Lone Star Press

The cast of Support Your Local Sheriff gets together to do it again, but this time James Garner is a frontier Gigolo charming his way into the affections of the middle-aged madams. Suzanne Pleshette stars as Patience the town hot chick/ wacko in this spoof. While Garners gigolo has an embarassing tattoo removed, Jack Elam mugs for the camera. Harry Morgan blusters as a mine owner and Garner is mistaken for a legendary gunfighter. Somehow, this time around the gambling addicted conman as killer gag gets a little old. Chuck Conners plays a convincing hardened killer looking to find out who is using his name. Still fun, but a little less charming. The DVD does have a trailer that gives away the whole plot of the movie, so its nice to see that some things have not changed.

  

James Garner plays a man drifting through a little mining town on his way to Austraila in this late 1960s Western. He arrests local thug Bruce Dern and locks him away in a jail without bars. Harry Morgan, Jack Elam and Joan Hackett roundout the short list of sidekicks. And he locks wits with Walter Brennan in this light-hearted spoof. There are a few shootings, but Garners character gets over on the gunslingers with his wits and charm. While it has the same setting, this is about as far from Deadwood as you could get and it is a nice change of pace from the grim modern Westerns.

  

The first season of this show is great with the first seven shows being directed by James Burroughs. The late great Phil Hartman is pitch perfect as the silver-tongued ego driven voice of the station Bill McNeal. Classic episodes include the one where the station manager Dave quits coffee and Bill McNeal quits cigarettes in a buddy system/ suicide pact. In another episode, the station is abuzz with the possibility of an annual bonus. The single slightly off note on the show is the over the top clowning of Andy Dick as he opens the episodes of the last half of the second season with a big sloppy pratfall. The extras on the DVD include loads of commentary versions of the episodes.

  

The adventures of Chili Palmer, the star character from Get Shorty, continue as he swerves into the music business in this unfunny movie. This movie is full of bigger stars in smaller parts. James Woods gets off easy as he gets capped in the first act. Christina Milian, Cedric the Entertainer, the Rock and Uma Thurman make the most of what little they have to work with. John Travolta plays Chili Palmer again, but everyone in the film looks like they are sleepwalking. The DVD extras are pretty weak, with a bunch of weak deleted scenes. But the Rock is the one bright spot in this unfunny film.

  

Brian Vaughan has decided to wrap up this series and it shows in this six issue trade paperback. He is swinging a mighty plot hammer and revealing a grand design to the series as connections are randomly drawn between characters in different parts of the story. Earlier red herrings that referred to the source of the plague that killed all of the men in the world are long forgotten. And everyone suddenly knows everyone else. And has for a long time. We are this close to a “And all the while…” moment. The art by Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan is still solid with Goran Sudzuka doing a nice looking fill in here and there. It just feels like the story is rushing to catch the last boat out of town.

  

Alan Moore’s fingerprints are all over this revenge story making it “too talky” for a load of action movie fans. The makers of the Matrix adapt the delightfully subversive graphic novel and draw parallels to our modern world. Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, and Steven Rea all turn in interesting performances as the fictional calendar creeps closer and closer to the Fifth of November. I am not a purist when it comes to adaptations and tend to agreed with Raymond Chandler on the subject. When asked how he felt about someone ruining one of his books with a bad adaptation, he pointed at the book and said that it was just fine.

The extra DVD has a short feature about the making of the movie that duplicates a similar feature on the first disc. There is a short feature on Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British Parliament building. And there is a feature on the British invasion of DC Comics that saved the company from telling stories about flying superdogs. Or something like that. I dozed off in the Gunpowder feature. So, the extra DVD has about 30 extra minutes of movie stuff. It almost makes me miss the four hour features on the back end of the Mummy movies. The redeeming feature of the second DVD is the Natalie Portman gangsta rap from SNL.

  

Captain Barney Miller and his motley crew of detectives deal with low-level criminals in the sleepy 12th Precinct in this show from 1975. Before the era of Political Correctness, the cast of the show looked more like NYC than a show like Friends ever did. Hal Linden plays the level-headed title character. Abe Vigoda plays Detective Phil Fish with a strangely endearing Boris Karloff-lite approach. The enthusiastic Detective Wojo is played with thick-headed relish by Max Gail. Ron Glass, Jack Soo and Gregory Sierra round out the excellent cast. The early look into Barney’s homelife is quickly ditched in favor of more time with the detectives. There is not much extra for the DVD, but the thirteen episodes from the first season are sharp and hold up pretty well.

  

Jimmy Palmiotti and his writing partner Justin Gray have perpetrated more than their fair share of moronic comics on the reading public lately, but their work on the Jonah Hex series almost makes up for it. This trade collects the first six issues of the new version of the classic DC Western title. Hex hunts down bad guys and survives a variety of Civil War death traps in these clever little done in one stories. It almost makes up for The Battle for Bludhaven. The art by Luke Ross is compelling and different and should be a window for Greg Land to look through. In this series, Jonah Hex is modeled on the Spaghetti Western-era Clint Eastwood. But the photo-referenced images move on the page and do not lay there like the clipped letters in an extortion note. This is first rate work for the art and the story.

  

A load of people criticize Wizard magazine for being aimed at hormone-addled teenage shut ins. That criticism is well-deserved and a symptom of their lack of understanding of the next generation of comics book fans. A picture of Jessica Alba in spandex and a headline that screams about the Top Movie Babes would seem to be at odds with the emerging Graphic Novel reader.

But Wizard has done us a solid by publishing this book. There are segments on the finepoints of storytelling by top flight pencilers like Gary Frank, Terry Dodson, Phil Hester, Pia Guerra and an excellent segment on lettering by Walt Simonson. Greg Horn talks about page design and negative space. The chapter on backgrounds by Gerhard is particularly interesting and insightful. There are also practice script pages by Bendis, Robert Kirkman, and Ed Brubaker with commentary by the original pencilers. While the Wizard magazine tends to focus on the over-hyped crossover du jour or the T and A obsessions of the art teams, this book delves into the fundamentals of sequential story telling that make it a nice compliment to some of the more scholarly examinations of the art form.