These Bulls Can Contend Without Derrick Rose

Tuesday's latest in the Derrick Rose injury saga hit hard across the NBA, but it shouldn't in Chicago.

Of course it sucks that Rose, the Bulls' hometown hero and franchise player (if by contract alone), might miss the rest of the year after surgery on his knee, and here's hoping he makes a full and speedy recovery.

But for the Bulls and their fans, this isn't the end of the world, or even of the season. This team is still a championship contender.

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the third straight season Rose has sat out several games due to injury. The Bulls front office staff knows this, and they made sure last summer their team would still be competitive if Derrick's balky knees made it a hat trick.

It's turned out better than they could have anticipated.

• The Bulls' foundation is stronger than ever as Jimmy Butler has exploded to All-Star status; Joakim Noah, even in a down year, continues to be a top-five center; and newcomers Pau Gasol, Nikola Mirotic and Aaron Brooks have exceeded expectations. This is without a doubt the most talented Chicago squad outside Rose since the 2011-12 edition that went 50-16.

Another guard can join Jimmy Butler, Mike Dunleavy, Pau Gasol and Joakim Noah in a still-stacked Bulls starting lineup.

• The Eastern Conference is ripe for the picking. Atlanta - who, by the way, is going to fail the "who has the best player in the series" test to almost any other contender - has dominated an extremely weak crop as Toronto, Washington and Cleveland have struggled to get it together. Cleveland might be the biggest threat to the Bulls, but this is the time to strike as the second LeBron era gets rolling.
• Frankly, losing Rose might help the team. Chicago's dirty little secret is Rose hasn't been very good this season - his 16 PER is about league average and only .9 above Brooks - and doesn't seem to be improving as he recuperates. While peak Rose would make the Bulls the favorite, they could be better off trading his terrible 3-point shooting and absolute refusal to drive to the basket and draw fouls - Rose's best skill in 2010-11 - for a little peace of mind this year and improved shooting and confidence when he returns to the court next season.

Chicago's dirty little secret: Derrick Rose hasn't been very good this season and doesn't seem to be improving.

The odds remain squarely against Chicago winning a championship this year - the postseason is always a crapshoot, and the loaded Western Conference means whoever emerges as Eastern Conference champion will have a huge challenge in The Finals - but the Rose-less team's chances aren't much worse than they were with him 24 hours ago. We're still in this thing, Bulls fans.

"Kingsman: The Secret Service" Is Bloody Brilliant

Colin Firth's Harry "Galahad" Hart is a believable British bad-ass in the finest Bond tradition.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is the silly James Bond movie I've been waiting for.

Since Casino Royale, 007 has deliberately avoided the whimsy that made me fall in love with the Roger Moore era. Kingsman, however, shows there's room for a British bad-ass who lives in the real world but doesn't need to escape to the beach for weeks to brood about his own mortality¹.

That man is Colin Firth's Harry Hart, a seasoned Kingsman agent code-named Galahad who brings back the bravado of late-70s Bond but abandons the troubling sexual politics. (Don't worry - he has some major violence issues to make up for them.) Almost immediately, Director Matthew Vaughn begins playing with the trope: our first look at Galahad² is at the end of a mission he's botched, demonstrating that Hart is a super-spy but not super-human.

After an 18-year time jump, the rest of the film takes place along parallel tracks spawned by Hart's mistake. He investigates the brutal murder of an agent code-named Lancelot like the one he let down in the opening, and that agent's son, Eggsy, becomes Hart's latest recruit to Kingsmen. Like the modern Bond at MI6, Hart recognizes he can't stay a Kingsman forever.

Eggsy's story, as portrayed wonderfully by relative unknown Taron Egerton³, feels less like Bond than it does X-Men: First Class - Vaughn's previous film, which also wore its Bond influence on its sleeve⁴. Composer Henry Jackman returns, this time with collaborator Matthew Margeson, to give Kingsman's score a familiar feel as the recruitment plot follows a familiar path⁵.

Colin Firth is the undisputed star of Kingsman, but Taron Egerton threatens to steal the show.

Firth and Egerton fill Kingsman with a buoyant, irreverent tweed energy that sets it apart from Vaughn's other work⁶. I was impressed when Vaughn made me love Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr more deeply; the affection I feel for Galahad and Eggsy feels new and refreshing, and I wouldn't mind at all if it's the launching point for a new franchise⁷.

Hopefully future installments would address the one lingering Vaughn issue in Kingsman: unjustified gratuitous violence.

At its worst, Kingsman reminds me of Kick-Ass, another Vaughn film that shows a boy struggling to become a young man and something like a superhero at the same time. The first hour or so of struggle is fun; the second, in which the main character becomes a pretty terrible dick and helps slaughter scores of people, is not.

Eggsy starts and pretty much remains a charming dick, but he and Galahad get away with some majorly questionable conduct⁸. Kingsman makes it look exceptionally good⁹, but its body count is the one thing that makes me hesitate before recommending the film to anyone and everyone.

Nonetheless, if you're interested in an extra-bloody, irreverent spy adventure, you won't do better than Kingsman. Rejoice! This is the first great geek movie of 2015.

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1 Sorry, Skyfall. I still love you.
2 Immediately after a delightfully inventive and funny opening credits sequence.
3 Just compare that movie's end credits to these.
4 Shout-outs to Full Metal Jacket, Men in Black and The Hunger Games for their obvious influence as well.
5 Who will probably continue to do so for basically no money over the next five years before doing any more meaningful work.
6 Honorable mention to Samuel L. Jackson as slimy, lisping Bond villain caricature and eco-terrorist Richmond Valentine and Michael Caine as Kingsman leader and (SPOILER) somewhat predictable traitor Arthur. 
7 This is reportedly why he chose to do this project for Fox rather than X-Men: Days of Future Past, although it's still an adaptation of another work - like Kick-Ass, Kingsman is based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar, although Vaughn consulted on the source material here.
8 (SPOILER) The world is literally ending if Eggsy doesn't activate devices that kill hundreds if not thousands, all of whom are to some degree complicit in the villain's evil plot. Galahad is a little less guilty in that he's under mind control when he murders an entire church of deplorable conservatives, but he still has plenty of blood on his hands.
9 It also sounds great: Vaughn pairs the film's most brutal sequence with "Freebird," which I will never hear the same away again.

Spidey's Home: Early Hype, Narrative Possibilities and The Future of Marvel Comics After "The Deal"

Let's start with the good great AMAZING news: Marvel is making Spider-Man movies.

It's hard to process exactly what that means to webheads like me. For years, we've been resigned to the fact that Marvel forever lost the ability to put its most popular character on the silver screen thanks to what started as a savvy business move - pawning off film rights to its characters that it would never use - and blew up in their faces TREMENDOUSLY. We enjoyed the Raimi trilogy, we ate up The Avengers and we tolerated the reboot, but the whole time this image remained:

This hurts way down deep. RT @devincf: Poor Spidey pic.twitter.com/af9VTpuUUz
— Derek Beigh (@derekbeigh) October 28, 2014

Even when rumors started last year that Sony might let Spidey out of his cage (hat-tip to Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal, who was on top of this from the start), I didn't believe it. Couldn't. The idea that the studio behind The Avengers and both Captain America films would make Spider-Man stories was too powerful for me to consider without immense pain unless it were true.

So, now that it's true, let's consider what "The Deal" (I've decided this is what I'll call it) really means:

1. "The new Spider-Man will first appear in a Marvel film from Marvel's Cinematic Universe." Smart money is Captain America: Civil War, the next big team-up movie to go into production. (Some are speculating about a post-credits scene for Avengers: Age of Ultron, but that would require superhuman speed or an immense amount of corporate foresight/hubris to pull off.) Spider-Man is a huge part of that comic-book arc, but Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige previously said the creative team won't hesitate to move pieces around. I expect a small cameo.

2. Feige will be a producer alongside deposed Sony exec Amy Pascal on a 2017 Spider-Man film with "a new creative direction," which probably means bye-bye to The Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield, co-star Emma Stone and Director Marc Webb - who, aside from having a very appropriate name, never seemed to excel at (or even like) making Spider-Man movies. So much the better for all of them in their freedom to do other, likely better, things, and for us to see new blood and a fresh start. (Side note: Leave Donald Glover alone. Dude has got stuff going on, and not every talented person needs to play a superhero.)

3. "Sony Pictures will continue to finance, distribute, own and have final creative control of the Spider-Man films." This is, in real-life terms, the most important sentence in this press release. Spider-Man is Sony's golden goose, and not only do they have no intention of letting him get away, they're in no way interested in sharing the eggs. This deal is a straight-up service trade: let us use Spidey in a movie, Marvel says, and we'll help you fix this brand. The real dream, Marvel Studios using Spidey when and how it pleases, remains elusive and probably impossible. (My dream, Joss Whedon directing a movie with Spider-Man in it, will apparently be an agonizing near-miss.)

4. Speaking of the brand: Sony's new Spider-Man movie is slated for July 28, 2017, without any other details attached. (Which is a problem in itself, but let's just grit our teeth and move on.) This will almost certainly be the start of a new franchise - hopefully with Feige on board all the way - and mean delays if not outright cancellations for Sony's Spider-universe projects, including the interesting-but-odd Venom movie, strange Sinister Six film and downright baffling Aunt May solo joint. It's hard to care too much about those, but I will legitimately miss the Amazing series, which was narratively sloppy but well-produced and acted, especially by the leads and Green Goblin Dane DeHaan. A lot of the discussion since Marvel and Sony's announcement has been about Marvel saving Sony from itself, but let's not insult a ton of hardworking people who put together two immensely-profitable movies that, while never as good or interesting as Raimi's trilogy, rose above the vast majority of Hollywood drek that gets released every summer. The Amazing team deserved a chance to finish the overarching story (so aggressively shoehorned) in Amazing Spider-Man 2 on their own terms.


No more tomorrows, Amazing team.

5. "Marvel and Sony Pictures are also exploring opportunities to integrate characters from the MCU into future Spider-Man films." Potentially some exciting crossover opportunities here, especially given Marvel's enormous slate of already-announced projects, but cool your quinjets: many of the most-interesting Marvel characters, including the also-New York-based Fantastic Four, remain siloed at other studios - mainly Fox, which holds the Storms and the cash-cow X-Men franchise. We're not getting New Avengers. (At least not yet.) More likely is a big-screen crossover with the The Defenders, another Big Apple group to be set up in a series of collaborations between Marvel Studios and Netflix.

6. Perhaps the most important part of this agreement: for the first time, I have faith in the future of not only Spider-Man comics but X-Men too. Consider what Marvel has to think about from a corporate standpoint with that endeavor: comics make money, sure, but the most profitable part of the Spider-Man brand is controlled by Sony, probably forever. Disney didn't pay $4 billion for Marvel to increase visibility for another studio's characters, and while stopping production of Spider-Man comics would produce a massive backlash now, slowing them down and letting Sony continue to twist in the wind is a realistic way to take us down that road. This deal shows Marvel is willing to make compromises and not shut out any property it doesn't 100 percent control. If Fox is willing to let X-Men characters appear in Marvel films, my nightmare scenario of watching Marvel cancel that comic and promote the living daylights out of Inhumans instead will become nothing more than a paranoid delusion. It may be already - but The Deal reassures me anything is possible.