Psychiatric Help $0.05: Lucy, reviewed.

It's Lucy star Scarlett Johannson's year.

My NPR review of Luc Besson's wiggedy-wack but truly, madly, deeply watchable Lucy. 

I'm still feeling pretty good about the summer movies I recommended (then) unseen in the Village Voice back in May, though Dawn of the Planet of the Apes -- which I still haven't caught with -- probably should've made the list. And I arbitrarily excluded documentaries, even though Life Itself is the only film that's made me cry so far this year. Though I haven't seen Boyhood yet, either.

Anyway, We Delivered the Bomb: On Choosing the 50 Greatest Summer Blockbusters

In honor of the historic 25th anniversary of the release of Lethal Weapon 2, give or take a couple of days  -- no, that's not actually why I did this -- I elucidated the agonizing process of logrolling and negotiating required for me to determine my votes in The Dissolve's list of the 50 greatest summer blockbusters in this essay for NPR Monkey See.

Sometimes you need the Socratic Method and math to discover you're dead inside.

Back to the Future (Past), or You Can't Keep a Good X-Man Down

I enjoyed X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer's return after a decade-long absence to the surprisingly resilient superhero franchise he originated. This movie is based on a 1981 story from The Uncanny X-Men comic book that I first read when it was reprinted in probably 1989 or 1990.

The movie alters the tale as necessary to unite the cast of 2011's 60s-set X-Men: First Class with the players from the earlier X-pictures, set in the present day -- or rather, as a title card at the top of 2000's X-Men tells us, "the not-too-distant future." I'd feared this timeline-straddling -- Days of Future Past is set in some unspecified year in the 2020s, -ish, and in 1973 -- might make the movie as dull and incoherent as the Star Wars prequels, but it's funny and light on its feet.

This time-travel movie triggered some sympathetic time-travel on my part. I bought my first issue of X-Men in the summer of 1988, and I stuck with the title for about four years after that. Since then, I've looked in on the X-Men infrequently, whenever I've heard that Grant Morrison or Joss Whedon or Matt Fraction was up to something interesting with them. 

Anyway. For NPR, some ruminations on how time-travel helps to keep long-running movie franchises fresh.

SEE ALSO: Another thing I wrote for NPR, about a quite different time-travel flick last year.

So Long, H.R. Giger, and Thanks for All the Sleepless Nights

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H.R. Giger, 1940-2014

A brief remembrance, written this morning not quite as quickly as I can type, of the great Swiss artist H.R. Giger and his most iconic creation, for NPR Monkey See.

Please Hammer Girl Don't Hurt 'Em: The Flat Circle of Screen Violence

The same weekend I saw both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Raid 2 -- prompting this piece for NPR Monkey See -- my pal Glen Weldon showed me the mostly-animated G.I. Joe episode of Community. The show got a lot of mileage out of the fact that nobody ever got killed in that war cartoon, wherein an elite American military unit fought a uniformed army of terrorists to a stalemate every 21 minutes using ray guns. 

The G.I. Joe comic book, meanwhile, took a realistic approach to firearms. Characters sometimes got killed, too, although not very often. It didn't get me hooked on guns, thankfully, but it got me hooked on comics. It was also pretty clearly a gateway drug to more sophisticated depictions of violence in movies and TV.

The Retouchables: RoboCop

Peter Weller in RoboCop '87: I will call you "Murphy," and Murphy when you call me you can call me "Al."

Today! Right now! Right here! The first installment of The Retouchables, an irregular but recurring feature I'll be writing for NPR Monkey See about reboots and remakes and re-remakes and, just maybe, bootmakers. IN THIS EPISODE: RoboCop!

 José Padilha's remake opened at number four with a bullet last weekend, so the time just felt right. This'll be all on RoboCop for a while, I promise.