Tag: Patton Oswalt

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Film/TV TV Features

Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. Makes Use of Supervillain Absurdity

Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing — M.O.D.O.K. (voiced by Patton Oswalt) makes use of Marvel’s Silver Age-era silliness.

Supervillains — they’re just like us! They’re insecure. They struggle with work-life balance. Their kids are a handful. They can focus their thoughts into deadly energy beams.

Okay, the last part probably doesn’t apply to you (and if it does, please don’t call me), but it does apply to M.O.D.O.K. Marvel Comics has been creating and assimilating heroes and villains since 1939, and M.O.D.O.K. is … certainly one of them. You can be excused if you’ve never heard of him. He was created in 1967, the period known as Marvel’s Silver Age, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a foil for Captain America. George Tarleton, a technician at shady tech company Advanced Idea Mechanics, was injected with mutagens designed to increase his mental capacity, transforming him into the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. The drugs grew his cranium and shrank his body, so he is forced to live in an armored hover-chair of his own design. He immediately used his superior intellect to take over A.I.M. and launch various schemes for world conquest, which must be thwarted by whatever Marvel superhero is in need of a punching bag at the moment.

While it produced some of the most eye-popping art comics have ever seen, Marvel’s Silver Age is so called because it wasn’t a Golden Age. To call M.O.D.O.K. a C-list character is being generous. He kind of made sense in the psychedelic ’60s when drawn by super-genius artist Jack Kirby, but he never really got past his innate ridiculousness. On nerd culture website IGN’s list of the “100 Greatest Villains of All Time,” M.O.D.O.K. was No. 100. At least he made the list! But it’s like he built this army of atomic super-soldiers for nothing.

In other words, M.O.D.O.K. is perfect for comedy, and in this dark age where no Marvel IP can long go unexploited, Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum have given him the perfect vehicle: a sitcom. It’s not the first time the Marvel juggernaut has crushed the hoariest of TV genres; WandaVision married the blockbuster and I Love Lucy to fine results. But M.O.D.O.K. on Hulu gives the Silver Age the slapstick treatment it deserves, thanks largely to Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, the stop motion animation house behind Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken. Seth Green’s evergreen comedy was created to put his action figure collection into surreal and hilarious situations. It has evolved into a weekly visual tour de force that pushes the limits of the oldest animated form. M.O.D.O.K. takes these skills to the next level, incorporating motion capture performances and even the occasional live action shot into the mix.

Oswalt stars as our floating head antihero, and the comedian takes to it like he was born to play the part. M.O.D.O.K.’s bulging intellect is overshadowed by his Trumpian vanity. When yet another extremely expensive battle with the Avengers ends in failure, he learns A.I.M. is broke. After a night of clubbing and flattery by tech CEO Austin Van Der Sleet (Beck Bennett), he agrees to sell the company to tech giant GRUMBL. Playing second fiddle inside the organization he conquered with his mind doesn’t sit well with the most self-involved brain in the multiverse — especially when they replace his torture chamber with a day care center. As the season progresses, his schemes to regain control lead to escalating super-science conflict with his work frenemy Monica (Wendi McLendon-Covey). He steadily loses status until he’s only head of the mail room.

Meanwhile, at home, M.O.D.O.K.’s wife Jodie (Aimee Garcia) is a mommy blogger whose new book Jodify Your Life is climbing the bestseller charts. M.O.D.O.K.’s jealousy tears the family apart leaving daughter Melissa (Melissa Fumero) and son Lou (Ben Schwartz) stuck in the middle.

Making comedy out of burdening comic book characters with real-life emotions and failings isn’t a new concept. The stamp of The Venture Bros. can be seen frequently in the dysfunctional families of obsessed heroes and villains, such as when M.O.D.O.K. is thrown out of the hip villains-only nightclub, The Soho Lair. The writing is archly funny, delivering a couple of authentic laugh-out-loud moments in every 22-minute episode. It also helps that Oswalt’s reputation brings in a slew of high-powered guest voices, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Nathan Fillion, Jon Hamm, Chris Parnell, Alan Tudyk, and Bill Hader. The biggest attraction is the stunning animation. If you’ve been sleeping on films like the magnificent Kubo and the Two Strings, you’ll be shocked at how stop motion has progressed in the digital age. If everything has to be Marvel, I ask for more like this, please.

Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. is streaming on Hulu.

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Film/TV TV Features

We’ve Got Movie Sign! Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour Comes to The Orpheum.

The 1990s were a time of peak irony, but the three comedies that defined the sarcastic tone of the decade all started inauspiciously in the late 1980s: The Simpsons began as an animated segment on The Tracy Ullman Show in 1987. Daniel Waters’ caustic teen comedy, Heathers, was a box office disappointment in the spring of 1989, only to gain a cult following on home video. And on Thanksgiving 1988, KTMA, a small cable channel in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area premiered a homegrown show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.

TV stations frequently licensed old movies to squeeze a few extra ad dollars out of their (frequently stoned) late-night viewers. Occasionally, these films were great, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, which became a Christmas staple because it was a box-office flop that was cheap to license. But they were usually terrible.

Hiring a regular local host to introduce low-budget horror and sci-fi films was a frequent local TV gimmick, such as Memphis’ favorite ghoul, Sivad, who ruled the WHBQ airwaves in the 1960s. Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s innovation was that the host stayed on the screen and pointed out exactly how bad the movie was.

The creator and original host of MST3K was Joel Hodgson. The Minnesota comedian spent much of the 1980s trying to get his aggressively eccentric prop comedy noticed in Hollywood, with some success. But after an NBC deal fell through, he returned to Minneapolis and got a job at a T-shirt shop, hoping to revamp his act. He pitched the concept of a movie host who spiced up the questionable films by doing comedy riffs over them to Jim Mallon of KTMA, and he built the props — two sarcastic androids named Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo — himself. The show was an instant local hit, seemingly springing from the id of the blunted late-night audience who were already hate-watching the movies. By Thanksgiving 1989, the show was airing on the startup cable outfit The Comedy Channel; when the network merged with rival Ha! in 1990, MST3K became the flagship production of Comedy Central.

With the laconic Hodgson as the show’s low-key guide and a cast that included ace comedy writers J. Elvis Weinstein, Trace Beaulieu, Mary Jo Pehl, Frank Conniff, and Michael J. Nelson, the show introduced America to the works of anti-auteur Ed Wood, the low-rent Japanese turtle monster Gamera (“Gamera is really neat/Gamera is filled with meat/We are eating Gamera” went the lyrics the crew wrote to go with the films’ ear-bleeding theme song), and the near-mythical worst movie of all time, Manos! Hands of Fate.

Gary Glover

Joel Hodgson (above), Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo take on No Retreat, No Surrender.

After a falling out with Mallon, Hodgson left the show in the middle of the fifth season, but not before epically pissing off Joe Don Baker by pissing on his tough-guy cop disaster, Mitchell.

The show continued with Nelson as host for the rest of the decade, moving to the Sci Fi Network for its final two seasons. But it never really went away. The extremely geeky fan clubbers were early adopters of the internet, and the VHS tape-trading culture the show inspired transitioned seamlessly onto YouTube. Hodgson and the rest of the cast hit the road with live shows like Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax. Then, in 2015, Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring the show back, on Netflix. For four years, the $5.7 million he raised was the biggest success on the crowd-funding platform. With an all new cast that included Jonah Ray, Felicia Day, and Patton Oswalt, the show has run for two seasons on Netflix.

“I know I’m lucky to have it last so long, but I never really thought about it like ‘How long is this going to last?'” says Hodgson. “I feel like it’s just so much a part of my life I can’t really get outside of that.”

Hodgson will bring his blockbuster live show, The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour, to The Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, November 23rd. “It’s a live version of the TV show with 1,000 people in the room,” he says.

The film that will provide the backbone of the evening’s festivities is No Retreat, No Surrender, a notoriously awful martial arts movie from 1986 starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The audience can also expect lots of songs and skits from Hodgson — who says this is his final tour — and his talented cast. “I found a lot of good people to help me,” Hodgson says. “That’s the secret — it’s just finding people who care about it like I do.”

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Film Review: Big Fan

Big Fan (2009; dir. Robert Siegel)—If you don’t give a damn about professional football, then pat yourself on the back. But also take a moment to pity the millions of passionate NFL fans out there whose Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays just got a whole lot more exciting. You know, fans like me, who are—or should be—finally starting to question our devotion to a sport that rivals bullfighting and Roman gladiatorial combat for the ways its savagery and ethical gray areas compromise its entertainment value. If you’d like to understand how we football fans can not only live with but altogether ignore the latest horrifying information about former players suffering from brain damage, set aside some time for writer-director Robert Siegel’s debut, one of the most perceptive films about American sports fandom ever made.

Comedian and noted sports agnostic Patton Oswalt plays Paul Aufiero, a working stiff from New Jersey who loves the New York Giants as much as he hates his mom, whose basement he lives in. Big Fan is the story of Paul’s obsession, and it works even when it’s trying too hard to mean something more; you don’t have to be a Dostoevsky scholar to connect the dots when Oswalt intones “I am so sick…” while scribbling his talk-radio call-in show notes from the underground parking garage where he works. You also don’t have to be a sports-movie fan to sympathize with Paul and his pal Sal (Kevin Corrigan) as they sit outside Giants Stadium on game day and run through the full range of anger, disbelief, black humor, exaltation and exhaustion that every NFL fan will recognize from countless Sunday afternoons on the couch.

But Oswalt’s a tick too smart to transform completely into a lonesome, starry-eyed prole whose every interaction with the world goes about as well as a medieval de-nailing. Michael Rappaport, who plays the trash-talking Eagles fan Philadelphia Phil, offers a truer, ruder portrait. A master builder of pitiable and self-hating goons, Rappaport salts his exuberance with profanity and meanness—his casual obscenities sound even dirtier when contrasted with Paul’s labored hot takes. There’s no real exit from this sad character study, and like Frederick Exley noted long ago in A Fan’s Notes, there are few if any indications that being a fan is anything other than a dead end. Against such impossible odds, Big Fan still believes that hope springs eternal; its final scene catches Paul dreamily muttering “It’s gonna be a great year” from behind prison glass.

Grade: A-