Stop the presses

State of Play: the last newspaper movie?

The film doesn’t so much lament the fall of the print media as the core of its story – it simply references it occasionally with bitterness. At the same time, the film is wrestling with everything that is wrong with the mainstream print media – internal bias, editorial control over a story, the interruption of ongoing police investigations for the sake of the scoop, the lean towards tabloid journalism and the desire to sell papers above getting the story straight.

...And really I might have let it slip past as a character quirk of a reporter watching his industry fade away – except that the film ends on a dour note with a loving, almost nostalgic look at the printing and distribution of a newspaper – from typesetting to curb. It was like one of those sequences you would see on Sesame Street when you were a kid or something. Only tinged with sadness. And while excellently assembled – I mean you could almost smell the ink on your hands – it certainly leaves one pondering the death of print.

Knowing is half the battle, the other half is killing people

It's a foregone conclusion that the upcoming GI Joe movie is going to be, well, awful, even with Ray Park as Snake-Eyes. Even if it's not outright camp, it fails the Marlon Wayans test (which is simply "Is Marlon Wayans in this movie?") and is virtually guaranteed to be a celluloid atrocity (is it antiquated to invoke celluloid now?).

If you're still longing for the good ol' days of body counts, outrageous technology and globe-shattering master plans, you might want to check out GI Joe: Resolute. In lieu of Larry Hama (with whom GI Joe should eternally be associated), it's written by warren_ellis, and yeah, that's immediately intriguing. In the first episode the body count's two named (and I'm sure much beloved) characters, along with a few million bystanders. Two episodes are online already -- the second of which is pretty much Snake-Eyes in action and perfectly so. I'm already pulling for this to be the new lingering narrative and not whatever comes out in theaters, but it's got the feeling of one last swing for the fences before the new team steps to the plate. Ambitious and a bit audacious, a worthy last hurrah so far.