August 2015

Silk #6

/ / Comics

Silk #6I still don’t know what to make of Silk. Although I like Cindy Moon as a spunky teen heroine, it’s an awfully crowded Spidey Universe right now and like Spider-Gwen so far I’m enjoying the design of the costume (even if the bandanna mask still doesn’t quite work for me) more than the character’s adventures.

Silk #6 opens with our heroine at the mercy of The Repairman who plans on dissecting young Cindy to see what makes her tick. Managing to squirm free, and in thanks to the sudden arrival of a pissed-off Black Cat, Cindy escapes death (or something far worse), but this only leaves her with the same troubles and with no new clues to the location of her missing parents.

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Digging for Fire

/ / Uncategorized
  • Title: Digging for Fire
  • IMDb: link

Digging for FireMiddle-age apathy is the major theme of Digging for Fire as a husband (Jake Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay along with director Joe Swanberg) and wife’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) separate weekend plans while on vacation let each work through the listlessness of their shared existence and eventually find their way back to each other. It’s a story that’s been done several times, sometime much better (like Massy Tadjedin‘s 2010 film Last Night) and more often far worse (any number of middle age brain-dead romcoms).

More archetypes than fully fleshed-out characters, neither Tim nor Lee are all that interesting. Tim is your typical mid-life crisis male wanting to spend time with old friends and recapture lost youth. Lee is worried about the future, her marriage, and loosing her sense of self under the weight of marriage and parenthood. Johnson and DeWitt give the characters a bit of a spark but it’s Tim’s unusual obsession with finding a bone and old revolver buried in the back yard of the home where the family is staying that proves to give the movie something unique to explore, if not something terribly original to say.

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Mistress America

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Mistress America
  • IMDb: link

Mistress AmericaWritten and directed by Noah Baumbach (and co-written by the movie’s star Greta Gerwig), Mistress America is an uneven comedy that has a tone and feel more befitting a stage play than even an independent theatrical release. That’s not to say it should be easily dismissed. Despite its issues, when the film gets it right it gets it just right (such as an extended sequence in a yuppie suburban home where the quick-hitting back-and-forth dialogue finally hits on every note). Taken as a whole, Mistress America is neither as good as its brightest moments or as bad as it valleys where the lack of laughs exposes just how thin a story Baumbach is working with.

Lola Kirke and Gerwig star as strangers in New York brought together by their parents’ impeding wedding. Tracy (Kirke) is struggling with both life in college and the big city, neither of which see fits in all that well. Brooke (Gerwig) is a force of nature whose outgoing personality masks her own litany of personal issues. Tracy, of course, immediately latches on to her first real friend in the city while Brooke is happy to share her knowledge and experience with a young would-be sibling who obviously adores her.

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