I saw John Carter this last weekend... It was a lot of fun. Ignore the critics and Disney's horrible marketing campaign and just enjoy the movie.

Here a fun clip with Woola!



-Swinebread

Hauptmann Amerika

This has got to be one of the weirdest things for me in the Universe... Captain America in German!




I think I heard something in there about sending the Führer to hell



Here is trailer two in German


The Red Skull sounds awesome!

-Swinebread

An Unexpected Delight

Holy Crap! The Irish Times call Captian America "An unexpected delight."

See Link Here

Maybe folks overseas will like movie Steve Rogers after all.



-Swinebread

Ave Marvel

In all of the SDCC news dump this small tidbit jumped out for me. It's been announced that Strikeforce: Morituri is being delvoped into a Movie.

SFM would actually work quite well as film since all of the characters would be under a death sentence. They tried to get a TV version of of this in 2003 so I'm not holding my breath though.

see link here

Rotten Tomatoes is Manipulating Captain America's Score

Currently Cap is barely getting a Fresh Rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Yesterday, It was Rotten with only a few reviews. I'm Calling BS on this as Warner Brothers owns RT and Cap is MARVEL/Disney.

From Comic book Movie:

Rotten Tomatoes is indeed owned by Warner Brothers, the company behind the recently released Harry Potter movie. As the reviews roll in it would seem that the RT score is being manipulated to be presented as low score and in fact rotten. As I write this the score stands at 58% with a 7/10 rating, 14 positive reviews and 10 negative. Wow? 7/10 still, and it sits at a 58% rating? A little odd I might say. I've been scanning the web all day and I know for a fact there are way more than 14 positive reviews from major critics out there, and maybe there are more than 10 negative reviews from major critics but I don't see them. In fact every negative review that I see on the web is updated on RT, but there are still tons of positive reviews yet to be released. I also find it odd that of those 10 negative reviews 3 of them don't actually seem negative and they all have a score over 60%, is RT actually reading these things?

I don't think it's a stretch to think that RT is sitting on a ton of great reviews until the very last minute, or at least as long as they can. It's almost like they're deliberately waiting for a negative review to come in until they put up another positive one, perhaps to keep that score down as long as possible? I don't think it's a coincidence that of the first 8 reviews posted 6 of them were negative. Where have we gone since then? Positive has gone up by 12 and negative only by 4. Huh? maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist but that does seem a little odd.

It is the day before the movie opens and there is no consensus on RT yet... TOTAL BS

-Swinebread

Full Article here

A thread from superhero hype here


They are deliberately keeping the score low to damage the 1st weekend of Cap.

Patrick Swayze has Died

We all knew it was coming but it's still very sad.

Karl Malden RIP

Karl Malden was real actor, not one of those lameos you get at the five and dime.




Don't Leave Home without 'em



-Swinebread

More Evidence that Star Trek Will Suck?

An article here notes that Star Trek is not tracking with the 18-25 group... it doesn't look good folks.

We can't be sure at this point but this is another sign to be worried.

I don't think the film will please the old guard nor will attract a new audience.

This film is made by a man the doesn't like Star Trek for The Hills crowd. Star Trek seems to be a reimagining that dumbs it down rather than lifting up.

Hey I could be wrong but I haven't seen one thing yet that gives me any hope...

OK maybe there is some Zachary Quinto as Spock love but that's as far as it goes.

If I'm wrong I'll cop to it, but it's looking more and more like we're getting a turkey in the vein of Phantom Menace


-Swinebread

I saw Watchmen last week, twice actually. The first time I wanted to see it on my own terms so I went to a Wednesday matinee alone. Before the previews, I took particular delight in passing the time by reading a section of the Ten Cent Plague. With Watchmen coming to the screen, it felt as if the damage done by the comic book witch hunts of the 1950s was finally being lifted… at least creatively, but I digress.

That first viewing of the film was transportative. I didn’t come away thinking Watchmen was a perfect film. But I feel that I had seen as good of an adaptation as anyone could have pulled off. I was in a highly meditave state when I left the theater, something I hadn’t felt since… well…Groundhog Day of all things. I couldn’t stop thinking about the film and the comic. Then on Saturday, I went again with the wife and saw the movie on it’s own terms. Nobody walked out of either showing. No one bitched about the film and no dumbass brought preteen children to the movie. Mrs. Swinebread was lost, unfortunately, but that was more due to the fact that English is not her first language. She did like the fact that it was an adult film and she thought it was great that it didn’t have happy ending. She is Japanese after all.

There is so much to discuss about Watchmen that I could never mention it all but let me start with a that fact that Zack Snyder was screwed. If he adapted Watchmen for a general audience then the fanboys would rebel and tank the film. If he made a more direct adaptation of the comic then general audiences would be easily confused and the risk of financial failure looms. Snyder went with the latter, and I see it as the only real choice. And for the record I think 300 is an awful movie (although it’s not too bad if you think of it as a joke or a parody film).

There are several controversies that I feel I must address. The first, of course, is Dr. Manhattan’s Penis. All I can really say is “GROW THE F UP.” Seriously, folks need to get over their puritanical prudery. A naked man doesn’t equal porn. We’ve had full frontal female nudes in film for forever and now we get one CG cock and the whole world ends just because immature folks can’t stand the sight of the male member. This film has adult content. What a surprise, it is rated R. I take particular delight in hearing stories of families having to race out of the theater because their kids saw Dr. Manhattan’s wang. Rated R means rated R. If you are gonna get upset about something, then get upset about fact that one of the characters guns down a pregnant women. A funny thing is that I’m starting to see more positive comments from women about Doc M’s nudeness.

The sex scene on the owl ship is was probably too long and yes the Shrek song didn’t help sell the scene. I would have preferred a sweeter, more romantic coupling. I do understand what Zack was going for though. There is an unrelenting darkness to Watchmen and I think he was taking the time too lighten things up a little, plus if I thought the world was really gonna get nuked soon I’d be having raunchy sex in an owl ship too if I had one. I’m not defending Zack’s choice here but I do understand where he’s coming from.

It’s too violent? Zack likes his violence hardcore and so punched up the gore in several scenes. The brutality is all there in the GN but it isn’t as graphic as Zack makes it out to be. I didn’t have a problem with it personally except when Dr. Manhattan splattered the gangsters onto the ceiling. That distracted from the plot. There is a certain horror to the violence in the Watchmen comic but most of that horror happens in the mind of the reader. Zack tried to bring that same sense of horror by clearly displaying the awfulness of it directly. Of course there were no bodies in New York so that’s one point that went the other way. While shocking I was pretty neutral about it.

Is it’s too dark? A lot of folks complained that it was much too awful for a superhero movie. I recognize it is a downer of story but folks are bringing a lot of cultural baggage of what constitutes a comic book movie and what doesn’t. There’s a whole universe out there in the world of comics waiting to be discovered and it’s time for folks to look passed the X-men movies. That said, WB did market the film as a regular superhero flick in the vain of Dark Knight.

The ending was changed. Not a big deal. I was pretty neutral about it. The Squid would not have translated to the screen and would not have been understood or accepted by a mainstream audience. Plus, just think of all the exposition that would have been added to the film. *Shudder* Dr. Manhattan is the only preternatural thing (besides Nixon’s nose) in the film and to introduce a fake preternatural alien would have been too much.

It should have been updated? Oh Please, this is simply laziness on the part of some of the younger folks in the audience. It’s the same old “the past is not real and so has no significance” rant. Part of the problem here is that most folks don’t know a thing about history and don’t want know. Watchmen is a very complicated story moving through different eras but I guess some in the audience couldn’t tell the difference between 1985 and 1945. Detaching Watchmen from the events that shaped the America in the 20th century renders the story pointless. Plus, the Watchmen narrative is a cracked mirror of comic books trends and stereotypes from the 1940s to the mid-1980s.


Things I liked:

The attention to detail was fantastic. I got Blade Runner vibes.

Of course, Jackie Earle Haley was great as Rorschach

The Silhouette’s V-J Day kiss!

Sticking as closely as possible to the comic.

All the stuff with Molock

The Sally Jupiter Tijuana Bible… it’s all gravy after that

I liked most of the stuff with Janey Slater

The opening… but everybody liked that

People are reading the comic… that’s cool and the best thing about this whole project


Things I didn’t like:

The music choices were not the best. I know zack was trying to make it feel like the time period but some of it didn’t work. As a good score would have been better. Did I mention the Shrek song?

The two lead gals acting wasn’t quite up to snuff.

There were some problems with tone. Zack sometimes has trouble capturing those softer moments.

Ozy’s exposition about himself didn’t work.

Having Janey Slater show up and say I got cancer was sorta off… although I understand Zack was pressed for time.

Billy’s vocals were not strong enough for me. The dispassion was good but the level was not.

Missed opportunities:
Zack tried to cram in as much as possible, so for me it’s not about missed opportunities but rather his interpretation of elements of the comic.

Things I was neutral about
The new ending
The new costumes
The running time
The Violence
The Mars stuff

I liked the Watchmen a lot but can see why some folks would have problems. It’s a very adult picture and people need to know this before they enter the theater. Snyder worked very hard in replicating the GN but he does have a few problems with communicating the right tone with Watchmen. If he was a little more experienced I think some things would flow better. We’ll get the extended DVD so that might mitigate the minor pacing and plot problems. Regardless, people are debating the merits of the film and the graphic novel and that kind of attention given to an actual comic book story is fantastic.


-Swinebread

Drag Me To Hell

So many good trailers for upcoming movies lately. First "Star Trek" and "Terminator Salvation" now we have the trailer for Sam Raimi's upcoming back-to-basics horror film "Drag Me to Hell." This looks like a cure to the torture porn that's smothering the modern horror genre.



Raimi is best when he's got little studio oversight and can just let his demented mind run wild. I am so there on opening night.

- Dean Wormer

Star Trek: Countdown #2

I'd like to do a little mini-review of IDW's Star Trek: Countdown now that I've read the first two issues in the series. In the course of this review I'd like to compare the upcoming Star Trek and Watchmen films and their respective directors JJ Abrams and Zach Snyder. In the course of doing so I may be revealing minor spoilers to the Star Trek film and a major spoiler in Watchmen if you're not already aware of the Big Change from the book at the end of that movie that's consumed comic fans on the net over the course of the past year.

If you've managed to remain blissfully unaware about the details of both those films and want to go into them cold then read no further.

***SPOILERS***

I like to search the net for pre-information about upcoming genre films. This includes set photos from spies, designs and interviews with the creators. So if I had to summarize the "feel" I've gotten for the Watchmen and Star Trek films coming out shortly I'd have to say that I've felt for awhile that Zach Snyder, a director I haven't had much use for, "gets" his material better than Star Trek's Abrams.

In interview after interview Snyder has displayed a demonstrable love for the source material that makes it clear to me that the film's in good hands. In fact: if Snyder's recent comments on the film are true he's already saved the film from what the studio was planning before he took the director's job.

When it comes to the infamous missing giant squid at the end of the film Snyder has a pretty good reason for reluctantly removing it from the story. As they plotted it out the story was already three hours long before they even got to the climax. The squid would've taken about 15 minutes to explain, which was 15 minutes they didn't feel they had.

JJ Abrams, on the other hand, has done nothing but make comments such as "this film is not for Star Trek fans" and admits that as a child he loved Star Wars more than Trek. Blasphemy in Trek circles.

On the other hand Abrams also talks about Star Trek being about the characters and about Rodenberry's optimistic world so he does have some understanding of Trek's appeal. Whether that translates into the finished film is up in the air.

Which brings me to the Star Trek: Countdown comics. I wasn't going to read these as it seemed more like an attempt to cash in on the film than they had some story to tell. Then I came across the first 8 pages online and read them but only for a pretty geeky reason: I wanted to see if the Romulan ships that Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman designed for the film and would be included in the comic looked like the ships I loved from the original television series.

What I found was that writers Orci and Kurtzman, who are also the screenwriters for the film, have an obvious reference for Trek and can tell a good story. Forget the alternate timeline stuff we've heard about. None of that is here. Instead we have a story set solidly in "our" Star Trek universe some years after the last Next Generation film.

There's so much they get right but let me just point out one little part out of the second issue that I just finished that had me chuckling. At the end of the first comic Data appears and he's now in command of the Enterprise. If you're one of the five people that saw the last Next Gen film you know that Data was killed (he had to be since they were ripping off Wrath of Khan.) In a meeting with Spock and a throwaway line it's mentioned that they haven't met since his memory engram was installed on his double.

In one small frame of the comic they sent a delicious "fuck you" to the Braga/ Berman team that so many of us think killed Trek on television by casually undoing one of their biggest mistakes. I love this.

As for the story itself it's centered on Romulan miner Nero, who will become the villain of the upcoming film, and his attempt to stop a disaster from befalling Romulus. He's an extremely sympathetic character in these books. He's falls strongly into the Trek hero tradition of bucking the powers that be to try and prevent very bad things from happening.

Of course this won't work for poor Nero, which is the point. We get to see why he's angry and why he blames the Federation and some of it's greatest heroes for what happens.

The bottom line is that these comics are actually making me a little more confident about the upcoming Trek film, which is not what I expected. If the film's as good as the comics then we have nothing to worry about. That's still a pretty big "if."

- Dean

I watched Mad Max 2 this last weekend... I hadn't seen it in awhile and I was reminded of what fantastic movie the Road Warrior is.

I was stuck by two things that seemed odd though. The first was that several scenes are sped up to make the action more exciting but to me, with my 21 century eyes, it just looks silly.

The second is the total lack of people who aren't white. I guess we just had to wait for TIna Turner in Mad Max 3.

Mel is great in this film but I realized why his character Max is such a disturbed loner... it's because the The Apocalypse occurred and Jesus didn't come back....


-Swinebread

I thought it was really weird that five past Oscar winners came out and gushed over each of this year's acting nominees. I like the traditional way with one winner from the previous year introducing and presenting the acting award for the opposite sex. Being nominated for an academy award is already a huge honor without the extended on-air love fest, plus the whole thing unnecessarily eats up more time. I mean come on... these actors wouldn't even be in the room if they didn't have SOME talent right? So why the hell do they need more praise heaped on them with millions watching... increadble...


OK, maybe I'll admit that Mickey Rourke needed slap on the back...

but other than that it was too much...


It's also cool to note that a "COMIC BOOK" movie has won a major acting award with Heath's Joker... It makes me wonder about Watchmen and next years Oscars...


-Swinebread

No Hurm, No Foul

Watchmen's visionary* director Zack Snyder went into some detail about the DVD release of his pending film based on the classic graphic novel. The running time of the DVD will be a whopping 3 hours and 25 minutes. Mostly because it will include the Tales of the Black Freighter which will not be in the theatrical release.

Of course Black Freighter will be released on it's own DVD to coincide with the release of the film but I can't imagine how fans of the book would want to see it any other way than included in the overall story since it parallels and complements the larger Watchmen narrative.

Here's the trailer for that DVD if you haven't seen it-



(*Warner Brothers requires under pain of broken fingers that you refer to Zack Snyder as "visionary" whenever you mention him in writing.)

Movie of the Week: Head of State

-Swinebread

Hey remember when there was all that buzz floating around about Marvel working on a Deathlok movie...? No? Well I sure did as he is one of my favorite characters (at least the original Luther Manning version is...) anyhoo, yes they WERE working on a Deathlok movie and Paul McGuigan was going to be the director. Here's the scoop from this i09 article

Finally, I asked McGuigan about those internet rumors that he was working on a movie based on Deathlok, Marvel Comics' cyborg character. "It wasn't a rumor, it was true," says McGuigan. He'd been working with Marvel and writer David Self on a Deathlok movie, but then Marvel put it on the back burner. "I was really into it, but Marvel changed their mind."

McGuigan got pretty excited about working on Deathlok, and he has all of the character's back comics. The biggest challenge in doing a Deathlok film would have been the fact that the killer cyborg is always having conversations with his on-board computer. "In a way it felt like Knight Rider, where you have the machine talking to him." It would have been a challenge to make that work on screen. "The script was really good. David Self is no slouch, he's a great screenwriter. And the whole idea of nanotechnology was fasinating." The movie included a "weird professor" character, who created Deathlok because he wanted to go down in history as another Da Vinci. (And McGuigan had envisioned Robert Downey Jr. for that character, which would have been a very different role than Tony Stark.)

"It would have been a good movie," he adds. "Maybe they'll still make it with somebody else."

It looks like it wouldn't have been set in a near apocalyptic future as the original Astonishing Tales comics were, which I think is the best way to do a Deathlok film, but now it doesn't matter I guess.


-Swinebread

Ricardo Montalban Has Passed Away

A very versatile and talented actor that just happened to be one of the best parts of the Star Trek legacy. He will be missed. see here






Ricardo Montalban tribute part one


Ricardo Montalban tribute part two


Ricardo Montalban tribute part three


-Swinebread

Warriors, Come Out to Play-i-ay

I watched the directors' cut of The Warriors a couple of days ago and man, I have to have to say this is one great movie. As a kid, I'd seen bits and pieces of it here and there, but to see it now as an adult, incredible. Most folks know about the various influences on the The Warriors, but it was great to hear that Comic Books affected the Hyper-reality of the film too.

The design, the editing and the characterizations were all viewed through comic book storytelling esthetics and so much so that the only thing the Director, Walter Hill, actually changed for his director's cut was to add comic book transitions i.e. captions and comic panels. It really works well and is a nice nod to a popular art form that most folks wouldn't want to acknowledge.

What is additionally interesting is that this year is the 30th anniversary of The Warriors (30 YEARS! holy crap) and a comic adaption begins coming out this February as part of the festivities. So it's all one big circle in the end.

Trailer, I love the music in The Warriors as well:


-Swinebread

Movie of the Week: Danger: Diabolik!

-Swinebread

Miller Craps On Will Eisner

UPDATE:
Frank Miller has created a Stink Fest of Epic proportions. According to movie critics, we are in Ishtar territory here and the general public seems to agree as The Sprit has tanked and tanked badly.

What's so sad about this is that Eisner was a revolutionary storyteller and now his most famous and innovative, Noir character, The Sprit, will be forever besmirched by Frank Miller's stunningly bad film.

There is a lot that can be said about this movie but I think this quote from MaryAnn Johanson's review says it the best

The Spirit does not believe in itself. It thinks comics are a joke -- and it appears to thinks that movies are a joke, too.

A sad sad time for comic book movies... and just when they were starting to get some respect.

Thanks Frank for f-ing up a legacy...

Let me add, in all fairness, that I have not seen The Spirit but I'm sure I will at some point to verify what is being said about the film. But this I do know, it was not necessary to shoot The Spirit in the same manner as 300 and Sin City.

I feel these two images sum this whole thing up.
Frank Miller's version of the Spirit on the left and an original Eisner Spirit cover on the right.


I'd much rather see a movie about that character on the right side.

UPDATE: I was talking to a guy at work last-night and he said he wanted to see the Spirit because he liked the first one...

I said "what first one?"

He replied "Sin City..."

Of course I politely corrected him that The Spirit was not a sequel

-Swinebread