Spitballing - Green Lantern

 

Ever since Green Lantern came out in 2011, I've heard conflicting reports about the film's quality.  No one thinks it's actually GOOD, mind you, but there are some people who think it's halfway decent and not nearly so bad as many others suggest.  Upon finally watching the film for myself, I'd say it's somewhere between those two opinions, but leaning more towards the "it stinks" side.

Spitballing - Thor

Alternate Title: Thor From The Point Of View Of Someone Who Just Got Through Reading The Poetic Edda And The Prose Edda And Is Going To Be Pretentious About It

The (Comic) Book Was Better - Under the (Red) Hood

 

I hear there used to be an old saying about comic books, how only three characters ever stayed really and truly dead: Uncle Ben, Bucky and Jason Todd.  Well, in January 2005, Marvel decided to stomp all over that axiom by resurrecting Bucky Barnes as the slightly unstable and infinitely more complex Winter Soldier.  The very next month, DC followed suit by resurrecting Jason Todd as the slightly unstable and infinitely more complex Red Hood.  I eagerly await the day when Marvel revives Uncle Ben only for DC to overshadow this event by reviving Thomas Wayne, but until then, let’s talk about Jason Todd and how both comic and cartoon have handled his return.

Highlander

 

I guess if you want to get picky, Highlander isn’t your typical superhero movie.  There’s no aliens or adoring/condemning public or big flashy costumes, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to the title character as a superhero.  Then again, it does feature a good guy fighting a bad guy, rescuing damsels in distress and generally being a broody loner, so I say it counts.

Spider-Man 2

Back in June, I devoted an entire entry to ranting about how confused and ridiculous 2002’s Spider-Man is, no matter what the bulk of the critics and movie-goers would have you believe.  I don’t want to drive a stake through it or anything.  It’s just a bad movie.  Surprisingly enough, I was not driven out of the superhero fandom on a rail for expressing this opinion, so here I am, testing my luck again by reviewing the equally stupid 2004 sequel, Spider-Man 2.

The (Comic) Book Was Better - DC: The New Frontier

 

Since the maiden voyage of the good ship The (Comic) Book was Better didn’t completely capsize and sink, it’s time to set sail yet again, this time with the epic tale of epicness known as The New Frontier.  The comic was written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke and published in 2004; the cartoon came out in 2008.  The comic is so epic that it needed two full-length TPBs to contain the awesome (though it is all available in one volume now, from what I understand), so of course, the cartoon version had to cut quite a bit.  The question is: did it cut the right things?  And was it able to tell a compelling story with what it did use?

Spider-Man

In 2002, among the hottest of hot summer blockbusters was Sam Raimi’s take on Marvel’s wondrous wall-crawler, the spectacular Spider-Man, which earned a whopping 821.7 million dollars at the worldwide box office; was nominated for two Oscars, two Grammies, and a whole slew of other accolades; and spawned two sequels over the next five years.  The film remains popular to this day, scoring an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and many, many devoted fans.

And I don’t like it.

I will now take a short recess to dodge the bushels of rotten vegetables being thrown at my head, and then we shall proceed.

Batman: The Movie

Long before Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan ever thought of bringing the Dark Knight to the silver screen, 20^th Century Fox decided to capitalize on the wild success of the ‘60s Batman series with a full-length film.  It was shot during the break between the first and second seasons on a budget of $1,377,800, which was pretty paltry even for back then.  But hey, just because a movie is made on the cheap doesn’t mean it can’t be good—Psycho, made six years earlier, famously had a budget of just one million dollars.  Is this film anywhere near as brilliant as Psycho?  Don’t be silly.  Is it one heck of a fun ride?  You bet your Bat-boots it is!

The (Comic) Book Was Better - Superman/Batman: Public Enemies

We’ve all heard it.  Heck, we’ve all said it—“That movie was good/bad/okay/fantastic/the worst piece of dreck ever put on film… but the book was better.”  In this new review series, I am going to be looking at movies (or TV episodes, though the emphasis will be on DC’s series of animated films) and the comic books/graphic novels that inspired them to determine which one told the story better.  I won’t really be comparing them per se, because otherwise you could probably narrow it all down to “the cartoon cut too much stuff out”—I’ll just be judging each version on its own merits as if I have never seen/read the other version, and we’ll see how this works. Today’s subject: Superman/Batman: Public Enemies!

The Incredibles

After all the rage from last month’s reviews, I figured it’d be therapeutic to start March by writing about something fun, and let’s face it—if there are two companies that know how to make fun movies, they’re Disney and Pixar.  In 2004, in the wake of the wildly winning Finding Nemo, they brought their formidable fun-making forces to the world of superheroes.  The result?  The Incredibles, which ended up netting another few bajillion dollars for its creators.  Was it deserved?  I think we all know the answer to that, but let’s take a look anyway.