Showing posts with label Spider-Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spider-Man. Show all posts

Monday, July 25, 2011

News, Death, Comics, Cons, Lines, Money, Stuff



I'm back. I did not go to Comic-Con over the weekend, but I did spend lots of time waiting in line the past few days. So it is basically the same thing. Here's what happened over the weekend.

-Oddly enough, last time I was gone for a weekend, I began my post with an Avengers poster. Here's another (actually, seven more) showing off the characters in all their glory. This is also our first at Mark Ruffalo and the side of his giant face as the Hulk. (slightly better picture Here)

-The final lead-up to the Avengers - Captain America: The First Avenger - did pretty good at the box office. It was number one with $65 million (That's $600,000 less than Thor, which I thought was a flop. It's looking pretty good in hindsight now). $10.50 of that was mine (superior 2-D version), and it was very good. I think Thor was more fun, but this worked a lot better as a movie. It also ties in very well to the other Avengers movies. Big shocker however. The rest of the world doesn't Captain AMERICA that much, as it only made $2 million overseas, despite simply being called The First Avenger in most countries.

-Harry Potter took a big fall, making a mere $47 million domestically in its second week. Don't feel too bad though, it sits at $834 million worldwide.

-Friends With Benefits, the completely fictional movie that made me want to punch my TV every time they ran an ad, was third with $18 million. And now the only reason to see this (Mila Kunis naked) has been debunked as a body double. And no, that wasn't really her topless in Forgetting Sarah Marshall either.

-Amy Winehouse died. I was shocked she was still alive anyway. And since she died at 27 years old, out comes the comparisons to Jimi Hendricks, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, and everyone else who died at the same age. Despite what some people are saying, there is no conspiracy that people die at 27. Also despite what some people are saying, Winehouse doesn't belong in the same sentence as those legends.

-Comic-Con came and went without too many Megaton announcements. The biggest news was Rhys Ifans, who plays the Lizard in the awful looking Spider-Man movie, came to his press conference drunk, pushed some security guards, and blamed America for everything wrong in this world before he was arrested. Sometime in all that, he revealed that the Lizard was a giant Hulk-like beast without a lizard mouth who lives in the sewer. Who can blame him for drinking?

-Robert Rodrigeuz, one of my favorite directors, announced he was finally going to make Sin City 2. He has the script and he hopes to get it done this year (Sin City 1 was completed insanely fast, despite having a huge ensemble cast). He also plans on a Machete Trilogy, one of which has him going to space. He is also doing a new Heavy Metal anthology movie. There won't too many details with that, but he is looking for fan submissions. These four R-rated, borderline NC-17 films, will come out after the family friendly Spy Kids 4-D. That's why I love this director.

-Pee-Wee Herman is trying to get a new movie now that his Broadway show has been such a hit.

-They are making a live action Voltron movie and a live action Captain Planet (!!!) movie. No word yet on whether Ted Tuner is cast in the lead role.  

-Snow White And The Huntsman is a film to keep your eye on. Kristen Stewart is Snow White, Charlize Theron is the Queen, Chris Hemsworth is the Huntsman, and the Dwarfs are Nick Frost, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Johnny Harris, Bob Hoskins, Eddie Marsdan, Brendan Gleeson and of course, Ian McShane.

-I compared Spider-Man to Mirror's Edge, a game many of you probably aren't familar with. Well here they are side by side. This actually is pretty sickening. Mirror's Edge is on top, I think.



 -Finally, here's a full trailer for the Walking Dead season 2. It's so good, I almost forgive AMC for the stupid zombie and rock throwing teaser.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Film



With Captain America just a few days away, it is the perfect time for the other comic books to knock the wind out of the patriot's sails. There's the new Batman trailer, where nothing happened. There's the new Walking Dead trailer, where nothing happened. And there's the trailer after Captain America, which actually has some excitement. I won't spoil it for you, but if you want to know simply tune in to any other website on the internet. Now we have the first full trailer for the Spider-Man reboot, which has just slightly more than nothing happening.

Now the other Spider-Man films - all three of them - are great movies. I understand there were some problems with director Sam Raimi and the studio, and that Tobey Maguire and Kristen Dunst aged about 30 years between films (and still couldn't find any chemistry), but it seems like those are easy things to fix without remaking the entire franchise. Replacing an actor mid-series isn't the end of the world (it's actually pretty common in super-hero movies) and as long as they are good, nobody except idiots would complain. Then they can still work with the established franchise.

I just hate the idea of reboots, so maybe that alone killed this trailer for me. But the trailer being god-awful sure doesn't help. Watch it if you dare.    


Spider-Man is without a doubt one of the most fun and light-hearted comics out there. This is the exact opposite. Strike one: Why does this look serious? I hate throwing the term "emo" around (maybe because I love Rites of Spring and so many other old DC bands, but they all got mixed in with all the crappy MTV-emo bands in the mid 2000s, but that's a story for another day) but this looks insanely emo. The bad kind. One of the biggest complaints of Spider-Man 3 was how it was super emo (less so than the other two, but that's another story for another 'nother day), so what better way to start off a fresh start reboot than by going back to the old films.

Strike two, why are his parents there? Amazing Spider-Man is on issue magic number 666. In all those years, his parents appeared about four times, usually as a robotic decoy. While I don't care how they stick to the comics, Peter Parker having no parents plays a much larger role. It is a common writing strategy to not give the hero any parents (see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Dorothy, and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) to make him more disconnected from his or her surroundings and more relatable to the viewers. It also gives the hero a reason to leave home and begin the adventure. However, everything about this trailer says his parents leaving play a large part of the story. It is just going to bog the film down.

Strike three, what is with that action scene? I guess we should be grateful there actually was an action scene, but that was ripped directly out of Mirror's Edge. Except with worse CGI (must have been the Wii version). Are all the Spider-Man scenes going to be in first person? Or was that just a quick teaser they whipped together? While it sure didn't make me want to see, it got me in the mood to play Mirror's Edge again. This may even be a good enough excuse for EA to finally make a sequel.

For now, I'm not going to look past the trailer (I have too many bad things to say about the film's exclusion of J. Jonah Jameson), but something tells me we may be seeing a second reboot in the near future. We still got a year till its release, so maybe they can fix it still. Until then, the only thing we can take solace in is there is no way this turns out worse than the Spider-Man Musical.



Right?