Chris Lee writes about Hollywood and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times and, through the years, he has spent a ludicrous amount of money on sneakers. He just sent over this post on some heroic new shoes.
It was as inevitable as the Hulk and Iron Man winding up in a MarvelStudios-produced movie together: that comic book geeks and athletic footwear fetishists known as “sneakerheads” would one day bond over shared cultural arcana.
This week marks the release of a trio of limited edition DC Super Hero Shoes, available at Limited Soles courtesy of sneaker purveyor ACI International. The cost: $110 a pop, each shoe’s look copped from the chunky-soled styling of Nike’s iconic Air Force 1 basketball shoe.
Respectively commemorating Batman, the Joker and Superman, the collectors’ edition kicks are a vibrantly-hued, small batch affair you’re not going to find at your local Foot Locker.
ACI International produced only 1,938 pairs of the Superman shoe (in homage to the year the Man of Steel’s debut issue was released), 1,939 of the Batman and 1,940 of the Joker’s model –- each individually numbered and encased in the kind of custom packaging that sneaker snobs make a primary talking point.
As well, each pair comes kitted-out with enough comic-specific details to make fanboys swoon: the words “BRUCE” and “WAYNE” on the heels of the Batman shoe, an embossed silhouette of Metropolis (with the obligatory Daily Planet logo) on the heel basket of the Kryptonian model and a purple caricature of the Joker on the tongue of the criminal clown’s shoe.
Of course Adidas beat ACI International to the fanboy punch earlier this year, releasing Hellboy-themed limited edition sneakers tied to the release of director Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy: The Golden Army” in June. Working in conjunction with the movie distributor Universal, Dark Horse Comics and original Hellboy comic book artist Mike Mignola, Adidas Originals produced two comic-inspired sneakers: the Forum Mid-Golden Army (which boasted an image of actor Ron Perlman as the demonic anti-hero on its outsole) and the Stan Mid-Hellboy (which came with a mini-comic, three extra footbeds and something called “lace jewels”).
And back in April, the custom designer Flawless Victory reworked a pair of Nike Vandals with images of Spider-Man’s nemesis Venom. “The disgusting details of Venom including his sharp teeth and overabundance of saliva show the designer’s skill with small touches,” noted the blog myairshoes.com.
David Strick's Hollywood Backlot has some great new galleries featuring shots from the set of "Dexter" and "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." If you haven't checked out Strick's impressive archive of stars and filmmakers photographed as they work, it's well worth a visit.
Thor is a Norse god, so I always liked to imagine that he talked like a big, bellowing version of the Swedish Chef, but in Marvel Comics, of course, the God of Thunder has always sounded more like a Shakespearean actor portraying one of the brawnier members of the Danish court from "Hamlet."
Maybe that turned out to be a selling point; Marvel Studios is now trying to lock in (or, according to some sources, already has locked in) Kenneth Branagh to direct a film adaptation of Thor's comics tale. Variety has a story about "negoitations" being underway but I doubt that Marvel Studios, still a very young and reputation-sensitive enterprise, would let this news out to circulate unless it was close to inking the deal.
I think it's a great choice if does happen. I think "Dead Again," "Hamlet" and "Frankenstein" proved the Shakespearean veteran to be a natural storyteller and one with a flair for keeping characters vivid and believable in the midst of sweeping tales.
Plenty of television comedy stars have hung with Spider-Man, but Stephen Colbert may be the first to swing with him.
Colbert, the master parodist of Comedy Central, shares an eight-page adventure with the world-famous web-slinger in issue No. 573 of "The Amazing Spider-Man," on sale Oct. 15. The folks at Marvel sent over a page from the story and while I can't quite tell what's going on, it's pretty clear that Colbert actually takes to the rooftops of Manhattan with the arachnid hero.
Colbert and his name have been popping up a lot in Marvel pages lately (perhaps too much, actually), following the January announcement by the company's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada that Colbert's faux campaign for president in our world would be mirrored by a genuine bid for the White House within the Marvel universe. The references have been scattered in different issues (a cameo here, a campaign poster there, some T-shirts, etc.) but nothing quite as dramatic as this.
Marvel has always been open to daffy gimmicks like this -- hey this is the company built by Stan Lee, after all.
For instance, 30 years ago, "Saturday Night Live" was all the rage so, in the October 1978 issue of "Marvel Team-Up," Spider-Man met up with John Belushi and six other Not Ready for Prime-Time Players (Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner) for a deliriously cheesy adventure. On the cover, Belushi is in samurai mode, but he looks vaguely like Anne Ramsey from "Throw Momma from the Train."
The "plot" has Peter Parker attending an "SNL" broadcast on the same night the evil Silver Samurai comes looking for a ring of great value that has accidentally ended up in the possession of Belushi (yes, that's right, he's basically Ringo Starr in "Help!").
The best moments in the story: Morris dressed up as Thor and the late Radner wondering to herself at one point, "Hm, what's that noise from Belushi's dressing room?" And I'm guessing that on most Saturday nights on the real set, that was a loaded question...
Here's your chance to get the latest scoop on the "Iron Man" sequel straight from director Jon Favreau or, if you prefer, this is a golden opportunity to spook him with your encyclopedic knowledge of his screen work in "Swingers" and "Rudy."
Either way, the filmmaker who brought you the summer's most fun super-hero movie (as well as the sublime "Elf" and the grieviously underrated "Zathura") will join us here for a live chat on Wednesday (Oct. 1), the day after the release of "Iron Man" on DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment. The chat will start at 11 a.m.local time here in Los Angeles.
If you can't join us Tuesday, feel free to post a question here in the comments section and we'll try to ask some from there as well.
-- Geoff Boucher
April 2008 photo of Jon Favreau by Ringo H. W. Chu\Los Angeles Times
Bill Murray has been a groundskeeper, a businessman in Tokyo, and a ghostbuster (and will be one again), but now he's campaigning for a new role: mayor. In "City of Ember," Bill plays the mayor of an underground city, a character who's funny and out for himself. The Oscar nominee has been out promoting the film and recently made a surprise visit to the the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, to the delight of fans.
The marketing folks behind "City of Ember" earlier transported some of the press to Comic-Con on a train, actually the Tioga Pass, a 1950s former Canadian National "presidents car" and the Overland Trail, a 1940s former Southern Pacific club lounge car (with barbershop -- thanks Conductor Bill). It was very cool. This time, they've hatched a site and video touting the ex-'SNL'er as the right candidate to lead the city against the darkness. It seems to fit in with this politically-charged environment.
Johnny Depp will play Tonto in a Disney revisitation of the Lone Ranger, but who will be the masked man?
The Hero Complex is officially supporting Viggo Mortensen for the role of mystery man of the Old West because, after seeing "Hidalgo" and the trailer for "Appaloosa," we just think he does the dusty-trail adventure thing with a nice flair.
George Clooney would also give Disney a powerhouse tandem at the top of this hoped-for franchise, as well as some major opportunity for the type of winking humor that gave "Pirates of the Caribbean" its box-office flair. Clooney may be too old, but we still think he has enough silver bullets in his ammo belt. Depp, meanwhile, may be just five years shy of 50 but still approaches his acting career like a kid rummaging through a trunk of dress-up costumes. Not only will the part-Cherokee Depp be wearing the fringed buckskin, he will also be donning the garb of a pirate, a vampire, a gangster and, um, a guy with a funny hat.
The Oscar nominee has a busy schedule, to say the least. On Wednesday at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Disney gathered the press for a preview of its upcoming major releases and announced that Depp will be back in eyeliner as Jack Sparrow, the rummy scoundrel of "Pirates of the Caribbean," which will have a fourth installment with Jerry Bruckheimer back as producer. The franchise has already pulled in $2.6 billion at the box office. (Bruckheimer will also produce the Lone Ranger movie.)
Other Depp projects coming include a turn as the Mad Hatter in a Tim Burton adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland," which will be a 2010 animated release with a motion-capture approach in the same vein as "Beowulf." It will be Depp's seventh major project with Burton -- and No. 8 will be "Dark Shadows," yet another black-cape affair for the movie-making partnership, this one a remake of the baroque soap opera from the late 1960s and early 1970s about an accursed family in Maine that, we suspect, had a lasting effect on a local youngster named Stephen King.
Depp will also be robbing banks as the gentlemen bandit John Dillinger in Michael Mann's period gangster flick "Public Enemies," due in theaters next year. That film also stars Christian Bale.
-- Geoff Boucher
Johnny Depp photo from December 2007 by Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times
Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, from the Los Angeles Times archives.
Virgin arrived on the scene in 2006 and stirred things up with some big ideas (looking to Asia and India specifically for concepts and audience and also tapping Hollywood talent to create comics that could be used as instant templates for film projects) and big names (Sir Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra on the corporate masthead, and Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Ed Burns and Nicolas Cage among its film-world creators, along with comics-industry notables such as Garth Ennis, Alex Ross and Mike Carey).
The venture was met with considerable interest and some cynicism (Alan Moore, for instance, took a thinly disguised swipe at Virgin here not long ago and essentially called it everything that was wrong with a Hollywood-obsessed comics industry). The formula certainly grabbed the attention of some Hollywood folks, who had watched the Dark Horse success story and believed that a small but nimble comic-book company could not only be a dynamic Hollywood player, it could in essence publish movie storyboards.
I talked to filmmaker Ritchie about this a year ago and he was intensely interested in the notion of writing a story, realizing it visually on a comic book page and then using that as project pitch and visual guide to a movie. The "Snatch" director told me that "Gamekeeper," his series for Virgin, became a hot commodity before it was even printed. "The irony," he said, "is there has been more interest in this from movie studios than anything I ever did before." But, in the end, it was money matters in the greater Virgin empire that forced the closure of the comic-book company's New York offices early this month.
I exchanged e-mails this morning with Gotham Chopra (who is the son of author Deepak) and he told me about some other things coming up that I will be able to share with you soon. Essentially, though, my sense is that he, publisher Sharad Devarajan and their team have lost the corporate backing of Branson's sprawling Virgin empire (which is grappling with the grim financial realities of the day) but that they were in comic-book business before they had Branson as a partner and they will solider now without the British conglomerate.
Haden Blackman, the project leader on "The Force Unleashed" video game, has a daydream: He strolls into the movie theater, buys some popcorn and then sits down and watches his game's tale of Darth Vader and his secret apprentice flicker to life as cinema.
"Oh, that would be incredible," said Blackman. "And it's not impossible. Never say never. George [Lucas] has looked to tell new 'Star Wars' stories through the games and with the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, and then he has also shown a willingness to let the characters come into the films. Look at Aayla Secura, a creation in the [Dark Horse] comic books who became part of the theatrical films."
More than that, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," released in August, began as a television animated series (and still will be, with tie-in episodes premiering Oct. 3 on Cartoon Network), but when Lucas saw the work in progress he decided to take the tale to the cineplex. That film has gotten mixed reviews, to say the least, but Lucas doesn't seem to care a bit about the opinion of any detractors when it comes to his historic entertainment enterprise and its directions.
Dark Horse has also released a graphic novel version of "The Force Unleashed" and, to my mind, it's more satisfying than the game -- although in full disclosure, that's not saying much, because I am far more of a reader than a gamer. Blackman not only penned the story for the graphic novel, he also has a lavish 224-page book titled "The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed" that celebrates the images and behind-the-scenes labor on the game as if it already were a major motion picture. An adapatation of the film in a traditional prose novel written by Australian sci-fi author Sean Williams also hit No. 1 on the New York Times list of hardcover fiction bestsellers and now, after four weeks, is at No. 14 on that tally.
Lucas is clearly pleased with this new entry to the broader "Star Wars" story and I would not be surprised for a moment to see it on a theater marquee at a CG-animated project in the next few years, especially with the intensifying Hollywood interest in video games and toys as film properties. There's also the very real power of putting Darth Vader on a movie poster in the theater lobbies of America.
If the "The Force Unleashed" does become a movie, Blackman said it would be a testament to the priorities and sophisticated ideas of his team, who he says puts storytelling and game-play on equal footing and emphasized "the artistic nature" of the quickly changing video-game medium. "It's an incredible time," he said, "to be telling powerful stories in this fairly young medium."
Perhaps, but like the most recent film addition to the Lucas universe, there was huge pre-release anticipation for "The Force Unleashed," followed by widespread grumbling. It hit stores Sept. 16 and topped the 1-million units sales mark in its first five days, according to industry retail reports, but the reviews have been decidedly mixed.
Here's the take, for instance, by Hero Complex contributor Pete Metzger, who reviewed the game for the Los Angeles Times and echoed many other underwhelmed gamers:
Most of the things that make up the "Star Wars" universe these days -- movies, TV shows, toys and video games -- are lacking the magic that made the original trilogy of films so incredible. Gone are the spectacle and awe. Instead, we get halfhearted disappointments (such as the current "Clone Wars" animated movie).
Sadly, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is no exception. It should be an amazing story bridge between Episodes 3 and 4 and one that boasts groundbreaking new artificial intelligence and gaming technology. But Unleashed fails to register the tremor in the Force we were hoping for.
In a serious David vs. Goliath win for the little guy, Mirchi Movies, the makers of the Bollywood film "Hari Puttar," stood up to Warner Bros. and, in what turns out to be a last-second ruling, will be allowed to release the film this Friday (Sept. 26) in India.
The studio had claimed that the title sounded too similar to the boy wizard and J.K. Rowling money tree that is "Harry Potter," but the Delhi High Court threw out the case, basically saying that anyone who'd read Harry Potter would be able to distinguish the two films/titles. Wand, meet gavel.
Attorney Pratibha Singh told the AFP: "The case has been dismissed. The court said that Warner Bros had known the title of the film since 2005 and had delayed bringing the case to court until the last moment."
The case also seemed to hinge on the fact that Warner Bros. knew about the title three years ago, and waited until the film was about to be released to bring up this suit.
Good for the film, the filmmakers and the legal system for giving a common-sense ruling. If anyone should be mad, it's the "Home Alone" people! Here's a look:
Growing up, Geoff Boucher always wanted to be a mild-mannered reporter working for a major metropolitan newspaper....or maybe a wookiee. He came to the Los Angeles Times in 1991 and, after years covering crime and local politics, he switched to the Hollywood beat covering film and music. Now he's the paper's go-to geek.
Also contributing:
The Legion of Super-Bloggers here at the Hero Complex includes Yvonne Villarreal, a Times staffer whose earliest memory of wanting to be a journalist stems from watching broadcast reporter April O'Neil on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series; Jevon Phillips, a Times staffer who specializes in our favorite television shows, especially "Heroes" and the frakking brilliant "Battlestar Galactica;" Denise Martin, another Times staffer, who has an undying passion for "Twilight" and anyone ever enrolled at Hogwarts; and Gina McIntyre, a Times editor who learned her craft by watching too many slasher films.
Chris Lee writes about Hollywood and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times and, through the years, he has spent a ludicrous amount of money on sneakers. He just sent over this post on some heroic new shoes. 
Of course Adidas beat ACI International to the fanboy punch earlier this year, releasing Hellboy-themed limited edition sneakers tied to the release of director Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy: The Golden Army” in June. Working in conjunction with the movie distributor Universal, Dark Horse Comics and original Hellboy comic book artist Mike Mignola, Adidas Originals produced two comic-inspired sneakers: the Forum Mid-Golden Army (which boasted an image of actor Ron Perlman as the demonic anti-hero on its outsole) and the Stan Mid-Hellboy (which came with a mini-comic, three extra footbeds and something called “lace jewels”).
