Just the Ticket

I've been feeling rather aimless lately. Maybe it's the onslaught of five average-to-barely tolerable monster movies that I assigned myself to reviewing. Maybe it's the dreary atmosphere that takes over this time of year. Or maybe its a sort of post-partum side effect of having finished reading Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties  and not being inspired to do anything afterward, like I summitted a particularly formidable mountain and lack the desire to take in any particular view, no matter how beautiful, nor to immediately make my way back down. I'm simply here, at a peak that feels more like a valley, waiting for the winter chill to eat my toes. Don't get me wrong; I don't mean to say, in this age where saying "Stephen King books are too long" has become an understatement of the impossible, that Sleeping Beauties  was as insurmountable to me as Mount Everest would be to, well, me . I only mean that having accomplished such a literary fea...

So, as I was working on my review of the Tremors  Anthology, a funny--strange, not actually funny--thought went through my head about the inconsistent use of the word "shelter." A shelter is a structure that keeps bad things out and good people safe. Or, like many nouns or adjectives, shelter can be an idea of safety; a quality of shelter that you attribute to a person, place, or group--that may or may not be a physical shelter--simply by your act of seeking out that person, place, or group. But what if you brought explosives into  a bomb shelter? If they blew up inside of it, would anyone on the outside know what happened? Would it have served its purpose as a shelter under those circumstances, if not as a bomb shelter? And wouldn't that completely upend the usage of the word "shelter?" If "shelter" meant the same thing in all cases, wouldn't that create some post-apocalyptic society where the rich and unabused lived in an impenetrable room wh...

Hey, Ticketholders; what's shakin', Bacon? It's finally time to tackle Tremors , the series about ever-evolving, giant, monster worms that attempt to consume some of the least enjoyable movie stereotypes ever written. Case in point, Tremors  stars Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward as two incompetent handymen/farmers who settle their disagreements with rock-paper-scissors and exchange such poorly scripted witticisms as "I wish I could stampede up your ass." And no, this is not a Cinemax prequel to Brokeback Mountain . Elsewhere, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire play a survivalist couple, complete with bomb shelter, homemade explosives, and a crap-ton of guns. And of course, because this is a monster movie, there is the requisite prankster who nearly gets shot several times and whom we wish would just hurry up and get himself eaten. The setting is the ironically named "town" of Perfection, Nevada, a sparse collection of roughly seven buildings, half of which ...

In my review of Spider-Man: Homecoming , I made a point of mentioning the erroneous critical quotation that claimed the movie and/or Tom Holland was the "best Spider-Man ever!" The Dark Tower  came out last week on video, and after hearing what a waste of budget, inconsequential, unfaithful, disjointed, unrelatable, and other ways of calling it generally awful as a movie, I felt compelled to see what positive words might be present on the cover in this instance. Turning over a gritty-verging-on-bland black-and-white cover image featuring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, the title, and not much else, I found a single critical quote without so much as a single star to accompany it. And here it is, straight from Forbes magazine contributing writer Scott Mendelson: "It delivers Idris Elba as an action hero." So, apparently The Dark Tower  is so bad that a neutral, obvious, generic character description like this is the most positive thing that any critic, prof...

♫Down here at the pawn shop!♫ Welcome, Ticketholders, to another Sublime issue of the Grimm Fairy Tales  Retrospective ! '90s reference, y'all! Must stop using exclamation points! Keep reading! The  Grimm Fairy Tales Short Story #5: Pawns  is about as much of a story as Wicked Ways was a story: merely a dialogue with accompanying visuals. The first page (left) displays the Snow Queen, the Wonderland beast, the evil knight last seen in Sela’s Rip Van Winkle dream sequence, Sela dressed as Snow White, asleep in a glass coffin, and what appears to be Tinkerbell (less scantily clad than in Rip Van Winkle ), with a man in green brandishing a hook standing next to her. Looming above all of this is a huge, ominous hand, showing that, like the title implies, all of these figures are pieces in some elaborate board game. The looming hand is that of The Dark One, and the dialogue in question is with his assistant, both of whom were last (or will later be, if we’re talkin...

This is your morning wakeup call, Ticketholders! It's time for today's edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective . Grimm Fairy Tales #30: Rip Van Winkle  is another mind-trip issue, with the reaper figure from the 2008 Annual coming to pay his respects to Sela following her death at the end of Snow White and Rose Red . Though Belinda ran her through from behind with a very long sword (Excalibur, if I remember correctly), Sela is not bleeding. Either it’s been awhile since she was killed and the wound coagulated shut, the artist was lazy and/or forgetful, or because magic. Keep that third option in mind. As seems proper to the reaper--and it is, because this is Grimm Fairy Tales , after all--he says goodbye in the only way Sela would respect (or find blasphemous): by telling her a story from Sela’s own book. In what he calls "Sela’s version" of Rip Van Winkle , it turns out that Robert wasn’t her first love. Long before Robert (assuming this is a fla...

Welcome to November, Retrospectres! Tradespeople? Pageturners? Hmm. I've unintentionally given myself over a day and a half to think about this, and none of these really feel right. I guess we'll stick to retronym territory for now. So let's start again. Good afternoon, Ticketholders! So, as I said while I was thinking, I'm what feels like at least a day and a half late at following up on the end of the last Retrospective  post . And since the average modern attention span doesn't last beyond this post's first use of punctuation, I'll remind you here that the last issue of Grimm Fairy Tales sucked. Badly. It was the standout oddball for all the wrong reasons; the blackest of black sheep among a mostly gray flock that is nonetheless interesting because who doesn't like animal videos? Weird analogy, I know. But the Ugly Duckling  issue was uninspired, cliche, detached, and otherwise so noticeably bad that the proverbial Boy might choose not to cry wolf...

Happy Halloween, Ticketholders! And because it's Halloween, I'd like to take a moment to do some  Critical Quickies  on a few frightening things I've been watching on Netflix. Stranger Things --Winona Ryder ( Beetlejuice ), David Harbor (the upcoming  Hellboy  reboot), Finn Wolfhard (this year's  It  remake). A kid goes missing and uses Christmas lights as a Ouija board, a monster gets loose, a girl with psychic powers steals waffles, Winona Ryder can act, finally, and Matthew Modine ( 47 Meters Down ) is creepy as all hell, except that when the show gets there, Hell (or Negative Earth, the Upside Down, The Vale of Shadows,...) is a lot creepier. An homage to 1980's coming-of-age horror movies and Stephen King that does both justice, appeals to a broad audience without pandering, and just has a cool, engaging story. The only thing wrong with it (that was also probably an executive decision to preserve said near-perfect quality) is that it was only eig...

Good afternoon, Ticketholders! I really must come up with a new tag for you guys, since I'm not doing much movie-related stuff anymore. Oh, how the digital age sucks! But, I've harped on that particular string to the point of snapping it already, so let's just dive into something else ugly. GFT #28: The Ugly Duckling Here’s a "great" idea: get someone who’s never written for Grimm Fairy Tales before to write an issue! New (and as of this date, only three-time) Zenescope writer Mike Dolce presents a take on The Ugly Duckling that acknowledges few and incorporates none of Grimm Fairy Tales ’ established mechanics while recycling plots that have been used at least three times before ( Cinderella , Beauty & the Beast , The Little Mermaid ). At the “heart” of the issue is Robin, an awkward, plain-looking girl who resorts to magic (provided by Belinda) to make herself attractive and popular, only to become a superficially desired mean girl who spu...

Things are back on track, Ticketholders! In other words, I have my eyes on the prize. And with nothing else clever to say, here's my Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective  review of the Three Blind Mice . GFT #27: Three Blind Mice Again, this is not a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, nor is it a fairy tale, period. Like stories featured in the first two annuals ( 2007 and 2008 ), it is a nursery rhyme. More specifically, it is a nursery rhyme that some historians believe was a way of endearing young children to Queen Mary I (the farmer’s wife) and her view of Protestant heretics (the three blind mice). And because burning people at the stake doesn’t really appeal to children (except maybe Timmy in his early GFT appearances), the author of the rhyme chose to include a lyric about bodily dismemberment by kitchen utensil instead. Sounds just right for Grimm Fairy Tales , doesn’t it? I started reading this issue, thinking that I would have to say something negative about how starting ...

Hello again, Ticketholders and other click-bait enthusiasts! It's been several days since the four-part Spider-Man: Homecoming  special (the collected edition of which can be accessed here ), and almost two weeks since a Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective  hit the interwebs despite my many promises to the contrary. And before you read the rest of the post, you can download and read the Volume 5 Trade Paperback from this link . Trade Volume #1.5 So to recapitulate and recapture the latest focus of the Ticketverse, Sela Mathers is dead, leaving Belinda with free reign over the lost souls of the world as we head into the fifth volume of the first volume of  Grimm Fairy Tales , beginning with this pair of milestone issues. GFT #25 & 26: The Little Mermaid Collection Next on Belinda's list is the mother of a college student named Sara. After reading some of The Little Mermaid (which is not technically one of the Brothers’ Grimm’s original Fairy Tales, ...

Given the "most recent first" nature of blog structures, and the fact that I just haven't been in the mood or had the opportunity to post to my normal schedule, I've decided to take a cue from the world of comic books and start doing a supplemental post here and there called Ticketverse Trades , collecting recent posts of a common theme (links only, because brevity is king) so that they may be read in the order in which they were intended. This first Ticketverse Trade  includes links to the recent, four-part Spider-Man retrospective, titled Homecoming . Homecoming #1: Web Series  ( Spider-Man animated series retrospective) Homecoming #2: Geek Mythology (unofficial  New Piece Offerings #11 , mythology of Spider-Man) Homecoming #3: The Reel Reason You're Here ( Spider-Man  movies retrospective) Just the Ticket #102: Spider-Man Homecoming ( Homecoming  movie review) I genuinely plan to get back to another Retrospective  series of mine ( Grimm Fairy ...

In this modern age, I don't like the fact that critical voices are often contrary for the sake of being contrary. Do I still find them entertaining? Yes. Do I allow them to influence my own desires, tastes, and opinions when it comes to actual entertainment media? Sometimes, but only when reinforced by more knowledgeable, credible voices. In truth, sometimes, I don't agree with either the contrarian opinion or its more scholarly reinforcement. Amazing Spider-Man  and its sequel are widely regarded among critical and fan voices as the worst Spider-Man film efforts since Spider-Man 3 , which I didn't hate, but merely thought was an average production that left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth when it was all over. Amazing , on the other hand, I loved. Its sequel was of considerably diminished quality, but had that addictive aspect that had me wanting more and angered me only when I discovered later that none of the epic plot setups therein would be given resolution. Like S...