Eveready batteries: now 93% better at shooting buxom women out of erect penis-y cannons!
One wonders what was going on in consumers’ heads back in the 1940s if a vivacious human cannonball with magnificent breasts getting blasted 100 feet through the air out of a dong stand-in was enough to pique their interest and illustrate the power potential of their product. Read more…
Red Letter Media vs. Transformers
By now many of you may have dragged yourselves to the latest Michael Bay Transformers debacle, and have emerged from your screening numb and wondering how anyone could ever consider bringing a child into a world with such hideous evil in it. The sane response is to vow on the graves of your forebears to never again purchase a ticket to any Bay “film,” enter a monastery perched on a remote mountaintop and only accessible by a perilous donkey ride, and devote the rest of your days to cleansing your sullied soul. Read more…
It’s hard to explain why one still goes to see the Michael Bay Transformers movies, which are churned out with a remarkable regularity in this new millennium. Is it a morbid curiosity, the same impulse that makes us crane our necks to scan the twisted crimson wreckage of a highway accident? Is it an obedience to the little kids inside, who owned the toys and watched the cartoon and read the comics, who begged and pleaded for someone, anyone to take them to see the Orson Welles(!)-infused Transformers: The Movie during its blink of a theater run? Is it a Lucy/Charlie Brown/Football thing, spawned by the fact that the first Bayformers movie was, amazingly, pretty good?
Probably all three in the case of this viewer. So here we are again, with another Michael Bay monstrosity. And, as hard as it is to believe, this is the worst one yet. Nigh unspeakably so. In some cinematic Stockholm Syndrome corollary, it makes dreck like Revenge of the Fallen seem almost palatable by comparison. Can you give out negative stars? Read more…
When X-Men Collide – X-Men: Days of Future Past
This month’s crop of summer blockbusters has been middling at best. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a sloppy, forgettable affair that managed to make a muddle of the Sinister Six, and Godzilla failed to live up to the prerelease expectations and delivered a cookie-cutter dopey plot around the reasonably enjoyable (if frequently truncated) monster slugfests. But now we come to the big one, the film that one could almost call a comic fan’s dream come true: X-Men: Days of Future Past, with its meshing of two cinematic X-casts in a tale based on one of the most treasured arcs in the X-canon. X-pectations are high, to say the least. Read more…
There are many fine moments in Michael Mann’s classic thriller Manhunter — the best of the Hannibal Lecter film series despite the absence of Anthony Hopkins in the Lecter/Lektor role that made him famous. One of the best comes during our first glimpse of that film’s serial killer bete noire, the Tooth Fairy, after he abducts tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds and binds him up in his disturbingly appointed house. It’s terrifying and sends chills up and down your spine, and Tom Noonan, one of our most underappreciated character actors, is his usual imposing, strange self. What has always sold that one scene is a great quote from this wounded, demented loner at the center of the titular manhunt, the man who wants to become a monster, a real, living Red Dragon. He stands in front of the scared out of his mind Lounds and tells him, simply: “You. Owe. Me. Awe.”
This is the bedrock of a successful Godzilla movie, what the filmmakers have to deliver and what the audience has to feel. We. Owe. Him. Awe. Everyone from the studio execs to the fat schlub digging into his extra-large tub of buttered popcorn. Awe. Capital A.
Which begs: Does Gareth Edwards, in his sophomore directorial effort after the low-budget Monsters, get it done in the big, new Godzilla? Does he give us the eponymous antihero that we crave? Read more…
I wasn’t a big fan of the first Amazing Spider-Man — we should get that admission out of the way for purposes of full disclosure. While it got a number of things right — both of the young stars, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, were light-years better than their flatline predecessors in the Raimi trilogy — the middling story failed to grab, this Spider-Man was more jerky than his predecessor, and by the time the credits rolled I remained unmoved by the dopey larger Oscorp conspiracy involving Peter Parker’s disappeared parents. But this is the cinematic hand that we comic book movie fans have been dealt, and we’re going to have to lump it and like it. Especially now, as Sony is going to try to have their own little Avengers-verse by spinning off the Sinister Six (which they’ve fundamentally botched — more on that in a moment) and everyone’s favorite slobbering-costume-tooth-thing, Venom. Like the Blob, the rebooted Spider-Man world is expanding, threatening to consume us all. Read more…
The final X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer has arrived, in all its heavily Wolverined glory
Now that Captain America: The Winter Soldier has thrown down the pretty-good gauntlet, the rest of the summer superhero slate have something to live up to. Of that bunch, X-Men: Days of Future Past has the most potential, with its venerated source material and dream mash-up of different casts. Wolverine! With the kids from First Class! And not in a brief one scene profane cameo!
Here we have your usual old-timey page of comic book ads, with products hawked that promise to build your body, cure your woes, improve your mind and stuff your drawers with loads of unnecessary tchotchkes. (A baseball bat pen and pencil set: surely a necessity for every domicile, an item that will never get old and be absent-mindedly relegated to the dusty space behind the couch.) The wild card, however, is the ad for hamsters. Yes, hamsters. That’s what the bold type says, simply if not elegantly. Hamsters.
Ultimate Warrior, RIP
We interrupt our regularly scheduled comics programming to note the passing of the Ultimate Warrior, one of the most insane main event wrestling characters of all time.
Once you get past the “OH GOD HIS TIE IS CAUGHT IN THE MACHINERY HE’S ABOUT TO BE MASHED INTO A PULP” of the picture, you can maybe stop and think about perhaps starting a career in AC and refrigeration repair. Granted, this ad doesn’t hold the implied promise of riches and women, but at least there’s the not-so-alluring bait of greater job security.
Your pick of a convertible, machine gun. counterfeiting machine, or hideous, horrifying dolls — enjoy, kids!
Never before has such a lineup of tchotchkes been assembled, one in which the ping-pong ball machine gun and the convertible car toy are by far the most mundane. Your eyes are drawn to the evil-looking dolls, but the real show-stealer? A machine that makes money. Wait, what?
Wrestlemania XXX, considered
Tonight is WrestleMania XXX — that’s “30,” not a signifier that pro wrestling is going the hardcore porn route — and this is a grand mile-marker for the squared circle’s biggest showcase. Thirty. 3-0. Professional wrestling has been around a long, long time, and exhibitions of mano-a-mano physical strength have drawn in people far and wide, including Abraham Lincoln, but the product that we know today, the national, nay global industry that’s on television constantly emerged from its pupal stage in the 1980s. That was when the World Wrestling Federation, now Word Wrestling Entertainment thanks to that other WWF, changed the game with a little something called WrestleMania — the WrestleMania that would have a Roman numeral I appended to it as the event was replicated in subsequent years.
What’s become “The Showcase of the Immortals” is no longer young. For those of us old enough to remember the first one, it’s another of the piling up reminders that we aren’t either. It’s also as good a time to pay ruminate about a dopey industry that’s a hell of a lot of fun.
You see a lot of karate/kung-fu/Yubiwaza/whatever ads in comics, but rarely do they contain the item hovering at the center of this one: a record. Yes, a record, one perhaps pressed at home by the sensei of this do it yourself chop and kick course.
My comic book experience is a tad frozen in time. My familiarity with storylines that take place after the mid-1990s is, at best, limited, not from any distaste for the material so much as an inability to cope with the sheer volume of storytelling that’s taken place over the medium’s ascendant decades. The last comic purchased in what could be termed my youth was issue #3 of Kingdom Come, and then it was off to college — and comics were for a long time a thing of the past. (Indeed, it would be several years before I finally found out who won the titanic alt-future showdown between Superman and Captain Marvel.) Over the past five years, as I’ve gotten into buying old comics and started the dopey blog you see before you, the interest has gone backwards, but not forwards from that jumping off point. Older comics are valuable, and the largely worthless comics from my childhood have sentimental value. The stuff after? Cheap and no nostalgia — not as much interest. (That comics were no longer printed on newsprint didn’t help. Is it truly a comic book if you can’t pull off an image with Silly Putty? No. No it is not.)
This is a roundabout way of saying that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the first time I’ve gone into a comic book movie with only a passing familiarity with a major character — in this case the titular villain. Yes, I know his senses-shattering secret identity and the general outlines of his whole deal, but he’s not internalized as characters like Loki and the Red Skull are. There isn’t a rote understanding of the chapter and verse. This is new for me, undiscovered country, which makes this movie a fresh experience, both watching it and reviewing it. Kind of nice — I feel a little bit like those people who scratched their heads after Thanos’s toothy cameo in The Avengers. Ignorance may be bliss.
And the verdict?
Jared
blog into mystery 