I’m Fine with a Spinal Tap Sequel
By Dan Brown Much to my surprise, I find myself not dreading the Spinal Tap sequel. Set to land in theatres September 12, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues once again features Rob Reiner as filmmaker Marty Di Bergi chronicling the career of the band that made songs like Stonehenge, Big Bottom and Sex Farm somewhat famous. I’m surprised at my own reaction because, well, most sequels suck. And I have a high opinion of the 1984 original. If you’re a fan of the movie, as I am, you have no doubt spent many hours repeating lines like “These go to 11,” “He died in a bizarre gardening accident” and “What’s wrong with being sexy?” with your friends. People have had decades of repeated viewings to build up This is Spinal Tap in their minds, so why try to compete with that legacy? As a group, sequels, remakes, and reboots have an underwhelming reputation – when they don’t suck canal water outright. Movie fans hate them by reflex after being force-fed a diet of retreads they never asked for. Only the odd one, like Top Gun: Maverick, taps into the magic of the original, becoming a box-office success in the process. Most of them are . . . meh. Yet I’m hopeful. There are several reasons for this optimism. For starters, the premise for the new film is a promising one. This is Spinal Tap became a legendary motion picture for one reason: It contained every joke about rock and roll that could be made on the big screen. Band members constantly dying, musicians who can’t find their way to the stage, a manager whose favourite tool for settling disputes is a cricket bat, elaborate set pieces malfunctioning during concerts, it even had a Yoko Ono figure. The End Continues will succeed if it contains every joke about aging rockers. This is the creative team’s comedic window of opportunity. It’s a rich vein to mine. One of the locations for filming Spinal Tap II was in Florida, so with any luck there’s a spoof on how foreign rockers like AC/DC’s Brian Johnson flee to the Sunshine State once they’ve made their fortune. Another possible source of laughs could be Tap being consistently judged not worthy of induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Is there any idea less rock and roll than that of a museum devoted to rock music and rock musicians? This July will see the members of Black Sabbath reunite for a farewell concert in Birmingham. Surely the notion of aging rockers getting the band back together for one more big show is an opportune one for jokes? I also have faith in the group of comedians who made Spinal Tap II. Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer – this is a formidable team. They’ve had decades to come up with jokes about their characters, plus their improv powers have only grown greater in the interim. Collaborating on other mockumentaries, such as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, gives these players even more range to work with. And let’s face it, this will likely be the last Spinal Tap flick, so that may give Reiner and company the courage to go all out and not hold back. I can see a funeral for one of the band’s members being another setting for huge laughs. I can even picture a real-life scenario in my mind in which the sequel generates Oscar nominations. I know the Academy is prejudiced against comedies, but wouldn’t you love to see the members of Spinal Tap give their acceptance speech in character? Are you looking forward to the Spinal Tap sequel? Are you a fan of the original? Let me know in the comment box below! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Robert Pattinson Versus Himself
NOTE: Dan Brown’s column will now be appearing twice a week on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games; on Tuesdays, he’ll write about graphic novels, and on Thursdays he will cover other pop-culture topics. By Dan Brown You know a movie star has made it when he faces off against . . . himself. The latest example is Robert Pattinson who – through the plot device of cloning – is his own worst nightmare in the movie Mickey 17, which landed in theatres March 7. But not just any actor can do battle with his own mirror image. A Hollywood star has to earn the right to trade blows with a doppelganger by achieving a certain stature first. He has to overcome every other possible enemy – gangsters, terrorists, Nazis, aliens – over a number of earlier movies for this career avenue to open up. The earliest example I can recall of the trend is when the character played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1991’s Double Impact pounded on his twin brother. Arnold Schwarzenegger fought his clone nine years later in The Sixth Day. Then Tom Cruise got in on the act in 2013 in the film Oblivion. Gemini Man in 2019 featured Will Smith hunting . . . Will Smith. Strangely, veteran tough guy Sylvester Stallone has never gone up against himself on the big screen. But I have to believe that at some point during the 1980s Stallone contemplated doing a project involving Rocky Balboa trying to punch John Rambo’s lights out. At that time, it would have been easy to get it greenlit. Even relatively young stars are going this route. Next month will see the release of Sinners, the Southern gothic vampire flick in which the ascendant Michael B. Jordan plays identical siblings. The smart money says it will include at least one scene of a scrap between them. You may also be aware Robert De Niro is currently playing two roles in Alto Knights, released last week; the two gangster characters are childhood friends, not twins, and critics have slammed the picture for being confusing for that reason. That’s how accustomed audiences have grown to this convention. The closest Bruce Willis ever got was when he played an older and younger version of the same bounty hunter in 2012’s Looper, so I don’t count that one, even if the two versions of the character were enemies.Nor do I include the 1988 Jeremy Irons movie Dead Ringers, since it was a thriller, not an action film. Also out is Mark Hamill’s brief encounter with his own dark side in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back – that case was a single scene, not the entire premise. As I mentioned above, not every actor has the necessary drawing power to play on a double bill with themselves. In Hollywood, you have to earn the right to be your own opponent by building up your filmography over a number of years and motion pictures. For that reason, starring opposite himself would make no sense for an actor in his debut film – he wouldn’t be that well-known. That’s why you have to work your way to the top, fighting other types of bad guys, before you can trade blows with your twin or clone. At a certain level of fame, a star is the only one audiences will buy with the necessary strength to go toe-to-toe with himself. By process of elimination in all his previous movies, he becomes the next logical adversary. I leave it up to you to decide if Pattinson fits that bill. I tend to give him a break since he has followed an unusual career trajectory, alternating smaller projects with blockbusters.You will notice I have used the male pronoun throughout this column, a choice I made from not being able to come up with any examples of women action stars being part of this trend. I would argue Linda Hamilton long ago had enough action cred to fight herself, perhaps in the form of a Terminator version of Sarah Connor. I would pay to see that.And we know from previous instalments that androids and cloning are part of the Alien universe. Who doesn’t want to see Sigourney Weaver star in Alien: Ripley vs. Ripley? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Movie Mentors Inspired Me
NOTE: Dan Brown’s column will now be appearing twice a week on the website of L.A. Mood Comics & Games; on Tuesdays, he’ll write about graphic novels, and on Thursdays he will cover other pop-culture topics.By Dan Brown It’s the movies that made me the mentor I am today. If it wasn’t for motion pictures like To Sir, With Love, The Empire Strikes Back, and Stand and Deliver, I’m not sure I would be one. It was the movie mentors – Sir, Yoda, Jaime Escalante – who showed me how I could inspire young people. Those characters also provided proof of how rewarding mentorship could be not just for the young person, but the mentor, too. Some background: In my day job, I work as the editorial-support manager for the Western Gazette, the student-owned and-run newspaper here in London. What does that mean, exactly? I like to think of it in these terms: Each new academic year, a recent grad serves as editor-in-chief. I, on the other hand, am the paper’s “mentor-in-chief.” (I could, and will, write a column another day about how I love the Gazette’s mentoring culture, every student gets in on helping newsroom newbies.) I’m also a journalism instructor at the same university, so have served as a mentor to students I meet through my classes. But my interest in mentoring started decades ago, long before I got my current position and long before I began teaching at Ontario universities. I was still a student in grade school. The original spark might very well have been when I watched Sidney Poitier’s To Sir, With Love for the first time, likely on afternoon TV in the 1970s one summer. It might have been Channel 10 or Global or even TVOntario that aired it. As you may recall, Poitier plays an engineer who can’t get a role in his own industry, so he turns to teaching as his Plan B, winding up tutoring a bunch of tough kids in 1966 East London. The unruly group of working-class teens initially gets the better of their teacher. In a fit of desperation he decides to throw out the curriculum so he can impose his own structure on the class, which allows him to school the motley crew about the facts of life they will need to survive. Gradually, they warm to his brand of tough love, and just as the students start to fall in love with him, he returns the affection. All that and a heartbreaker of a song by Lulu! It still brings tears to my eyes. Skip ahead a couple years. When The Empire Strikes Back comes out in 1980, George Lucas replaces acclaimed actor Alec Guinness (who played Ben Kenobi in the original Star Wars) with a green muppet as the new spokesman for the Force in Luke’s training scenes on the swamp planet Dagobah. To this day, I still ponder Yoda’s lessons. Is there really only a “do or do not” and no “try”? Isn’t that a tad harsh? When Yoda uttered the word “unlearn” it blew my mind. I knew what learning was, I was doing it at Valleyview Public School, but “unlearning” opened up all kinds of possibilities I had never thought about before. My favourite scene in all of Star Wars comes from that sequence, when Yoda describes the nature of the Force to a maturing Luke and tells him people are “luminous beings,” not just crude flesh and blood. Stirring stuff. As a teen, I would be riveted by Edwards James Olmos’s turn as real-life calculus teacher Jaime Escalante. His determination to help a class of young Latinos in L.A. reach their potential was inspiring. I marveled when he told them the Mayas invented the concept of zero, adding “You burros have math in your blood.” Olmos says he asks only one thing of his students: A desire to learn: “If you don’t have the ganas, I will give it to you because I’m an expert.” Math was never my thing. But I could see how he lit the fires in the eyes of his students.And there were others: Ben Kenobi himself, Joe Clark (as played by Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me), Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society (it was the book, not the movie, which introduced me to Miss Jean Brodie when I was a student at a British high school for a year). By the way, it wasn’t apparent to me until years after I became an instructor at Western that what I was doing was mentoring. One day, after helping a student from one of my classes, I got an email that said, “You’re a great mentor.” I had never thought of it in that way before. So that made it official. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Dav Pilkey Proves My Theory About Childhood Crimes
By Dan Brown I have a theory. It goes like this: All the things we got punished for as kids, are the same things that make us successful as adults. Dav Pilkey is certainly proof of that. (It’s pronounced “Dave.”) Who’s he? He’s the guy who failed at childhood but is an astonishing success as a grownup. And the things that got him in trouble when he was younger are the same attributes behind his outrageous triumphs now that he’s older. Pilkey is in the news this week because a movie he inspired, Dog Man, is the top-earning film in theatres right now. Pilkey drew and wrote the comic series upon which the animated Dog Man motion picture is based. It features a dog-headed police officer and was popular enough to seize the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office. Pilkey has also created many other comics series, including the Captain Underpants books, which you may have heard of. But the adults in his life weren’t always encouraging. In fact, his fantastic creativity is the reason why as a young learner, Pilkey’s desk was placed outside the classroom – in the school corridor away from other students. “When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia,” the author’s note in one of his books explains, “Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day.” However, he was not deterred: “Luckily, Dav loved to draw and make up stories. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books – the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants.” At least one of his teachers tried to put a stop to this. “In the second grade, Dav’s teacher ripped up his comics and told him he couldn’t spend the rest of his life making silly books. Fortunately, Dav was not a very good listener.”And thus a comic empire was born. Pilkey’s other characters include Big Dog and Little Dog, Dragon, Cat Kid and Super Diaper Baby. I don’t know about you, but the unnamed Grade 2 teacher from Pilkey’s past calls to my mind these Pink Floyd lyrics: “When we grew up and went to schoolThere were certain teachers whoWould hurt the children in any way they couldBy pouring their derision upon anything we didExposing every weakness, however carefully hidden by the kid” I know there are many supportive adults out there, but the ones at Pilkey’s school aimed to crush his spirit; all they actually accomplished was to guarantee he would become one of pop culture’s best-known and most successful creators. Almost every other author working today would love to have his track record. Nor does my theory apply just to the creator of Dog Man. Not to make this about myself, but I feel like I was treated the same way by a few of my teachers – even if my desk never got permanently moved out to the hall. When report card time came around, mine were filled with comments from teachers that went something like this:“Daniel spends his time in class socializing and talking too much with the other children.”“Daniel would rather read his comic books than the class-assigned readings.”“Daniel doesn’t care enough about his school work and prefers to draw superheroes.” You can probably guess where I’m going with this. Eventually, I graduated from elementary and high school. Then, years later, my job path took me into journalism, a career in which I’m required to strike up conversations with the people around me all the time. For decades, I’ve made my living talking to strangers. Turns out all that socializing was good practice. As a kid, I read Marvel comics like Fantastic Four and the Uncanny X-Men. Now I write about the entertainment industry and report on the latest superhero blockbusters because those throwaway comics of my school years have moved to the centre of the cultural discourse, a development my teachers didn’t see coming. And as I look back on all the sketching I did in elementary school, I realize that was when I started developing the observational skills that would serve me so well as a reporter. So, parents, take note. If your child has their nose stuck in a book all the time, that habit will likely pay off down the road. It will open doors you can’t even see from this point in their life. They may very well wind up a writer like me. Or, if your son’s or daughter’s favourite thing to do is play hockey, you may have a future athlete or coach on your hands. If your progeny seem to have an unhealthy interest in bugs and animals, they may one day turn out to be a scientist or veterinarian. You get the idea. Look, I don’t know what your kids like to do. But I do know there’s a more-than-fair chance that what seems like a silly pursuit could one day turn out to be more than just a childish fixation; it just might become their life’s work. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
It’s A Golden Age For Animation
By Dan Brown A quick glance in the rearview mirror before we get any deeper into 2025. As last year drew to a close, there was the usual wall-to-wall news coverage in December recapping the highlights and low points from the last 12 months. As all of those stories were airing on TV and running in the papers or online, I noticed something interesting that had happened in the entertainment world, specifically something about the top-grossing movies in 2024. Maybe you noticed it, too. There’s no denying it: We are now living in a new golden age of animation. Long gone are the days when animated stories were relegated to the ghetto of Saturday-morning TV cartoons for children. Also long gone are the days when decent animated movies were rare. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at 2024’s Top 10 films (according to Box Office Mojo) worldwide:1/ Inside Out 2 2/ Deadpool & Wolverine3/ Moana 24/ Despicable Me 45/ Dune: Part Two6/ Wicked7/ Mufasa: The Lion King8/ Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire9/ Kung Fu Panda 4 10/ Venom: The Last Dance The first thing that jumped out at me: The biggest movie of the year, Inside Out 2, is animated. (Don’t tell anyone, but I’m the one person on the planet who didn’t like the original Inside Out, it was hard for me to sit through it. Gimme Ratatouille any day.) But wait, there’s more. A full four out of the Top 10 movies are animated. Almost half the titles on the list!And if you consider computer-generated imagery to be a form of animation, which I do, then every movie in the Top 10 was an animated story to one degree or another. There are other signs of this new golden age. For example, when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem came out two years ago, the creators leaned into its roots as a comic – reviewers said it looked like a comic book come to life. That's how good it looks. And those animated multiverse Spider-Man movies from the last few years have been better than many of the live-action superhero movies made in the same periodAnd don’t get me started on the popularity of anime!This is why it’s an exciting time for animation fans. It was Walt Disney’s dream for cartoons to be taken seriously, so he created the first full-length animated feature back in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Fast-forward to our current era, in which animation is an element used in nearly every film with mass appeal. This new breed of animated movie is even getting critical respect. The quality of these films has improved so much that in 2002, the Academy Awards set aside a category for the best animated feature. Pixar’s 2020 picture Soul won in that category, and some observers came up with convincing arguments that it deserved to be nominated as the overall best picture, animated or otherwise. All of which has me tingling. Now, I don’t know if comic fans are automatically animation fans.But I am confident that the shift I’ve noticed means something positive for those of us who love graphics. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Deadpool & Wolverine Isn’t a Sure Bet
The superhero combo may not be able to win over movie goers according to Dan Brown. He explains how movie trends, ratings, and more won't help the studio in this week's column,
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