X-Men: First Class seems to imply a movie about the original five X-Men (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, Angel) from the comics, so you can imagine my building disappointment as I read the emerging details of this movie over the past year. Happily, based on some new commentary by producer Bryan Singer, the name may be misleading. The trailer that came out today looks interesting. Let's hope they have some more twists in store to explain how Havoc can be in a movie without his big brother Cyclops existing in the same timeline.
We've all gotten married at one point or another, but I think there's still one of us that hasn't had a formal wedding yet. If he ever ties the knot again, may his wedding be as awesome as this couple:
When you're a little kid, what would be cooler than getting to go to Comic Con? Getting into the Green Lantern panel? Yeah, pretty cool. Getting picked on to ask a question during the panel? Yup, much cooler. Getting Ryan Reynolds to recite the Green Lantern oath to you? Man, that's pretty cool. I don't know how you can top that. Telling all your friends that you got a clear live view of Blake Lively's boobs? Jackpot.
I have no background on Ironman other than the last movie and that Scratch had a collection. That being said the 2nd one looks pretty sweet.
Much has been said about the historic victory Barack Obama achieved with his presidential election and it's effect on minority achievement. I think I heard Will Smith say something on Oprah the other day that from his point of view, African-Americans now have no excuses not to strive for greatness. I find this reassuring for my own future kids. And now, I'm even more encouraged by the fact that Obama has raised the bar for another group of stereotyped underachievers--comic book aficionados. What's the first thing mentioned on "the 50 facts you might not know" about Barack Obama?
He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics.Heck, if the President of the United States and the leader of the free world can read comic books, well, so can I.
Not sure how long this will stay up. It's too bad Wander is in the midst of a move and without an internet connection--I have a feeling he would enjoy this bootlegged copy of the trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine quite a lot. It's probably not going to be near as good as The Dark Knight, but it'll be interesting to see what a director like Gavin Hood can do with the comic book genre:
The official trailer for the upcoming film adaptation of Watchmen is set to premiere before The Dark Knight tonight. Considering every showing is sold out at the local IMAX theater for the entire weekend already, I'm wondering how easy it's going to be to even see it in a regular theater in the next couple of days. So, if you're faced with the same (or stuck at home with little kiddos to watch), enjoy the Watchmen trailer already leaked out onto the internet:
Addendum: Damn, those YouTube monitors are fast! Just as soon as I posted this, the video was pulled off. Oh well. I tried. It was rather awesome, though--be prepared to pee in your pants.
Addendum, Part 2: Ooh! Ooh! Gizmodo has it up on their site.
A new - and entertaining - endeavor from Joss Whedon (the Firefly/Serendipity guy.) Watch the first and second Acts, then read the Master Plan.
When I saw that a sequel to Hellboy was coming out, I figured that I'd finally Netflix the original. I remember seeing the Mike Mignola comic back in the day, and it looked pretty cool though I never read it.
Anywho, I figured that I'd give Hellboy a look, and it was a good movie. Good story, good acting, very visually well done. So, I was eager for the sequel, especially considering it touted it's lineage with Pan's Labyrinth, which was a great story and an absolutely stunning film, visually.
I'm moved to a new office with no known co-workers, and I literally have nothing to do. Monday morning I get an email from the boss - "I forgot to tell everyone, but I'm on vacation until Thursday."
Oh yeah, I'm playing hooky.
A Monday afternoon seemed the perfect time to catch Hellboy 2. No crowds + matinee price = awesomesauce. I can say that it was as good as if not better than the original. It was certainly more daring in terms of how much fantasy they tried to make reality. In a comic of course you are pretty much unencumbered by how fantastic you make the artwork. In movies however, it's much tougher, and wasn't even close to possible until the advent of high grade CGI (which now that I think about it, makes those 80's Superman movies even more impressive.) Anywho, Hellboy 2 does on film as well as any high-art comic book. Imagine if someone could actually port a Moebius comic over to film without losing anything, and you'll get the gist of how beautifully done Hellboy 2 is. Guillermo del Toro is a skilled mofo.
On top of that, the story is likeable and the pace is very good. It's not frantic but it moves along nicely. The characters are also surprisingly beliveable, given that they are demon raised to be good, his pyrokinetic girlfriend, and a clairvoyant fishman. The acting is also surprisingly good (well, so was the previous movie) particularly considering the amount of make-up and foam rubber these actors wear.
Lastly, the villain in this one is awesome. I don't know if it was the actor himself or a stunt double, but his fight scenes were friggin awesome. True, there was wire work (but plausible reason to suspend disbelief), but this cat's Wu Shu (Kung Fu) was impressive.
So I wondered why I didn't feel more sucked in by this film. So far my best guess is that there is just too much to take in. I'll be buying these on DVD. I think once Del Toro gets to do his third film, this series will get the credit it deserves.
One last thing for Wander; Seth MacFarlane is in the movie. Go see it and try to guess who he is.
A quick search using Google and the internet reminds me that the first Batman film helmed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader pulled in over $40 million in its opening weekend and eventually went on to gross more than $400 million in box office ticket sales worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, Batman is the 20th highest grossing movie of all time.
Back then, lining up early for the summer blockbuster was expected, and I think even early ticket sales days before the movie opened was a somewhat novel thing when Batman came out. The lines in the mall to see Batman that first day it opened were excruciatingly long, and I think I was in the queue for at least a couple of hours. Crazy what we did back then to see a hotly anticipated movie. I still remember drawing bat signals on just about anything and everything on the weeks and days leading up to it.
Now we can simply buy tickets online, but it's nice to see some of the hysteria to see a movie first still exists. Some of this has been in the form of the midnight opening. Leave it to the newest installment of Batman, The Dark Knight, to really drive fans into a frenzy. From NYT:
In a frenzy, fans have bought so many late-night tickets for the July 18 opening of the next Batman movie that theaters in places like San Diego, Chicago, and even Eagan, Minn., are scheduling 6 a.m. screenings for those who can’t get in at midnight or 3 in the morning.I don't know what $40 million in late 80's U.S. dollars amounts to today if you adjusted it for inflation, but I imagine it's a lot. If this movie doesn't break some kind of opening weekend record, I'm really going to be surprised.
I generally enjoyed reading Punisher back in the day, but I was never a fanatic about it like Wander. I don't know what he thought about the two movie adaptations. I vaguely remember seeing the Dolph Lundgren one, and thinking it was crap. I never made it through the last version with Thomas Jane as Frank Castle. I missed it in the theater and tried watching it on TV some Saturday afternoon, but something about John Travolta as these over-the-top villains makes me want to change the channel. Anywho, a third version, Punisher: War Zone, comes out later on in the year. I guess it looks sort of promising:
Back when we were kids with nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon except beg Wander's mom to drive us downtown to Comics N Stuff for our weekly infusion of superhero goodness, we often dreamed about what some of our favorite Marvel characters would be like on the big screen. Fan mags would often report that an X-Men or Punisher movie was "in the can." Alas, none ever materialized, and we were left to dream on.
Now when we're all grown up, after most of us stopped reading comic books on a regular basis, an avalanche of the films we prayed for have come. And now I find myself wondering if adulthood has swayed my expectations as to what a comic book film should be.
The first adaptation of Hulk by Ang Lee was a somewhat more cerebral look into the psyche of Bruce Banner, the Hulk being the literal manifestation of the hidden conflicts of a man with suppressed rage and daddy issues. For those of us who kept arguing that comics were much more literature than mere kiddie reading, Hulk should have been a masterpiece. Instead, fanboys grumbled, critics criticized, and the general moviegoing public didn't come. Knowing there still was potential for a movie franchise, however, Marvel Studios gave the big green guy a second chance with The Incredible Hulk. The result? An adequate summer popcorn flick, but in some ways still not the magic combination I would have hoped for.
The new version of The Incredible Hulk is essentially a reboot of the franchise. No references are made to Lee's film. Instead the entire origin story of the Hulk is compressed into a flash of scenes during the opening movie credits and retold, although the basic premise is preserved. After a gamma radiation experiment that goes terribly wrong turning him into the Hulk whenever his heartrate reaches a certain threshold, Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is forced to leave his love Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and evade capture by General Ross (William Hurt) and the U.S. Army.
Louis Letterier's approach to this film seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the old Hulk TV, The Fugitive, or even his older work with The Transporter movies--keep the story kinetic and keep our hero running. For the most part this works to keep us entertained. Starting with Bruce Banner hiding out working in a soda factory, the film wastes little time with any real character development as it moves through Virginia and into New York City with almost nonstop action. This is oddly perhaps the flaw in the movie that keeps me from feeling like it's up to par with more superior superhero movies such as Spiderman, Batman Begins, or the most recent Iron Man. Something about how Letterier cuts the action together just seems to lack a sophistication that these other movies had.
The film slows down only to reunite Bruce and Betty for a brief moment. Liv Tyler, despite some rather corny dialogue at times, is pretty adorable in her part. Nothing is really established to piece together what their relationship was like before the movie, but somehow her presence and her interactions with Edward Norton make up for this deficit. Edward Norton, is OK as Bruce Banner, although I'm not sure if it's just that the character himself is a bit dull or if the script was lacking, but his acting skills seemed somewhat wasted in the film. William Hurt does an adequate job as the stereotypical military asshole, and Tim Roth as the primary villain William Blontsky and Abomination, plays his role quite well.
The CGI work is probably on par with what was done in Hulk. The Incredible Hulk looks sort of real, but still noticeably cartoonish (and luckily, not quite falling into that "uncanny valley"). Remarkably, though, the CGI wasn't nearly as distracting to me in this movie as it was in Ang Lee's film, and the action sequences with the Hulk himself are actually quite exciting. This, too, is a bit odd given the fact that this new version of the Hulk seems to have somewhat more tame powers than what Ang Lee's version did.
A few Easter eggs are dispersed throughout the film to keep any comic geek happy with some indirect references to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America, a couple of cameos Stan Lee and Lou Farigno, and, of course, the well publicized cameo by Tony Stark. The appearance of Robert Downey Jr. is a prime example of why nothing beats watching a movie in the theater with a full audience--once he came on screen, the entire theater was whooping and hollering it up.
In the end, this new take on the Hulk seemed to be almost a 360 degree departure from Ang Lee's version--almost zero character development, and almost full on action. If that's your thing, this film will be quite cheesy for you. For me, I would have preferred something a bit in between. Rumor is, Edward Norton was quite upset with the final cut of the film, and wanted something a bit more with that balance that I was hoping for. Perhaps a director's cut will show us what this movie good have been. Letterier, himself, has said in interviews that he has at least 70 minutes worth of footage that he cut and will include on future DVD extras. Still, it was an enjoyable movie for a summer weekend, and I'd recommend going to see The Incredible Hulk.
Oh, and don't bother waiting through the final credits--there's nothing at the end. Hey, you never know with these Marvel movies these days! ;-)
I feel like a bit of nerd--I'm spending my lunch hour following the live updates of the Wordwide Developer Conference keynote address being given by Steve Jobs right now in hopes of finding out exactly what the new iPhone is going to look like.
Anywho, in other more entertaining news, check out the new TV trailer for The Incredible Hulk. YouTube disabled the embed function, so you'll have to go directly over to their site to watch it. If you liked Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, let's just say you'll love this trailer.
Some semi-spoilers are in inviso-text below, although if you haven't heard about them yet, you don't surf the 'Net enough.
Jon Favreau managed to throw quite a few little bits into Iron Man to set the stage for an Avengers movie later on which apparently Marvel already has on their slate along with a Captain America film in 2011. S.H.I.E.L.D. is already set up, as is Nick Fury. Tony Stark apparently makes a cameo appearance in the upcoming The Incredible Hulk, so it looks like Marvel is really trying to tie together all of their film properties. The latest addition to this creation of an intertwined Marvel Universe is this find: Is that the prototype for Captain America's shield in the background? If it is--SWEEEEEET!
The trailers for this movie are making me more and more excited with each new one they release.
I know most of you (or maybe none of you) read Justice League of America comics, but I'm sure you all watched Superfriends on Saturday mornings back in the day. The movie blogs have been abuzz of late regarding preproduction plans for a live-action JLA film. George Miller, who helmed all three of the Mad Max films as well as Happy Feet most recently (now that's what I call a diverse resume), has already been announced as the director. Even more spoiler-filled leaks have come to light, some of which sound cool, and some of which I'm a bit disappointed to read.
I'm very interested to see how they're going to make such an ensemble superhero movie work on the big screen. Having lots of people running around a movie screen in colorful tights, I'm afraid there's going to be a temptation to camp it up a bit. The conflicts between Batman and Superman were some of the more memorable subplots of Frank Miller's Dark Knight graphic novels and continue to be used well in more recent mini-series like Justice (recommended even just for the Alex Ross painted artwork alone), so I hope they keep that stuff up in the movie. Heck, they could have made a whole movie out of that. Let's hope they don't dumb this down too much.
Somehow, a vital member of the group, Aquaman, got left off the list. I guess he's hard to incorporate into a movie with six other superheroes that can't breathe underwater. Or maybe Vinnie Chase wasn't available.
And what's with Green Lantern? Everyone knows Hal Jordan is the best version of the Green Lantern Corps. I find the use of John Stewart as strictly a PC move on the movie studio's part.
Anywho, the official casting list has yet to be announced, but apparently they've already decided on Wonder Woman--Australian supermodel Megan Gale. Suddenly, Linda Carter seems really old:
I'm not exactly sure what I just watched:
And on a somewhat related note, Spiderman was seen rescuing babies in Brazil:
A five-year-old boy dressed as Spider-Man became a real life hero when he saved a baby girl from a burning house in Brazil.
Pint-sized superhero Riquelme Maciel stepped into the house to pull the one-year-old to safety after he saw her mother crying. The boy had been playing with a friend in his back yard when they spotted smoke coming from the window of a wooden house. Using his Spidey senses he ran to tell the baby's mother Lucilene dos Santos, but she was too afraid to enter the blazing house.
Without hesitating, the tiny masked crusader decided he would brave the flames to save baby Andrieli from her cradle. Mrs Santos told reporters: "He said, 'don't cry, don't scream because I'm going to save Andrielle'.
"Then I began shouting for him not to go because I was scared he would die in the fire."
But Riquelme did not think twice. After the rescue the Spider-Boy simply said: "I decided to go inside the house and save her."
