo albums" phase. But you know who I think would be up for a silent actioner because he has proven that just because you're a 70-year-old filmmaker, that doesn't mean you have to phone it in? George Miller.

The Aussie director considered making Fury Road silent. A silent version of Fury Road is even being planned as an extra for its Blu-ray release. Also, it looks like Mad Max is getting less chatty with each installment. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Hardy does his last movie as Max--and Hardy's inevitably going to make more of them--he'll say only one line in the whole movie: "Oy."

The General: Fury Road from Walter Rafelsberger on Vimeo.