RIP Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy passed away today after fighting a years-long battle with COPD.  He had many great acting roles over the years, but his role as Spock is the one he'll undoubtedly be most remembered for.  My favorite Spock moment comes at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the final Star Trek film to feature the entire cast from the original series.  Here's a clip:

Merry Christmas!

The first official teaser trailer for The Force Awakens

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.  I'm a bit eager to put the awful prequels behind us and see what a continuation of the original trilogy without George Lucas' meddling might look like, but I'm not sure I can really form an opinion until we get past the teaser stage and start to see some real trailers.

The black stormtrooper seemed a bit out of place.  Not that I have a problem with the idea of black stormtroopers, but I thought the prequels clearly established that all stormtroopers were clones of Jango Fett, who is not black.  I suppose it's always possible that someone was wearing a stormtrooper's outfit as a disguise, much like Luke and Han did in the first film.

The villain's lightsaber has crossguards like a longsword, which may look sort of silly but probably comes in quite handy in a fight against someone with a normal lightsaber.

That speeder looks interesting, and Daisy Ridley looks pretty adorable riding it.  ( She's rumored to play Han and Leia's daughter, but I guess we won't know for sure until sometime in 2015. )

It sure was nice to see the Millenium Falcon again and to hear John Williams' wonderful score, which is probably the best thing I can say about the teaser so far.

A very belated review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I finally gave in and watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  I would've watched it sooner, but hearing so many Libertarians overpraising it as a warning about the rise of the police state had me dragging my feet a little bit.  I ended up liking it much more than I thought I would.  It was vastly superior to the first Captain America movie, that's for sure; I actually thought The Avengers worked much better as an introduction to Captain America as a character than Captain America: The First Avenger did.

( I've heard some say that Winter Soldier was a better movie than The Avengers.  I liked Winter Soldier a lot, and it was easily the best sequel I've seen in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, but I don't see how you could say it surpasses The Avengers.  Even Iron Man--generally accepted as the best origin story of the bunch--is still a lesser movie than The Avengers, IMHO. )

Captain America: The Winter Soldier kept a lot of plates spinning throughout the movie, but there's always plenty of well-timed exposition to keep you from getting lost; it maybe even had a bit too much exposition in a few places for my taste, but that's a minor criticism.  The movie didn't really connect directly to the events of The Avengers, but it did feel rather Avenger-y, thanks to the inclusion of Scarlet Johansson as Black Widow and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.  Robert Redford was perfectly cast as Alexander Pierce.  I thought Emily VanCamp was also a nice bit of casting, even though her part wasn't all that big.  I have a funny feeling that she'll eventually end up as a regular on Agents of SHIELD after ABC pulls the plug on Revenge.  ( By the way, if you like all the Hydra vs SHIELD stuff in Winter Soldier, you might want to give Agents of SHIELD a try... Hydra plays a big part in it, especially in season two. )

One thing I wasn't sure how to feel about in this movie was Anthony Mackie as the Falcon; there were moments where the movie seemed to want him to be more than just Captain America's sidekick, and yet he basically gets thrown under the bus the minute Captain America doesn't need to be flown anywhere anymore.  Also, the casting of Mackie as Falcon didn't feel quite right to me in either case, but the rest of the movie is good enough to make me feel like I'm picking nits for even mentioning these problems.

I got nothing...

There's plenty of awful shit I could be blogging about, but I just don't have a real post in me right now, so here's one of my favorite scenes from Barton Fink instead.  ( Warning: this scene is from near the end of the movie... if you haven't seen it yet, it's kinda spoiler-y.  )

Thomas Friedman is an idiot

I normally pay very little attention to Thomas Friedman, mainly because he so rarely takes a break from openly pining for Chinese-style autocracy to say anything even remotely useful.  Now Friedman is trying to compare ISIL to the Joker from The Dark Knight.  I should probably ignore this drivel too, but I just can't stand seeing someone use such a great movie to make such a shitty analogy.

If you insist on comparing ISIL to a Batman villain, then they are clearly Bane, not the Joker.  ISIL doesn't "just want to watch the world burn", they want to run it; they want to be the ones who get to decide which cities are spared and which cities are burned to the ground.  ISIL doesn't see itself as an agent of chaos, it sees itself as a check against the decadence of the West, much as The League of Shadows sees itself as a check against the decadence of Gotham.

( And of course, Friedman being Friedman, his ultimate diagnosis is that Iraq and Syria just weren't enough like China to keep ISIL from spreading.  Sigh. )

By the way, if anyone is like the Joker here, it's Obama.  The Joker wanted to upset the order of things; he wanted to turn the heroes of Gotham City into villains by repeatedly forcing them into making impossible decisions.  Obama seems pretty intent on upsetting the order of things too.  ( Hey, remember his promise to fundamentally transform the country? How did that work out for everyone? )  The Joker detests what he calls planners and schemers.  Obama doesn't seem to much care for people who have plans either; he told us about eleventy billion times that if we liked our plans we could keep our plans, but of course that was always a pernicious lie.  Speaking of lies, the Joker tells so many conflicting stories about himself in The Dark Knight that you can't tell if there is any truth at all there buried under all the fabrications; he might as well have been Obama's ghostwriter.  And how can anyone watch that scene where the Joker sets a great big pile of money on fire just to piss people off without thinking of Obama?

The many faces of stately Wayne Manor

Despite hearing mixed things about Gotham, I decided to give the premiere episode a try.  It's a far cry from Chritopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, which I consider to be the gold standard for all things Batman, but I do like seeing Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock enough to maybe stick it out a while longer.  One thing I noticed while watching the show was that the building used to portray Wayne Manor looked very familiar:

That building is the Webb Institute's Stevenson Taylor Hall, the same building that Joel Schumacher used for the exterior shots of Wayne Manor in both of his unspeakably awful Batman films.  Gotham is being filmed mainly in Manhattan, so reusing Stevenson Taylor Hall right there in Glen Cove probably made the most sense.

My favorite version of Wayne Manor is the one that appears in Batman Begins; Christopher Nolan used Mentmore Towers for both the interior and exterior shots:

Oddly enough, the design of Mentmore Towers is based very closely on the design of Wollaton Hall, which was used to portray the completely rebuilt Wayne Manor in The Dark Knight Rises:

( I'm not sure whether or not any interior shots were taken from Wollaton Hall; at least one scene was filmed in the entrance hall of Osterley Park. )

Tim Burton used Knebworth House for the exterior shots in Batman.  As much as I liked the movie, Knebworth House has to be my absolute least favorite out of all the different versions of Wayne Manor:

Tim Burton wisely used Hatfield House for all the interior shots in the first Batman film; I believe Hatfield House was also used in Batman Returns, though for some reason Burton decided to use a custom-built scale model for all the exterior shots in that film instead of using a real house.

The first time I ever saw Wayne Manor was the one shown in the campy Batman television series starring Adam West.  It has no fancy name, but you can call it 380 San Rafael Avenue:

That house is in Pasadena, California.  Sets were used for all the interior shots on the show, so I have no idea what the inside of that place really looks like, but I bet it's fantastic.

My take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so far)

Marvel Studios has done a pretty fantastic job of putting together a film franchise that they call the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  When I first heard about The Avengers, I wasn't very excited about it, mainly because I never read any of the Avengers comics in the first place; also, I assumed it would just turn out to be a jumbled Schumacheresque mess of a movie that did none of the characters any justice anyway.  Boy, was I wrong.

Thankfully, Joss Whedon turned out to be the one who directed The Avengers, and it ended up being one of the best superhero movies ever made.  Even people who don't normally enjoy superhero movies will find lots of things to love about this movie.  ( By the way, if you're boycotting everything Joss Whedon does because he said something stupid on Twitter, please do yourself a favor and get over it.  Dollhouse is probably the only thing I've ever seen him inject politics into, and even that was still watchable. )

You can still enjoy The Avengers for what it is without necessarily seeing all of the other films in Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you will probably enjoy it much more if you at least watch Iron Man and Thor first--both are solid films with terrific casts that have directors who actually give a shit about what they're doing.  I can't think of anyone better to play Tony Stark than Robert Downey Jr., and I've seen Jon Favreau direct good movies before, so I wasn't really surprised by how much I enjoyed Iron Man.  What did surprise me was how much I ended up liking Thor;  Kenneth Branagh did a superb job of blending what is basically a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy with just the right amount of sci-fi-ish Shakespearean tragedy.  ( Some have tried to accuse Branagh of political correctness for casting Idris Elba as Heimdall, but Elba somehow fits in the role so perfectly that it actually makes it hard for me to imagine anyone else as Heimdall. All of the casting was spot-on, really, even the small parts. Tom Hiddleston was especially great as Loki, which is probably why they decided to bring him back again later as a villain in The Avengers. )

The Incredible Hulk is definitely one of the films you can do without.  I'll go even further and say that you should actively avoid it, even if you're a completist.  As I mentioned before in another post, Louis Leterrier made such a mess of this movie that it makes Ang Lee's deeply flawed Hulk seem like a cinematic masterpiece by comparison.  I still don't understand why they made this awful remake instead of just making a better sequel to Ang Lee's movie that ties things into The Avengers.  And Edward Norton just ends up being replaced by Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers anyway, which only makes the whole exercise seem that much more pointless.

Iron Man 2 isn't really necessary in order to understand The Avengers, but it's still worth seeing if you enjoyed the first Iron Man movie.  A lot of what worked in the first film is still there in the second, but it still felt to me like something was missing.  ( Jeff Bridges, maybe? I dunno. )  Mickey Rourke seemed either miscast or misused, and I got tired of seeing his weird face and stupid hair after a while.  My favorite part of the movie was watching Sam Rockwell chew the scenery as a minor villain who doesn't know that he's a minor villain, but your miles may vary.  Oh, we also get treated to a preview of Scarlett Johansson in her Avengers catsuit, so there's that.

Captain America: The First Avenger was a decent movie, but most of it was pretty forgettable.  I have nothing against Captain America, but I liked him as a character much better in The Avengers than I did in his own origin movie.  Well, there was one scene at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger that I really liked, but that scene was only added to give Samuel L. Jackson a place to make a cameo appearance.  If the best part of your movie is just a setup for another movie, you've done something very wrong.  Too many characters felt like throwaways.  Even the villain didn't feel like a fully formed character to me.  How can you not make the Red Skull, a super-evil Nazi with a giant red skull for a face, more interesting than this?  ( And why did he have to spend so much time looking like Hugo Weaving? I like Hugo Weaving, but come on. We already knew from the ads what he was going to look like, so why hide it? )

Just as Phase One ended with The Avengers, Phase Two will end with Avengers: Age of Ultron, also directed by Joss Whedon.  ( I assume that Phase Three will lead up to a third Avengers movie, hopefully also directed by Whedon, but I can't say for sure just yet. )  The only Phase Two movies that I have seen so far are Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World, both of which are worth seeing, but without knowing more about the second Avengers movie, I can't really say whether they are necessary or not.  If I had to rank the Iron Man movies, I would place the third somewhere above the second but still below the first.  I'm convinced that The Dark World would have been a much better and much more coherent movie if only Kenneth Branagh had been kept on to direct, but if you enjoyed the first Thor movie you can still enjoy the second for what it is.  ( I haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet. I've heard nothing but good things about them, so I'll be sure to catch them both on DVD when I get a chance. )

Amazingly, Clark Gregg has appeared as Agent Coulson in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, and The Avengers, and now he even has his own show based around the character despite Joss Whedon's attempt to kill him off.  Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was pretty uneven for most of its first season, but it had a surprisingly strong finish thanks in part to a terrific guest appearance by Samuel L. Jackson.  I look forward to seeing what they can do with season two.  One thing I really like about Clark Gregg is that he seems just as comfortable with drama as he does with comedy; one minute he's in a David Mamet film, the next he's on a goofy sitcom, and then he's playing Leonato in Joss Whedon's version of Much Ado About Nothing.

Enough with the remakes, already!

Hollywood has always loved doing remakes because it's so much easier than coming up with an original idea; however, all the remaking of movies and rebooting of franchises seems to have really gotten out of hand in recent years.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying all remakes are bad.  It's just that there have been so many, and the good ones have been so few and far between.

Tim Burton's Batman was great, but Batman Returns was a pretty weak followup.  I like Tim Burton, but he's not someone you want heading up a franchise; his obsession with originality renders him utterly incapable of making two movies that can both exist within the same logical universe.  Tim Burton was then replaced by Joel Shumacher, who decided to turn Gotham City into a gay disco for some reason.  (I'm not just complaining about the nipples on the Batsuit, either.  He turned the Batmobile into a giant glowing dildo on wheels, for crying out loud.)  If there was ever a franchise that needed to make a fresh start, this was it.  With Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan showed us how to do it right.

One bad thing about a remake that gets it so right is that other people who put no thought into how great movies are actually made tend to fool themselves into thinking they could have easily done the same, and then they run out to make half-assed remakes of a hundred other things.

Another part of the problem is that more and more movies are being made based on comic books, and at some point studio execs got the stupid idea into their heads that the movies themselves should be treated more like comic books.  But they aren't the same, not to me.  If DC and Marvel want to keep reinventing their entire universes at the drop of a hat, that's fine, but please leave my movies alone, at least for a reasonable amount of time.  Please let them breathe a while and at least try to figure out what went wrong (and right) with them before you start remaking them.

Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were both great films, but I have no idea what the hell Sam Raimi was thinking when he made Spider-Man 3.  I also don't understand what Columbia Pictures was thinking when they green-lit The Amazing Spider-Man.  I can understand wanting to start over, but why so soon, and why use a director whose prior experience comes mainly from directing music videos?

A lot of people like to dump on Ang Lee's Hulk; it did have its problems, but it's still a much better movie in my opinion than Louis Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk.  The final confrontation at the end of Ang Lee's film made very little sense, but the rest of it was well done, and the casting was spot on.  Louis Leterrier on the other hand got almost nothing right in his film.  The backstory and exposition were badly bungled, just about every single joke fell flat, and there was no chemistry at all between Edward Norton and Liv Tyler.  (In fairness to Leterrier, some of these problems probably stemmed from Edward Norton's insistence on rewriting the script, but then why not just cast someone less meddlesome, like Eric Bana?  Really, they should have just made a sequel to Hulk that glossed over that film's problems while setting up whatever they needed to set up for The Avengers.)

And now everyone is freaking out about the news that Ben Affleck was chosen to play Batman in the next Superman movie, Batman vs. Superman.  Some of this probably comes from bitterness over Daredevil, but I think a lot of people are just apprehensive about the possibility of seeing Batman get Schumachered again, especially so soon after finally seeing the franchise reach its pinnacle.  People might also be a little leery about the idea of putting Batman in a sequel to a movie that probably shouldn't have been made in the first place.  (I haven't seen Man of Steel for myself yet, but I heard it wasn't very good.)

It'd be nice to see Christopher Nolan take off his executive producer hat for a bit and go back to directing.  I'd love to see him make a Nightwing movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a followup to his Batman trilogy; unfortunately, Nolan has said more than once that he wants his trilogy to remain a trilogy, so a Nightwing movie probably isn't in the cards.  But then why is Nolan attached as executive producer for Batman vs. Superman?  Does it mean they are planning to depart from Nolan's trilogy as much as possible in order to draw some arbitrary distinction?  I hope not, I don't think anything good can come from that.  I'd really hate to see Nolan end up being the worst thing to happen to Batman since Schumacher after having already been the best thing to happen to Batman since Burton.

Update: I'm really not a fan of The Atlantic, but I thought Nicholas Slayton had an interesting take on the potential problems surrounding Batman vs. Superman.

My review of "Tron: Legacy"

I got the chance to see Tron: Legacy recently.  I have to say, I was rather impressed with how much better the look and feel of this sequel was when compared to the original Tron.  The original movie was considered revolutionary at the time, but I don't think it holds up very well.

Fans of the original movie will be pleased to see that the new movie features updated versions of the classic disc battle and light cycle scenes... one of my favorite moments came when the two things were combined, something you never saw happen in the original.  The 2010 light cycles are capable of operating on multiple levels, going up and down ramps, and even jumping over people, leaving behind a deadly ribbon of light everywhere they go.  (The 1982 light cycles are practically two dimensional by comparison... they never go through the air, and while on the game grid they can only move straight ahead or turn exactly ninety degrees to either side.)  There are updated version of other classic vehicles too, along with a few entirely new ones... there's even a dogfight between light jets at one point.

Another thing the new movie has that the original doesn't: an awesome musical score by Daft Punk.  Their music breathes life into the movie in ways that are difficult to explain... the special effects (and Olivia Wilde's cheekbones) are nice to look at, but it would all feel pretty cold and dead without the music.  By the way, the musical duo has a cameo in the movie; they appear as the two DJs playing music at the End of Line Club.

It was a bit tough to make sense of the plot at times, but you could easily say the same of both films; however, the filmmakers did such a good job of making Tron: Legacy feel like it was happening in a real place that it made the absurd premise of the movie a bit easier to swallow, and it somehow allowed the film to skate around gaping plot holes by calling them "miracles" and "biodigital jazz."  It also helps if you like Jeff Bridges, which I do... his own personality really comes through quite a bit in his role as the older Kevin Flynn.  (It might help if you like Garrett Hedlund, too... but I really don't know him from Adam.  One of the problems I had with the movie was that Kevin Flynn's son Sam actually isn't very likable when we first see him as a grown man, and so a lot of the real-world stuff at the beginning of the movie ends up feeling kind of pointless.)

One other thing I'll add, without trying to spoil anything too much, keep an eye out for one villain in particular who bears some very distinctive markings upon his chest.

Obamapalooza 2013

My, what a disgraceful inauguration that was.  Everything about it disgusted me: the way President Obama tried to superimpose it upon the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday, the hyperpartisan inaugural speech he gave (and the insipid inaugural poem that accompanied it), the awful-looking Romulan outfit that Michelle Obama was wearing, and her utter classlessness as John Boehner tried to make polite conversation.  So now we have to suffer through an orgy of media sycophants falling all over themselves to wash Obama's feet and anoint him with oil, and to remind us all for the trillionth time how profoundly historic he is... brace yourself for four more years of failure, and four more years of him (and these same sycophants) blaming Bush for that failure.

Sure, Obama is historic.  He's the first black president--if you don't count Bill Clinton--but so what?  He's also got the thinnest resume of any president in our nation's history, and probably the thinnest skin.  In only one term he's already added more to the national debt than any of his predecessors.  And, as I like to joke, it turns out the first president to eat a dog will be the last to eat a Twinkie.  Not everything you could call historic is inherently good.  If Obama ate a baby on live television, that would be pretty historic too.

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about another historic president.  Calvin Coolidge was the first president to have his inauguration broadcast on the radio, and the first to have his State of the Union address broadcast on the radio... he was also the first president to appear in a sound film:

Calvin Coolidge left office with a budget that was smaller than than the one he inherited... how many presidents managed to do that?

My review of Brave

I finally got a chance to see Brave on DVD, and I have to say it was one of the best Pixar movies I've ever seen...  not just in terms of the animation, which was of course spectacular, but all the attention put into getting the story and characters just right.  And what a cast of voice actors... you might recognize a few of them, but even the ones you don't are perfectly cast.  It was a well-crafted movie from top to bottom... I'd put it right up there with some of my other favorites like Up and The Incredibles.

Brave is about Merida, a very headstrong princess in ancient Scotland... her mother is constantly coaching her on how to act like a proper princess, but Merida would much rather be riding her horse through the forest practicing shots with her bow and arrows.  Her parents try to arrange for her to marry one of three potential suitors from rival clans, but Merida wants none of this.  After fighting with her mother about it, Merida races off into the forest and finds a witch who she convinces to do a spell for her, a spell that will change her fate... it does change her fate, but not in the way she expects, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to undo the awful curse that she inadvertently puts on her mother.

Billy Connolly provides the voice for Merida's father, King Fergus... Connolly's silliness comes through at times, but the movie hardly makes her father out to be a buffoon as so many movies unfortunately do with fathers these days.  You know right from the opening scene what kind of man Fergus is when he bravely defends his family from the demon bear Mor'du, losing one of his legs to the bear in the process.  And the conflict between Merida and her mother is not overblown to the point of making her mother (brilliantly voiced by Emma Thompson) into a one-dimensional character... you can see both sides of it.

I also enjoyed watching the movie again with commentary from the writers and directors... it was very interesting to hear them talking about all the various story ideas they tried out before settling on the scenes that made it into the final version of the movie.  I found myself really hoping these people get together again to work on something else very soon.

There was a short film included on the DVD that explained the backstory of how Mor'du became Mor'du, but all that information is in the movie anyway, so it seemed a bit unnecessary... but there was another short film included called La Luna, which was utterly adorable.  La Luna has nothing at all to do with Brave, but it's still worth watching if you get a chance to see it.

Skyfail?

The guys at Red Letter Media have a review of Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie... it sounds like they both liked it quite a bit, but you have to get through about ten minutes of them goofing around before you get to the real review:

Quantum of Solace was a bit weak, but Daniel Craig is definitely one of the better Bonds... I hope his version of Bond will be around for a while.  His IMDB page already credits him with roles in two more yet-to-be-named Bond movies, so hopefully we can expect at least two more with Craig as Bond before they try to pull a switcheroo on us.

Last Ounce of Courage

I keep seeing ads for the movie Last Ounce of Courage showing on FNC over and over again, but the ads don't really tell me much of anything.  At first I thought maybe it was some Truther nonsense or something, so I looked it up and found this interview on the movie's website:

And even now I'm still not sure what it's about.  A guy's son dies so then he gets himself arrested for trying to put a cross up on a building?  Huh?  But it does come with the Chuck Norris seal of approval, so there's that.

The Dark Knight Rises, WBC hits new low

James Holmes is a fucking lunatic.  He murdered 12 people and injured many more, all because they wanted to see the latest Batman movie... and he took the trouble to boobytrap his apartment with explosives in the hopes that he could also kill some of the police.  He's so out of his mind he thinks that the Joker's hair is supposed to be red, not green.  (It's easy to see how someone as crazy as him might be involved with OWS, but let's not go spreading around photoshops and bad info... all that does is make conservatives look bad.)

He's so batshit insane that he has the Westboro Baptist Church solidly in his corner... that's pretty bad.  They say he was sent by God to shoot all those people, so they plan to protest at all the victims' funerals.  Wow, I never knew that God hated Batman so much.

I'm really glad that the "Batman Killer" moniker doesn't seem to be catching on.  Apart from the horrendous movies that Joel Schumacher made, I've always been a huge fan of all things Batman... I've especially enjoyed the first two movies in this rebooted Batman trilogy, and I really look forward to seeing the third.  Red Letter Media gave a pretty positive review of The Dark Knight Rises:

My very late review of Spider-Man 3

I finally got around to watching Spider-Man 3 the other day... I avoided seeing it until now because it didn't look very good to me, and none of my friends had anything good to say about it.

I guess it was watchable, but I can't really recommend it.  There were too many villains and not enough time spent on any one of them to properly develop the characters or explain what was happening.  The three main villains were Sandman, Venom, and the New Goblin... yet I think Sandman is the only one of the three to ever get called Sandman by anyone, and that was only one time.  Peter Parker refers to Harry Osborn as Goblin Jr. at one point, but I don't think the name New Goblin appeared anywhere except in the credits.   And I never heard anyone refer to Venom by name either.

Sandman's origin is not explained very well, and the sudden attempt to include him in the murder of Peter's uncle came off feeling a little too contrived and clumsy... and the conversation about forgiveness he has with Peter at the end of the movie ends up feeling a little too anticlimactic.

Some alien goo became a new suit for Spider-Man for a while, until he decided it was making him a douchebag so he found a way to get rid of it... then the goo attached itself to another douchebag named Eddie Brock and became Venom.  They had a scene where Dr. Curt Connors tried to explain the nature of this goo to Peter, but the whole scene seemed to be played more for laughs than anything... it didn't come across as very believable.  Also, the goo's mind-reading abilities are only hinted at, never really addressed directly.

Harry Osborn was out for revenge from the get-go, which was to be expected given everything that happened in the first two films, but in this one they had him bouncing back and forth so many times from bad to good to very bad to very good... it got a bit tiresome.

Another problem was that Peter Parker himself becomes a bit of a villain for a while before he finally sheds the black suit... well, he actually started acting like a bit of a douchebag before he has the black suit.  I was really annoyed by the attempt to make "bad Peter" look cool by giving him a really stupid emo hairstyle.  I was also annoyed that he never said a word to Mary Jane about the black suit, he just let her think he suddenly became the world's biggest asshole for no reason... I know they were trying to make a point about forgiveness and owning up to mistakes, but come on.

I really wish the same writing team from Spider-Man 2 could have been brought back to write this movie too, I think it would have turned out much better.  Even after stumbling a bit with this movie, they still could have brought back that team to write a fourth movie, but for some reason they tried using some completely new writers... nobody could agree on a script, and the whole thing fell apart when Sam Raimi backed out.  So now we will have a stupid reboot instead of what could have been a decent sequel.  Oh well.

Red Letter Media reviews Prometheus

The guys at Red Letter Media give a semi-positive review of Prometheus with some spoilers:

Update: And here they are delving into a few more spoilery type questions that have been bugging them about the movie.

Ugh... I'm still sick...

Sorry for the light posting here, I'm still recovering from a nasty case of the flu...  the worst of it seems to be over, but I just can't seem to shake this awful cough.  As long as my mouth has a continuous supply of menthol cough drops, I can keep myself from getting stuck in an endless loop of coughing and coughing and coughing... but even with the cough drops some nasty coughing fits still manage to slip through.  For those all I can do is blame Bush.

In other news, did you ever notice Japanese people make a lot of really weird movies:

Hmmmm... I think maybe I'll skip that one.

Happy Mother's Day!

What if Jessica Rabbit wasn't just a cartoon?

Photographer Ryan Astamendi has put together a pretty amazing collection of photos taken of women who were made up to look like Disney characters... he did a great job of bringing them all to life, but I thought his take on Jessica Rabbit was particularly mindblowing:

Wowie zowie... I'll never look at Who Framed Roger Rabbit the same way again.  (No, that's not a photoshopped picture... if you don't believe me, then check out this video of the model Courtney Black being prepped for the photo shoot.)