The Good

The Bourne Ultimatum: Wow, a trilogy of movies that’s good from the first to the third. You don’t see that often enough. This is an action move done right.

Justice League: New Frontier: Happily surprised how big a role the Martian Manhunter had, though disappointed that he really didn’t do much, considering his powers. The voice casting in this movie was terrific.

Eastern Promises: We rented this because my wife is a big Viggo fan and I’m a big Cronenberg fan. Neither of us were disappointed.

The Okay

Cloverfield: After all the hype, this was simply a basic monster film, full of noise and shaky cam, with characters doing dumb things. And yet, it was a nicely made action-suspense film. Still, Gamera would have kicked his ass with a plasma-formed foot.

Resident Evil (1-3): Not as bad as I expected, as long as I kept my brain from thinking. I’m a sucker for Milla movies, I admit.

The Bad

I Am Legend: Gah. So much money spent on so little. When will filmmakers realize that special effects just can’t make a shit script smell any better?

Live Free or Die Hard: How lame is it that John McClane can’t even use his trademark phrase in this PG-13 mess? Really lame.

30 Days of Night: Based on a comic series that I haven’t read, but probably should. I know there’s a certain amount of disbelief suspension that must be made for these types of survival horror movies, but really, it seems that if the characters had IQs above 70, these movies would be about 20 minutes long.

Atonement: I always hate it when overwrought, overacted movies are praised to high heaven.

If you can’t find silliness in the premise, then I suggest you read no further: I can’t help you. It’s likely that you thought The Core and Mission to Mars were paragons of science-fiction, or that Bruce Willis really could save us all from an asteroid. You are too far gone to help.

Now, for all you others, I’ll assume that you’ve stopped laughing. Oddly, if they had gone with a premise that was a little more realistic, it might not have been such a bad movie. It might have been average, even. Let’s meet the crew of the ship:

• Kaneda, the captain
• The guy who played Scarecrow as Kapa, the science guy. I’ll be calling him Scarecrow
• The guy who played the Human Torch as the asshole military guy
• The love interest girl Cassie, who was in 28 Weeks Later, I think
• Other expendable guys and girls, including the woman who likes plants more than people, the cowardly second in command, and the guy who seems to have a fetish for sunlight; they all die

As we know from this type of movie (and from other movies like Titanic), it’s never enough that a ship is sinking, or that a chunk of rock is going to hit the Earth, or that the sun is slowly dying (way, way, way too early): no, there has to be all sorts of other shit going on. In the case of Sunshine, we’ve got a previous mission to the sun that lost contact with Earth seven years earlier. Since two McGuffins are better than one, that ship reappears. This causes the following extra stupidity:

• Damage to a critical part of the ship that’s always likely to be damaged, with no way to access beyond the requisite spacewalk. Said spacewalk kills the captain.
• During the spacewalk, the oxygen garden is destroyed: there’s no way to complete the mission without the other ship’s oxygen
• While aboard the other ship, someone sabotages the airlock, leading to two more deaths.
• The guy who made a mistake causing the initial damage kills himself before the Human Torch can kill him (they need the extra oxygen).
• The last survivor of the other ship is now a crazed, super-strong serial killer, who starts stalking the other crew after sabotaging the ship’s computer.
• In keeping with the edict that critical parts of the ship are only accessible in ways that will kill you, the Human Torch has to dive into super-cold liquid to restore the ship’s computers. He dies.

I could go on, but I don’t have the strength. After the oxygen garden is destroyed, it’s calculated that there’s only enough oxygen for 4 people to make it to the mission’s end: it seems to me, though, that they were wasting a shitload of oxygen to pressurize unnecessary parts of the ship (including a warehouse sized area containing all the fissile material from the Earth).

Scarecrow, apparently, is the only guy who can arm all that nuclear goodness, too. Nothing like having single points of failure. The funny thing is that the Human Torch KNOWS that Scarecrow is the only one with the requisite knowledge, yet still "volunteers" Scarecrow for the extremely dangerous spacewalk. Huh?

The movie devolves into a slasher picture towards the end, and the Earth, of course, is saved. Luckily, everyone on board both ships is dead by the end of the movie (unless I missed any after end credits resurrection scene; I would not be surprised if this turkey had one). To me, that’s a happy ending.

Rise of the Silver Surfer manages to make the first Fantastic Four movie look good, a fantastic feat in itself. The plot is simple: the Silver Surfer comes to Earth to prepare it for eventual destruction by Galactus. Meanwhile, Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Sue Storm (Invisible Woman) are trying to get married. Hilarity ensues.

Okay, let’s quickly run down the things the movie gets right:

• Johnny and Ben are fun for the scant time they get together.
• The special effects are good, mostly.

And now, the bad stuff:

• Jessica Alba looks like someone scooped her brains out. Half the time, they put her in glasses, so that we think she’s smart. And she’s peroxided to the point of distraction.
• Galactus is a cloud. Really. And his big plan appears to be to have the Silver Surfer dig potholes all over the Earth.
• One of the big set pieces is saving a ferris wheel.
• No Ultimate Nullifier
• The special effects for Mr. Fantastic were, indeed, special. In the bad way.

There’s just so much bad in this movie. The comedy falls flat, the action is perfunctory, and the acting is mediocre. Avoid this.

Like most summer blockbusters, Transformers suffers from trying to cram two or three different movies into one. We’ve got Movie A, with a platoon of Army guys fighting the Decepticons; there’s Movie B, with Shia LaBeouf attempting to get laid; and Movie C, with hackers trying to solve the mystery of the Decepticons’ signal.

Movie C is the worst: they introduce 2-3 hackers (who are apparently at the beck and call of the U.S. military, because hackers are always helpful to authorities), only to drop two of those characters, add an annoying new hacker/comedy relief guy (who isn’t funny), then have them type a lot of crap on terminals. I love movie hackers who can find answers in five seconds that no one else can. There’s a lot of shouting "Cut the hardlines" in Movie C, like it meant something.

Movie A and B are equally bad. Truthfully, I don’t even remember any of the character names of the Army guys (there was guy with glasses who you knew was going to get killed, bald black guy, and guy who looks like Michael Biehn but isn’t). And Shia Labouf just makes me worry about how bad he’ll be in the new Indiana Jones movie.

Here are a few of the problems I had with the movie:

• Music totally ripped off the Terminator theme, and not in a winking, respectful way.
• Army guys big plan is to move the "All-Spark" (the McGuffin of the movie) from a fairly remote area to the middle of a busy city: had to have a place for massive collateral damage, I guess.
• Optimus Prime doesn’t show up until over an hour into the movie. WTF? It reminded me of another lame expensive movie: King Kong. It took over an hour for the title character to appear in that movie, too.
• Transformers taking the shape of crappy American cars. Autobots, brought to you by GMC/Pontiac.
• Related to the above: product placement up the wazoo. It seemed like every frame of this move had some product in it. It was visually tiring. Ebay, Xbox, Nokia, Ding Dongs, etc.
• At least two of the action set pieces revolve around making fricking phone calls. In fact, I think the reason they wanted to go to the big city was to make a phone call. That would make three, but I wasn’t paying any attention.

Ways this movie could have been improved:

• This movie is two and a half hours long and only needed to be about an hour. It actually would have been better if they replaced the movie with five episodes of the cartoon.
• Funnier if you mentally replace references to the All-Spark with Old Spice.
• Fire all the actors. And the writers. And the director.

At the end of the movie, our horny teen loser, having finally impressed the girl by shoving the All-Spark into Megatron’s chest, is making out with her. On top of his Transformer buddy’s hood. All the other Autobots are watching. It’s like they came from another planet to watch teens having sex (or to have teens have sex on top of them). Either way, that would have been a better movie.

I’ve been recovering from an accident, so haven’t been able to really do much (despite what you see in the comics, broken ribs really hurt: Batman shrugs them off, then uses his grappling hook to swing away; I kinda just pop painkillers and try not to move).

I haven’t been able to get comics as regularly as I’d like, but now I’ve got a pile to get through. It might take me a while to get through them all. On the other hand, it is kind of nice to read through a few weeks of comics in a short timeframe.

I normally don’t buy Superman comics, but the "Third Kryptonian" storyline caught my interest. Kurt Busiek is one of my favorite writers, and I do enjoy Superman Family type adventures. But while I think the story is pretty good, it seems like the Superman mythos is collapsing on itself. Even the title of the story arc is amusing, with all the Kryptonians running around, this should be called the search for the Umpteenth Kryptonian.

The plot, in a nutshell, some guy named the Auctioneer had discovered three Kryptonian life signs on Earth: Superman, Supergirl and someone else (Power Girl doesn’t register as an Earth One Kryptonian, and Krypto was offworld, and there’s some new Superboy kid who can’t be called Superboy running around, too, who came after the Auctioneer did his scan). Anyhow, Superman’s on a quest to find this new mysterious Kryptonian.

Logically, he turns to Batman, who gives his some leads. There are some nice moments between Chris (the new super-kid) and Robin, and the typical Superman/Batman interactions (I liked it more when Batman and Superman were happy buddies). Batman’s info leads Superman to the house of Kristen Wells (yay, pre-Crisis continuity porn!).

Kristen is, of course, the third Kryptonian, hiding on Earth to escape the crazy alien being named Amalak who has vowed to destroy all Kryptonians, yada-yada. We learn that Kristen is old (really old) and was a soldier back when Krypton was an expansionist empire, conquering other races, being generally nasty. Kristen is on Earth using Superman as an early warning system, since she knows if anyone comes after a Kryptonian, they’ll go after him first, allowing her to escape.

All this leads to massive fighting, with all the Superman family and Batman getting into it, with the usual surprises and usual cliches (with Kristen running away, but deciding to return at the last minute to save the day/redeem herself).

But after all this, I’m pretty confused. How many different Kryptons have been introduced in the past few years (and is that number greater or less than the number of Supergirls in the same time period)? We also get some different ideas on how red sun radiation affects Superman (it doesn’t remove his powers, it just removes access to them, or some mumbo-jumbo). We get a view into Krypton’s less noble past, but is it the "real" Krypton? What is the real Krypton at this point?

Also, looks like Kryptonians can survive in space without suits/oxygen again (Krypto was traipsing in space, Kristen had no problem between worlds, etc). Not sure when that happened, but I do like it (having Superman in space with an oxygen mask never seemed very super to me).

So while I enjoyed the story, in the end it just seems to muddy the waters (and add yet more Kryptonians into the mix). I like that Kristen Wells is an older woman (and looks it, mostly), while at the same time missing the originality of the pre-Crisis version (Kristen was a time-traveling descendent of Jimmy Olsen, who used scientific gadgetry to replicate superpowers).

The art is very nice, including the cover to the final part of the trilogy (pictured, it should be a poster). Rick Leonardi’s pencils are strong, and the action is well-done.

I think I might start getting Superman more regularly, though: I mean, with Krypto and interplanetary zoos and a Supergirl I actually like, this comic did a great job at sucking me in.

We’re four episodes into the new season of Legion of Super-Heroes, and up until this week I haven’t been too impressed. Sure, the season opener set the stage for the overarching plot this season: minor B-villain from the comics Imperiex is transplanted from the 41st century to the 31st, along with a clone of Superman. Pretty basic set up, done relatively well. The credit sequence spoiled the eventual death of one of Triplicate Girl’s personalities, and I think in general that her loss was glossed over. There was a very nice sequence with her remaining bodies using a mirror to form a triad, which almost made up for ignoring it the rest of the episodes.

After the initial two-part season opener, a fairly flat story dealing with Timber Wolf’s father came next. There wasn’t anything too interesting about the story, really. I loved Timber Wolf in the comic, but the animated version doesn’t do anything for me. The only interesting thing to me was Phantom Girl’s loyalty to Timber Wolf and her rather impressive fighting style.

The four episode, though, was terrific. "Chained Lightning" gave us the origin of Lightning Lad and his brother Mekt, while also updating the story of their sister, Ayla. It was both exciting and poignant. Plus, Shrinking Violet snorting when amused is just about the cutest thing I’ve seen so far this season. Her interactions with Brainiac 5 were also great fun.

They really need to do a Legion Espionage Squad episode, now that they have Chameleon Boy and Shrinking Violet around.

Overall, I am enjoying the new season, but the immediacy of Imperiex’s invasion seems to have waned quite a lot, and the new Superman seems more wishy-washy every time he appears (one week, he’s "We have to get Imperiex" and the next episode, Imperiex can wait. But I’ll keep watching.

Wow, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Firstly, the movie is this amalgam of comedy, drama, action, thriller, just about every genre you can think of. That’s the big problem, too: it’s the most unfocused movie I’ve seen in a long time. It starts out promisingly enough, with hints of a monster born from the mean-spirited American "we’ll do whatever we want" attitude. And the initial monster attack is good (though, you know, if a monster is running around, it might be a better idea to run AWAY from it, rather than parallel to it). But the movie then just starts jumping to 4 or 5 different threads: there’s the disfunctional family that must work together to save their daughter/niece, a sinister cover-up by the government, another sinister plot by the Americans, the touching story of survival of regurgitated kids, and many, many more.

None of it makes any sense. At one point, the main character (Park, father of one of the regurgitated kids) apparently gets lobotomized, but shrugs it off. The government wants to keep him under wraps, except they let him have his cell phone all the time. His family is no better: each must come to terms with certain failures in their lives in order to defeat the monster. But we really don’t get any idea why they are the way they are.

And then there’s some plot with the Americans using some super-weapon (think Oxygen Destroyer) that is supposed to kill the monster and other living things, but seems to randomly leave our heroes perfectly fine, while others start bleeding from their ears. Plus, it seems like a good amount of firepower would have worked perfectly fine on the creature, rather than some convoluted super-weapon.

At two hours, the movie is about an hour and a half too long and seems disjointed and confused most of the time. There are some nice moments of suspense and a few surprises here and there, but it doesn’t make up for the mind-numbingly bad parts. After the movie, I felt lobotomized.

Now, I did watch the dubbed version (a big mistake, I’m sure, but I doubt subtitles would have helped), and I’ll admit that the dubbing was awful (sounded like the guys from MXC doing voices) and that likely was distracting. But watching in Korean wasn’t going to improve this turd.

• MiniMates Martian Manhunter: This is the only one on the list that I don’t own. But I have to admit, it’s pretty darn cute (and apparently one of the rarer ones)
• Justice League Unlimited: This is a cool three-pack of Martian Manhunter from the Justice League cartoon. There’s also an excellent Justice Lords version of J’onn, among others.
• DC Direct: There are a few different DC Direct Martian Manhunters: a "normal" one, an "Unmasked" version, and an upcoming Alex Ross version. I was excited to see a "First Appearance" one, but disappointed when seeing that it wasn’t really from J’onn’s first appearance, but his most recent. Lame.
• Super Powers Martian Manhunter (pictured): There’s not much that can be said about the whole Super Powers line: they are still my favorites. This was the earliest Martian Manhunter figure and still one of the best. And it has the Power Action Martian Punch!
• Hasbro’s 9" Martian Manhunter: I own a few of these, because it’s a great design. Firstly, it’s nicely-articulated; secondly, the cloth costume is cool; thirdly, it’s a great conversation piece. I keep one of these in my office at work (no matter where I work). I recall interviewing someone for a position a few years back: his name was John Jones, but he didn’t even react to the cool Martian Manhunter figure.

Legion of Super-Heroes #26

There are times when I feel this comic is really just treading water: we’ve had Supergirl for a while, and now Mon-El is back, but those events just don’t seem to have much resonance anymore. We get a lot of exposition, with the origins of the Ranzz kids recapped. Finally, towards the end, we get what the cover promises: Giant Robots.

And, you know, any comic with Giant Robots automatically becomes better. Giant Dominator Robots are even better. I liked the cockiness of Supergirl, Mon-El and Ultra-Boy thinking that they could handle anything, only to fail (though Mon-El seems a little too familiar with members of the team, calling Brainiac 5 “Brainy” at one point).

I admire what Mark Waid is trying to do here, but the pacing on this comic is extremely leisurely. Plodding, almost. In itself, that’s not a bad thing, but combined with the limited amount of character development, it becomes a very generic comic. But I’m still intrigued by the whole Dominator angle (and how it eventually fits in with the rest of the DC Universe).

Robin #158

So, Robin and Klarion team up to save the latter’s magical cat.

That’s a pretty awesome concept, and it works fairly well. Seeing the different styles of the two characters make this a worthy outing. The weirdness of the whole "Judgement Beast" creature and Robin’s general inability to deal with the whole magical angle combined to make this a very good arc.

I think of all the One Year Later comics, Robin ends up being the most consistently enjoyable.

52: Week Thirty-Eight

This series really annoys me. Each month, there’s four new issues and each month, there’s usually one issue’s worth of decent story development. But since there’s a new issue every week, I overlook the failings. The series itself is totally forgettable: each issue is like cotton candy: really cool looking, but with a fleeting, insubstantial taste.

Even though I read the issue two days ago, all I really remember from it is Will Magnus acting weird and Renee dragging Vic around in the snow.

Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible

While reading this comic, I felt a strong sense of deja vu. Let’s see: teenager is tapped by a powerful being to take over for him, but the powerful being dies before passing on enough information. Heck, that’s the origin of a lot of heroes, but I was reminded of the Son of Vulcan mini-series from a year or so back (probably because it was so recent).

Still, this was an interesting story, with a Deus Ex Machina ending, but it was inoffensive enough. I liked the Detective Chimp story much more, though.

Technorati Tags: Legion of Super-Heroes, Robin, Klarion, 52, Dr. Fate, Ibis the Invincible

Red Menace #3

I’m finding this mini-series more interesting than Bilson and DeMeo’s work on the recent Flash comic, despite its well worn plot concept (superheroes unmasked during the height of communist fear). The pace is pretty good, with important events keeping the story moving.

52: Week Thirty-Seven

Well, Starfire is still alive, which is a plus. Animal Man was dead, but he god better, ditto for Booster Gold. I’ve settled into the disjointed storytelling and the fact that we’ll probably never know how Hawkgirl was shrunk to normal size. I liked Booster and Rip’s little adventure into the Fortress of Solitude (sometimes, writers tend to forget the shear amount of cool tech in the DC Universe). The final panel gives me yet another reason to stick around (besides awaiting Starfire’s probable death).

Shadowpact #9 and Helmet of Fate #1

Two comics in the same week starring Detective Chimp. I think that’s one of the signs of the Monkeypocolypse. One day, I hope that multiple Legion of Super-Pets comics come out one week. Anyhow, we get good old Detective Chimp pontificating about the Three Universal Laws of Superheroics over in Shadowpact and attempting to be the new Dr. Fate in Helmet of Fate, both written by Bill Willingham. And both are really good. I’m not sure how Shadowpact is doing, sales-wise, but I’m pretty fond of the comic: like the Secret Six, it calls upon a lot of unused DC Universe characters and creates a reason for them to join together. Plus, we get pretentious Phantom Stranger intros. As for Helmet of Fate, all I can say is Detective Chimp as Dr. Fate is an extremely cool idea.

Birds of Prey #102

Speaking of unused characters banding together, Birds of Prey continues its (so far) strong arc: with Spy Smasher intent on destroying the Birds, and Oracle willing to do anything to protect them. I’m constantly amazed at Gail Simone’s output: every month, she delivers 3-4 great comics. This one is no exception.

Technorati Tags: Birds of Prey, Oracle, Shadowpact, Dr. Fate, Detective Chimp, 52, Animal Man, Starfire, Monkeypocolypse