DC seems to have smartened up with not only their direction in film but their execution. When I heard this year's direct-to-dvd was "Wonder Woman", I was less than excited. I gave "Superman: Doomsday" a stellar review last year and was expecting a lame follow-up. Was it because she's a woman? Probably. I'm a jerk. What of it.
I'm a little taken aback at how much "Wonder Woman" kicked ass. There are few movies with such a short run time (an hour and thirteen mins) that mix action, comedy and backstory so damn well. Nathan Fillion (Mal from "Firefly" or more recently known as "The Hammer", which is his penis by the way) made me laugh out loud. There is a running 'crap' joke, believe it or not, that I found just hilarious. It's first use by Queen Hippolyta was awesome since it was so blunt. It's final use and punchline near the end should have been more of a kicker but only due to Keri Russel's light delivery, a tiny bit more emphasis on the word 'crap' probably would have shot milk out my nose. But enough about crap because this movie wasn't! (zing!)
Any time I hear "origin story" I think 'yawn' but apparently if you throw a shitload of hot "supermodels in battle armor" shoving swords through people's stomachs and cracking their opponents necks, it actually turns out pretty damn good. The original story of how Diana (Wonder Woman) is sent from Themyscira to "Man's World" (in this case, eastern USA) is pretty much intact. During her origin, that comic readers like myself are so familiar with, some awesome backstory is layed out that makes the rest of movie completely engaging. Other Amazonian ladies, who I'm only lightly familiar with, are given not just interesting character but you see relationships develop that have a big payoff later on. This makes the action much more interesting because on the surface, it's lots of cartoony punching (ie, one punch might throw someone flying a whole city block). The climax jumps back and forth and never misses a beat, I was actually quite into it and everything they writers were throwing at me, I soaked right up.
But if you're still not convinced, Wonder Woman is 6' tall, long legs, black hair, blue eyes and has some huge melons (which even get a close-up...seriously!)
Next year we get an animated "Green Lantern" story, which I anticipate almost as if it were the feature film (which will be coming out late '10 or early '11). With great characters and action, I think they're testing the waters really well, and smartly have the original animated series writers, producers, etc on board that made their animation department a hit in the first place with Batman: The Animated Series. I'm not sure if they're setting up on cohesive universe, though, as the Superman film had Supes being kind of a veteran and now we're getting Wonder Woman and Green Lantern's origin stories but whatever.
I've never been an aficiando of horror movies, my brother made me watch them and if he didn't, I probably would have never seen a single Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street to this day. Steve had (has?) a special hard-on for Freddy but Jason never got left behind. The last one we watched was probably Jason Takes Manhattan, which sucked balls, because he only took Manhattan for pretty much the last 20 minutes of the movie. However, he did knock a guy's head off in one punch and nothin-but-netted it into a garbage can.
Jason wasn't truly scary to me until he came back as a zombie through some wierd mojo and as he got slashed and hacked, he would then be missing certain body chunks in the following films, which was kind of neat. The part that made him scarier after the resurrection was that he was an unstoppable force walking around thinking nothing but "Kill it!".
I, and the world, wrote this series off when Jason's soul was jumping from person to person and the 'zombies' were eating people's hearts to keep him alive...I don't understand it either, but it happened. Due to this write-off, I have yet to see Freddy vs. Jason, which I actually do intend to watch as I hear that, despite being silly, it's not a bad slobber-knocker.
I did see Jason X on the space ship but my brain decided to erase it so I actually don't remember anything aside the fact that I watched it, and that's probably enough.
Anyway, be warned, this 'review' will be chock-full or spoilers but since it's a Friday the 13th film, I don't think you're going for the plot anyway so read on, if you dare...
The 1st twenty minutes of this movie could have been the whole movie and I would have walked out satisfied. A quick re-do of Jason's mother's death sets up the Crysal Lake mythos in a nice minute and a half. Cool, I get it, time for murder-death-kill.
A group of teens are walking into the woods, talking to eachother as if their dialogue were being read as they spoke (classic F13? Yes). Seems they're on the hunt for some Crystal Lake pot, which has a very special curator (though it will be to some debate to horror-nerds whether this is actually Jason's pot or just happens to grow nearby as it's never officially established). In any case, they get too close and piss Jason off. He checks out the scene and thinks of some clever ways to kill them off. Oh, and there's boobies. After much killing and a few boobies, we get the title screen, now the movie begins!
One of the pot girls looks a lot like Jason's mommy, who I guess he has a hard-on for and keeps her as a souvenir. Good thing she's not dead because her brother is riding through town for the billionth time in the last month looking for her. Despite the fact that he's been there looking for her before, so much that the sherriff knows him by name, he later mentions he has yet to try looking on the opposite side of the lake. Not exactly detective material. He ends up meeting up with a truck full of douchebags and their hot girlfriends which makes the viewer think "Hey movie, kill those douchebags and show me those titties", to which the movie responds, "Okeedokee".
Speaking of douchebags, when Graham and I saw the film, there was some douchebags in our row talking through the whole thing. Graham gave them the evil eye. There was another douchebag a few rows up who took a phone call mid-movie! Well, that was the last straw for Graham who turned and yelled "Get off your phone! What the fuck!", to no avail, the man had to get yelled at my our same-row talkers (ironically) before finally...continuing to talk on the phone. But we couldn't hear him any longer so who cares.
Anyhoo, the majority of the movie takes place in two locations, Captain Douchebag's cabin and Jason's Crystal Lake township. You do see each kill coming, but Jason never simply kills someone, there is always some cool weapon used or just something nearby that could impale someone, most often a 3 foot long machete (which, when injected into a females head it embeds itself so tightly, you must show her boobies to get it out again).
Basically, you get what you came for and all this boils down to is, is this a good re-start for the series? I would say, yes it is. It updates things just enough. There are certainly a few flaws, the only one that really is kind of 'what?' is that Jason finds his famous hockey mask only coincidentally just after his original mask of a bag gets torn up. Kind of a throwaway for something so important to his image. Graham (who I saw the film with) also pointed out some poor foreshadowing, there is a buzzsaw in the shed that is shown not once but twice, making you go "ooh, what's gonna happen"...and it never gets used! Rip! Jason is also a full-on human again...or is he? There is a hinting line in the film that after Jason drowned and his mother went on a rampage...Jason came back. Hinting that if he died once, he can come back from death again! Good news, considering the best thing about these films is how the heroes always find a way to kill Jason at the end. This movie proves that the old formula works and you don't need to put Jason on a spaceship just because we've seen him kill at a camp before.
Nerd Improv (aka Nerdprov) started last week and I get to play again tonight! Night #1 was fun times, it was basically the 1st half was NerdProv and the 2nd half was the 'veterans' doing whatever improv they do. So the actual Nerd part was about half an hour only but it was fun.
Between games was trivia, including easy, medium and hard questions (Eric Fell was able to list 11 actors who have played Dr. Who, gaining us 20 points) and the games were regular improv games with a simple twist. We played interrogation, for example, and I had to guess the weapon was Gandalph's staff and I did it in Narnia. Another scene was 'Moving People' where they acted out the movie The Bourne Identity but the trivia (questions ranged from Star Wars, Dr Who, Indiana Jones, etc) was the main part that made it nerdy.
Jen (of T23 fame) and her boyfriend John came out (since they live down the street) and John went up for moving people and Ian gave out prizes and John got Monty Python Season 2 which I thought was a pretty sweet prize! The winning team (mine and Eric's, FYI) also got prizes from Ian Boothby's private comic collection stock which was pretty cool of him. I got Catwoman: Dark End of the Street, Kristin got Sandman Chronicles and Eric got Batman: The Long Halloween, some very nice scores.
Shows are Monday night at 8PM at Chivana Restaurant on West 4th. If you need a landmark, it's 2 blocks west of the The Comic Shop on 4th and Arbutus, which you should all know well.
I was going to wait until the end of "Final Crisis" to review it but they've gone and killed Batman today so I have to speak up.
For years there's been the idea of how Batman knows he could die any day, "It could be the Joker, or Two-Face, or some punk who gets lucky...", well it turns out that Batman, who fights evil in the alleys of Gotham has been killed by an evil God from an alternate dimension who has taken over Earth. "Darkseid" lives after all the New Gods were killed and have seemingly been resurrected in human form here on Earth. And he killed Batman with is laser vision, for lack of a better term.
Batman R.I.P. - after the horribly confusing "Batman RIP" storyline, marketed as the end of Bruce Wayne as Batman, I didn't think they could screw up any worse. But here we have Batman surviving an exploding helicopter, only to have been captured by a couple of these New Gods and tortured. Nightwing, Alfred, Robin et al think Bruce is dead and have no idea he's fighting for his life in some underground lair. Or at least he was. After shooting Darkseid with a radion bullet (the only thing that can harm the New Gods) Bats gets exploded, we even get to see his body, held by the until-this-moment-absent Superman (who bursts back into our time after an adventure in the future, just as Bats gets offed).
Confused yet? I've been reading comics for 20 years and even I'm put off by this silliness.
Grant Morrison is the writer and he writes as if everyone knows what he's thinking, like the story is just the cliff notes and we're supposed to know what he meant. Well, "Final Crisis" has one more issue to go and after 6 issues (plus tie-in/crossover books), I have very little idea of what the hell is going on. The only way I find out what the hell I just spent my money on and read, is to go on blogs and message boards and find someone's synopsis because there is always a billion other people also asking "What the hell did I just read?".
Now we have to read "Battle for the Cowl" as Dick, Tim and who knows who else has to decide who's going to fill Bruce's shoes. The boring part is that everyone knows that, somehow, Batman didn't actually die today and Bruce will be back within the year. Captain America got killed over at Marvel and it made sense, he's still dead a year later and his book is one of the best on the shelves. It wasn't announced or marketed, he just got assassinated and we all went "WTF!?" and though we know he'll most likely return, at least there's a damn good story being told in the meantime. DC needs to watch Marvel and do as they do, you damn monkeys.
In my review of "The Beast with a Billion Backs", the Futurama movie before this one, I mentioned that I hope the next one is leaps and bounds above it as I was quite disappointed with that attempt. Well, luckily, the team smoked this one out of the park!
The humour is laugh outloud, which as most fans will know, isn't often the case with Futurama. The series often depends on hidden commentary that makes you go "Hey, that's totally true!" as opposed to making you spew milk out your nose. The laughs in "Bender's Game" come from slick dialogue with lines carrying over eachother with witty throwaways, worthy of Robert Downey Jr.
The first hour is almost purely standard fare until the fantasy genre kicks in, in a very poorly explained plot collision. Any fans of Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings will get a kick out of the fantasy aspect of the story with simple references to the LOTR collapsing staircases and changes "Orks" to "Morks" (raging zombie Robin William's that won't stop mumbling).
There is good use of all the standard characters but Zap and Kif fans can steer clear as they do not appear in this film (aside from a photo of Zap). Little Nibbler gets the star treatment as much of the basic plotline revolves around his dark matter poo. Just like in the previous movie, Bender spends most of the time off in his own sub-plot, which is much funnier than the one in "...Billion Backs" and Professor Zoidberg gets treated like the worthless slob he is. "Mom" is the main villain and it's always nice for long-time fans to learn new sidenotes on the decades long on-again-off-again romance between her and Professor Farnsworth. So much happens in a Futurama story I'm not going to ramble on about this scene or that scene but merely suggest this one's worth owning to watch every few months.
After months (or was it mere weeks?) of waiting, Iron Man has arrived on DVD! Next month we get The Incredible Hulk! Then we have a long, long wait until 2010 for the next feature films from Marvel, which will be the following:
'Iron Man 2' (May 7, 2010), 'Thor' (July 16, 2010), 'The First Avenger: Captain America' (May 6, 2011), and 'The Avengers' (July 15, 2011). As well as 'Iron Man 3' already being confirmed through a distribution agreement between Marvel and Paramount, but no release date.
Who knew Iron Man, of all characters, would be Marvel's new flagship? I'm very excited for the new films to be worked on and love that the seeds were planted in these first two films. There is foreshadowing all over the place: Captain America's sheild is visable in Tony's lab; the Avengers Initiative is set up in both Iron Man & Incredible Hulk; a report of Captain America being found frozen is on a newspaper's front page in Incredible Hulk.
Not to mention the in-jokes and nod to the comics: "Jarvis" is actually the Avengers' human butler, not a wise, helpful computer program; the X-Men's team jet, The Blackbird is visible in Iron Man's visor when referencing a recent project's ability to withstand flight distance; believe it or not, apparently Thor himself is the cause of that lightening that pisses off the Hulk when he and Betty are in the caves; James Rhodes will clearly be War Machine in the next Iron Man film after his '...next time' line in part 1...and a whole lot of other references I'm too tired to think of.
Until 2010, I luckily have the comics to keep my fix going until the movies bring these great characters and stories to the (cheap-ass) masses. If you were to pick up any ol' Marvel comic today, you might be a little confused, so here's what's going on right now with these characters:
The Secret Invasion is currently in full swing, Skrulls (shape-shifting aliens who hate humans and especially Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four) have been hiding among us for months and possibly years in a plan to take over Earth, disguised as regular humans and a large number of heroes.
...Iron Man is the current director of S.H.I.E.L.D., making him Earth's top cop and the 'face' of the Registration Act (recently passed making it illegal to use superpowers without being registered). It's possible the Act was passed due to hysteria caused by the Skrull invasion, and arguing heroes (pro-registration and anti-registration) are currently working together to save the planet from the invaders.
...Incredible Hulk has just returned to Earth after being jettisoned into space for the safety of the planet (by the self-appointed "Illuminati" - Iron Man, Professor X, Blackbolt, Sub-Mariner, Dr. Strange and Reed Richards). In space, he crash landed on a distant, inhabited planet and basically pulled a "Gladiator", becoming king of it's people. After a year of that, he returned to Earth with an army and tried to kill everybody, until it was all worked out with hugs.
...Thor has brought Asgard and it's warriors to Oklahoma. It sounds funny, and it is (especially when he gets mail) but damn if it doesn't work as he tries to re-connect with the people of 'Midgard' (aka Earth). Oh, and Loki's a woman now, for some reason.
...Captain America, recently killed, has been replaced with his long-ago sidekick Bucky. Everyone and their dog cringed at the idea but it's one of the best books on the shelves. Steve Rogers is most likely to return before the movie comes out but until then, the book is such a great spy-thriller story, I think Ed Brubaker can do whatever the hell he wants and I'll just keep on buying it each month.
...The Avengers are knee-deep in Skrulls right now, it turns out the "New Avengers", "Mighty Avengers" and "Avengers Initiative" books were all launched a few years ago specifically to foreshadow this invasion. Luckily, nobody saw it coming and the books were all good to begin with, giving us a mystery worthy of "Lost".
With the films heading in the right direction as a cohesive universe, could a slew of tv series be in the future? Hell yeah.
We went and saw "Weird Al" last year at the River Rock so when I heard he was coming back so soon, I was kind of like "Awesome! Let's get tickets!". And so we did!
I've been an avid fan of Al since I was about 14 years old or so and my friend Scott and I often interrupted the cafeteria in high school with our two-man rendition of the latest polka melody (mix & match of various rock songs, double-timed). If you're going to sing in the car, it may as well be a "Weird Al" song because you're going to belt it and he has such a wide vocal range, it's a fun, constant challenge going through an entire album!
Al's best songs have always been his self-written tunes, though he's obviously famous for his parodies. My personal favourite? Frank's 2000" TV (which anyone who rode in my parent's van in high school can confirm).
His biggest hit to date, surprisingly, is his most recent: White & Nerdy, which just went platinum! Seeing this incredibly fast-paced song performed live is indeed something to behold.
Speaking of performing live, I've see Al live three times now and he's the only performer/band that I've actually enjoyed seeing. No other singer has ever sounded like they do on the album as Al does, this is a huge selling feature for me and I'd go see this show again tomorrow night if I could.
One more night, August 23rd at the Red Robinson theatre!
