Oh boy. My nieces and nephew just plotzed a little bit. And frankly? So did I. “Winter is comes early…”. Oh come ON.
Winter IS Coming y’all. And is it too much to ask for a little (Jon) Snow?
Guess we’ll all have to wait ’til Sept. 28th to find out more. Dammit.
[Link to video, as the reblog gacked it: http://time.com/3239640/once-upon-a-time-frozen-elsa/ ]
This is one that hits home for me, as my father passed away from multiple myeloma almost 25 years ago. So let me just let the press release do the talkin’. And hope to see y’all next weekend at the ‘Con!
Help Patients Battling Blood Cancer at the 15th Annual Baltimore Comic-Con
Register as a Bone Marrow Donor
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – August 27, 2014 – Seth Kushner is a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, NY, and a proud member of the Bay Ridge community, where he and his wife, Terra are raising their almost-five-year-old son. Seth grew up knowing he wanted to be an artist and began a career as a photographer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, L’Uomo Vogue, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, and other publications. Published books include The Brooklynites, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics, and upcoming New York Comics. Seth is co-founder of TripCity.net, home to his CulturePOP photocomix and Schmuck comics. In 2013, Seth co-founded HANG DAI Editions, an independent publishing imprint.
Back in April, Seth was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and was told he needed a bone marrow transplant. Thankfully, Seth has found a bone marrow match and a transplant has been scheduled, but there are many other patients out there that need your help. Seth and his family and friends are encouraging everyone to become someone’s real-life hero.
Become a registered become a bone marrow donor at the Baltimore Comic-Con . All it takes is completing a registration form and swabbing the inside of your cheeks. In less than five minutes, you can potentially save a life!
Seth speaks with his son on FaceTime every morning and draws one superhero per day, which Terra brings home for their son. Seth stays positive and is confident he will beat his disease.ART AUCTION
The art created for the 2014 Baltimore Comic-Con Yearbook will be auctioned off at the Baltimore Comic-Con Art Auction at 5pm on Friday, September 5th in our Main hall, in the Exclusives Booth in the lobby. A portion of the proceeds from the auction will go to Seth Kushner and his fight against leukemia. Seth is a frequent guest of the Baltimore Comic-Con and we are looking forward to his return to the show in 2015! To learn more about Seth and to contribute to his cause, please go to http://www.gofundme.com/d8gc2o.DELETE BLOOD CANCER FACTS
Delete Blood Cancer DKMS was founded in the U.S. in 2004 and is the U.S. arm of DKMS, the German bone marrow donor center. DKMS was started by a family whose search for a donor inspired 68,000 people to register in just one year. Today, Delete Blood Cancer and DKMS make up the world’s largest bone marrow donor center with branches around the globe that have registered more than 4 million donors and provided more than 40,000 patients with potentially life-saving transplants.
In the U.S., Delete Blood Cancer has registered more than 500,000 potential donors and facilitated over 1,500 life-saving transplants. We have registered more than 100,000 new donors per year in the past two years. But they’re not stopping there. They lead the fight against blood cancer by working with families, communities, and organizations to recruit more donors and provide more patients with second chances at life.
Delete Blood Cancer is dedicated to their mission of building a critical mass of bone marrow and blood stem cell donors for patients in need. By educating about the donation process, demonstrating the impact of donation, and providing support and counsel to their patients and donors, they serve to grow their donor center and, ultimately, help more people.
The donors they register are added to the Be The Match® Registry, the official registry of the United States operated by the National Marrow Donor Program®. This registry currently includes more than 11 million donors, of which more than 38 percent have been recruited by Delete Blood Cancer and DKMS combined.
Register online at deletebloodcancer.org, text DELETE to 20222 to donate $5, contribute at deletebloodcancer.org, or fund raise via firstgiving.com/dkms.Delete Blood Cancer will be exhibiting at the Baltimore Comic-Con in booth #2503. Please stop by to learn how you can help!
TICKETS
General Admission and VIP Package tickets for Weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are now on sale! Visit www.baltimorecomiccon.com/tickets/ for more information and to purchase your advanced tickets now!
Oh HELLZ yeah! I always thought that Kristin Bauer van Straten got short shrift in OUaT. I’m really glad to see that she’ll be returning. 1) because she was amazing as Maleficent,
2) Because as she was all but zombified at the end of her storyline, I’m hoping for some scary monster action once the Frozen arc wraps up
3) because girlfriend can rock the usual OUaT wardrobe like a BOSS. Read the rest over at Entertainment Weekly!
Once Upon a Time — Pictured: Kristen Bauer (Screengrab/EW)
Alright y’all. It’s time for more tickets! This go-round it’s for the Baltimore area screening of A Dolphin’s Tale 2. Synopsis? Let me show it to you. Courtesy of the PR folks, of course!
Synopsis:
Warner Bros. Pictures and Alcon Entertainment’s “Dolphin Tale 2” continues the story of the brave dolphin Winter, whose miraculous rescue and recovery—thanks to a groundbreaking prosthetic tail—made her a symbol of hope and perseverance to people around the world and inspired the 2011 family hit movie “Dolphin Tale.”
Sounds like a really sweet film, right? And I hear on the street that you don’t necessarily need to have seen the first one to enjoy this one. (Though it’s easy enough to track down and watch beforehand if you’re a completist. Because that’s cool.)
Read on for the pass-scoring deets….
And they’re all black, a stark contrast to President Snow’s all white series. Coinkidink? I’m putting 100% down on no. Here’s the official deets from District 13 the PR folks:
Yesterday, Lionsgate released six REBEL WARRIOR POSTERS for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 featuring the fearless rebels of District 13: GALE (Liam Hemsworth), BOGGS (Mahershala Ali), MESSALA (Evan Ross), CASTOR (Wes Chatham), CRESSIDA (Natalie Dormer) and POLLUX (Elden Henson).
Be sure to download the OUR LEADER THE MOCKINGJAY app to your iOS or Android device. This app represents the underground communications network for District 13, and gives fans the ability to create and interact with ‘digital graffiti marks’ created in augmented reality space. http://OurLeaderTheMockingjay.Co.in
#OurLeadertheMockingjay
Aaaand peep the posters! Badass. (Clicky for the high-res images.) Remember — Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 opens November 21st, 2014.
Well, any fan of the Saw franchise can just go ahead and give the nice folks their moneies. Saw (aka “Saw 1“, as the cool kids say) will be coming back for a full week starting on Halloween night. Boo!
Read on for the full deets on how, where, when, what, and all that. Those of you that have been bad? I suggest hiding under your bed ’til Jigsaw is back in the box. Happy 10th anniversary, Saw!
As per my usual, here’s my Goodreads review. Sharing is caring. It’s a quickie this time, because as much as I’d like to really love Last Days, a book doesn’t get unconditional love from me if I’m able to set it down for over a week with no itch to pick it back up.
Dunno how I feel about this book. There were times when I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, and there were times when it sat untouched for days.
Still, the story is interesting even if there are times when the writing (editing?) is choppy. Nevill definitely knows how to describe horrific acts and monstrous people that do monstrous things. This is the kind of book you bring on vacation, so you’ll finish it in one go. Otherwise, like me, you may put it down and pick it up again much later.
Minus one star for the ending that felt like the author was running out of paper and had to wrap it up Right Now. Also, for the “Oh Noes!” twist that wasn’t.
3 out of 5 stars.
Here’s the rundown of the winners ffrom last night’s Emmy awards from the talented Melissa Locker at Time.com. Bonus: it’s a damn entertaining read.
Oh, and powers-that-be, please makea Scandal/Ray Donovan crossover happen.
Nutshell: I’d give If I Stay an A-. This is a movie that pulls all the right strings at all the right times. Yeah it’s in your face about it, but the story and it’s actors suck you in so totally that you won’t mind. Mia’s parents are a bit too perfect but that’s cool. Isn’t Gen X just the best anyway?
Being a teenager is rough. Ask any John Hughes film, or just pick up any of the zillion YA novels that have taken the world by storm of late. But for proud cello geek Mia (Chloë Grace Moretz), it’s about to get much rougher. Her beautiful but taken-for-granted world is about to be shattered as a car accident destroys her family, and leaves her in a coma. Will she have the strength to live and try to achieve her dreams after tragedy, or will she let herself slip away?
What I loved most about this story is the idea of family, and while the nuclear bit is important, family is so much more than the sum of your parents and any siblings you may have. It’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, “aunts”, “uncles”, BFFs, significant others. All the people that touch your life. Mia’s struggle is compounded when she has to decide to add these connections to the mix, and the many, many flashbacks show exactly how beautifully messy her life is. The cherry on top of that particular sundae is Adam (Jamie Blackley, The Fifth Estate), Mia’s rocker boyfriend, whose band is just beginning to get noticed. As Mia lies in a hospital bed after the accident — her “spirit” an insubstantial but aware part of her surroundings — family members come and go, and Adam tries desperately to see her. Cue the scenes of their meeting, their courtship, and their current difficulties!
Sometimes I’m too lazy for a full-out piece. Sometimes everything I’ve got to say about a film can be summarized in a sentence or two. Sometimes it’s both. So herewith, a quick-n-dirty on the high school football film When The Game Stands Tall!
Nutshell: Gotta give The When Game Stands Tall a C-. Director Thomas Carter (Coach Carter) is a man that does fantastic work with football game scenes. But the first half of the film is choppy and confusing. In trying to pay homage to the truth, this film gets bogged down by all the details that are desperately shoehorned in, with little exposition to help it all fit. Top-notch action and pacing at the end can’t fully compensate for a film that doesn’t understand itself ’til the last quarter.
Before: Go sportsball! As much as I enjoy (wearing my team colors and drinking beer with friends) watching sports from time to time, I often take a pass on sports-themed films. But this is based on a true story, and it’s gotta be better than Draft Day, right? I’m getting a full-on Friday Night Lights wannabe vibe on this one. Let’s go! *clap*
During: Where have I seen this Ryan character before? Oh yeah — he’s Cato in Hunger Games! [and he’s in Vikings; that’d be Alexander Ludwig]. Whatever, he’s great as a kid trying to find himself and deal with a stage-door (locker-room-door?) dad that’s too into the record books to be into his kid. [That’d be Clancy Brown. The Kurgan! There can be only one, MacLeod!] But damn there’s a whole lot of WTF in this film. Which makes me feel like a douche, because said WTF deals with a players parents dying, a kid getting shot, and all sorts of downer stuff that happens in Real Life™. But all this serves to derail the story. Whose story are we telling? Everyone’s? How long is this film? I’m so confused. Perhaps this is a Christian Film hidden underneath all the sportsball bluster. There’s a whole lotta Him around here. Not that the J-Dog ain’t a good thing. But it’s much more than even a film set in a Christian school “needs” to have to serve the storyline. Hey, if it’s in that genre this film would get an A, compared to a lot of the so-so stuff pawned off onto that audience.
After: I’m betting a whole lot of folks will forgive the first half/three-quarters of the film thanks to the absolutely kickass way the director can shoot anything having to do with football. Training? You can almost smell the testosterone, and feel the burn. Games? Heart’ll be in your throat, and the action in your face. The final quarter, with the De La Salle team playing The Game? Da-yam y’all, that was heart-in-throat time even for me. And it was fun to see Laura Dern play a normal gal who just wants to spend more time with her coach hubby, rather than a gal screaming at dinosaurs or being a one-woman emotional wrecking ball. And it’s good to see The Shield‘s Michael Chiklis play a football coach, rather than a cop with antisocial personality disorder. With Dern and Chiklis, it’s fun to watch ’em froth. But they’re damn good actors, so it’s nice to watch them take a “normal person” role and deliver great performances. Pity the story is so muddled that nobody will really notice. Wanna see kids tear up the gridiron? This’ll do ya. More than that? Re-watch Friday Night Lights.
Got a dollar to spare? A quarter?
Atomic Fangirl 