Mr. Hakujin

Yusss! This trailer looks like what I wished S3 would've been. The intro of Gus in to the series came later than I would've liked. But hopefully S4 can deliver what this trailer seems to promise.

This was a fun film as expected. Feige and the MCU team really knew what they were doing by putting this one after Infinity War. I really need to rewatch the first film before I can say if this one was better, worse, or on par, but my initial reaction was it was slightly better than the original. I think my biggest complaint would be that so much of the action was spoiled in the trailers. I also wished I would've seen this in IMAX-3D.

Also, is anyone else shocked how low the US box office was on this film? After Infinity war and the ad campaign to push this I was really surprised to see it do Solo numbers. In fact, it might even gross less than Solo domestically as Ant-Man is around $164million and Solo is at $212 million. Yet that dumpster fire with dinosaurs is already at $384million domestic. Pshh.

They had me at armored great white sharks. I'm hoping between this and SHAZAM! the DCEU can finally start copying some of that sweet, sweet MCU success in balancing humor with their action & drama.

5 hours ago, Donatella said:

There’s weird...and then there’s this. That was...something. I give it big props for being different than what we’ve gotten used to. It was very was creative and funny. But it also goes on too long and throws itself off a cliff in that third act.

 

It was just interesting enough for me to be excited and curious about where this director will go from here. 

Yeah, the third act, and especially the ending were disappointing for me. But overall I liked the film's humor and message.

5 hours ago, Donatella said:

 

Reading his friends posts are tough. Selma makes a good point. 

 

 

Damn! I don't think most people would've envisaged that level of concise logic coming from a Selma Blair tweet. Fucking Selma Blair, y'all. I'm not sure I've even thought about her since the Hellboy sequel. Good on her though.

It'll be interesting to see if Disney backtracks with Gunn at all. At this point I'm betting Gunn is just hoping Disney let's him either finish the script for GotG v3 or at the least use the story he's developed. (I don't believe he's finished a script. No?) Again, Disney set a pretty ugly precedent for intolerance with how they handled Roseanne--that being combating intolerance (or even the perception of intolerance) with more intolerance. I think Disney handled the Roseanne tweet very poorly, but got a lot of support for that move. So now they've gotta double down on that since there's a precedent--nay, likely even a company policy. And we see the vast flaws in that policy amplified with the Gunn tweets. By setting a precedent for zero tolerance on intolerance, Disney are the only ones to blame for their injustices (that's almost too severe a word--"mishandling" maybe?) towards Gunn and others. Alec Baldwin made a pretty good point about how much more effective it would've been in combating racism an intolerance to have Roseanne address these topics on her show in the next season. Immediately firing her was basically corporate virtue signaling. The national conversation over Roseanne wasn't about combating racism and intolerance--it was more about the quickness of Roseanne's "fall" and whether it was justified or not. Offense is a very personal thing. Someone taking offense has been "weaponized" for years now. The right wing is just using those same faulty SJW tactics as effectively (in Gunn's case at least) against the left. I've already digressed too far into rant territory, so I'll stop now.

tl;dr

Disney set this ball in motion and it shows no sign of stopping. Delete all your social media the day you're fortunate (?) enough to get an interview with them.

17 hours ago, Iambaytor said:

You mean one?  1 tweet?  The one that's not even a pedophile joke and only seems like one because it's on the wall that Mike Czernovich made to make it seem like James Gunn is a pedophile?  Literally every tweet that has a section outlining something upsetting in a red box isn't about pedophilia.  5 of those tweets are pedophile jokes and they're all pretty tame by 2009-2011 Standards....

*sigh* I counted two tweets mentioning a three-year-old specifically and five other tweets mentioning either a "baby" or "little kid" in Donatella's posting of the montage of  Gunn's cringe tweets. So, yeah, ya got me there. I should've written "baby, little kids, and 3-yr-old" instead of just the latter. It's also commendable that in a post where I essentially agreed with you and tried to put down a truncated version of my thought process on examining this whole thing from multiple pov's you still managed to find a way to take out one line of text and skew the context of my post into a prop for a rage rant. You've really leveled up your contrarian slant game to Breitbart levels. Kudos?

So I finished S2 a few days ago on a long flight. A guy a row over from me asked me what I thought of it and I let out a sigh. Before I could speak he said, "Too repetitive, huh?" Yep. We both agreed the final act of the final episode was intriguing though--enough to bring us back for S3. Not sure if this writing team can really pull it off, but maybe. Maybe.

S2 E8-13 spoilery comments:

The trailer didn't blow me away, but it didn't suck. I'm still hoping for a decent story here. How David got put in the same place as Glass though--that better be a good explanation. 

 Guess this means I'm gonna have to rewatch the series now as it's been nigh a decade since I first viewed it.

Wow. That trailer gave me a severe case of meh.

https://tenor.com/xaQK.gif

Damn, body isn't even cold and y'all screaming "Give it to Taika!" Ten year old tweets to seven followers aside, some of those tweets are legit messed up. Fuuuuh! I'm just so bummed about this. I literally follow one celebrity on IG, and it's James Gunn. This is a tough one.  But @The NZA --don't front. You know you laughed at that one about The Giving Tree. 

2 hours ago, Donatella said:

Oh god. A couple times I thought it would be fun to go back and read some early Hondos stuff. Yeah... not so fun. I try not to do that anymore because you wanna know and love people as they are now. The early aughts were problematic for a lot of you. I found my Livejournal from around that time as well and was HORRIFIED. I wouldn’t hire that bitch. But I was 19. Like Nick said, James was in his 40s here. I dunno. That seems like needlessly gross stuff just to get a laugh.

In all fairness, the majority of the first ten years of this site was needlessly gross stuff meant to get a laugh. 

2 hours ago, Iambaytor said:

*shrug* I'm pretty sure there's worse than this on this very site if we were to go back far enough.  I get it but his Twitter account has been there the whole time, Disney could've, probably should've looked into it.  Edgelord humor was in for a while and pretty much everyone who indulged said some stuff they'd have a hard time explaining in the cold sober light of 2018.  I mean would you be able to track down every shitpost you have on this site, I admit I'm a special case since I was 16 when I started here but it's quite an undertaking.

Amen. However, the sheer number of Gunn's tweets mentioning "three-year-olds" is just disturbing even for "Edgelord humor."

However, this is a decade ago, people change, humor changes. Just ask Eddie Murphy. Tweeting a quote from his two most famous comedy specials, Delirious & Raw, would get you fired today. But they made him a famous, multi-millionaire back in the day.

I mean, I still have big reservations about how people are seemingly losing entire careers in the court of public opinion, now to go back and search social media posts from a decade ago after the fact sets a scary precedent. Ain't nobody perfect. Ain't nobody never said/written/posted some fucked up shit--regardless of age. It's what humans do--we fuck up. There's a big difference between fucking up and being a fuck up. And I also still want my GotG v3 by Gunn, but just keep kids off the set.

*re-reads list of tweets*

*sigh*

Damnit. Fine. Give GotG v3 to the fucking Kiwi.

I almost feel like I'm cheating myself by reading up on upcoming MCU films before Avengers 4 drops. But I'm weak, damnit, and I cannot resist. 

Yeah, even money is on your boy from Turkey being Kraven. He's definitely got a Kraven-y vibe about him in the face. 

Yeah, the CW shows suffer from the same key problem as the Marvel Netflix shows--repetition and filler. But it's twice as bad with CW because the seasons are nearly twice as long as the Marvel Netflix shows. I genuinely like the characters and cast of CW's Flash, but I had to drop out early on in S3 because I just didn't have the patience for the storylines. Back in the day when all we had was Smallville in terms of superheroes on TV I had to tolerate these types of shenanigans from the writers. Now, however, there's just too much excellent TV out there to bother with mediocre anymore.

If the reviews are good I'll give Batwoman a try though.

10 hours ago, alive she cried said:

Whenever I hear people recommending CW shows, there's always a lot of: "Just get through the first seventeen episodes and then it gets really good. It's still a little cheesy, but great. Now it does dip again for the next two seasons but the first three episodes of the current season is pretty close to it's best" 

 

In the golden age in the television, that's a long winded way of saying "Don't watch it".

I hear something similar whenever a hardcore Dr. Who fan finds out I've never seen an episode of the modern iterations. (I watched some episodes with the curly-haired Doc who wore the multicolored scarf when I was a kid.) One day I guess I will try to give the David Tennant series a go. Maybe.

15 hours ago, The NZA said:

agreed but none of that felt as weird to me as You Can't Do That On Television...even by what i imagine were canadian standards in the 80's, that shit got weird sometimes 

For real. Even back in the day I remember it being like a car wreck--I didn't want to see it but I just couldn't look away. Didn't they also used to make fun of this one girl because she was fat but she wasn't fat? Moose? Can you imagine if they tried in 2018?! SMH. Shit all our hats.

Sliming and the dumb locker jokes were the best bits I recall about that show. 

I'm in season two and struggling a bit to finish. I can't say it's bad by any means, but I binged S1 in two sittings and S2 I've only finished up to episode 7 after a week. I'm getting through an episode, maybe an episode and a half, at a time before I have to move on to something else. I feel like they're really going into more CW territory with the writing this season in terms of corny melodrama elements. Most of those are coming from the Shades/Mariah (STOKES! Mariah STOKES!) story line. However, it's still got a lot of solid writing. S2E7 really felt like a mid-season finale. I'm curious to see where they go in the final 8 episodes.

Misty's story is pretty interesting so far. I had to go back and watch a bit of that last Defenders episode to refresh my memory on some things. I wasn't expecting to see Reg. E. Cathy as a character this season, and it's bittersweet knowing the actor has died. However, he's got such a great part this season and the scenes with him and Luke have been some of my favorite thus far. Another high point is this guy they have playing Bushmaster. He's got some layers and an interesting motivation for his villainy. S2E6-7 saw him do a lot of monologuing, but the actor was giving such a great performance that I didn't really mind some of these key reveals coming out as exposition.

S2E1-7 Comments

Yeah, it looks like the fact AOS is in its final season and the TV show bombing gave the editorial all the motive they needed to make the playing field less crowded. I'm sure the major players won't stay outta rotation for more than a few years, if even that. Is the Warren Ellis Karnak series still going? I was on board with that for the first few issues but trailed off.

Also, that spoiler is fake news. I refuse to believe it.

On 6/30/2018 at 4:59 AM, The NZA said:

yeahhh...i mean, the fox deal looks locked down by now, and as much as folks wanted x-men, the FF cast are way bigger (even if for villains alone)...

Agreed. With over a decade of X-films and TV show spin-offs, the mutants feel like a well trodden piece of real estate. The FF cast of characters also seems to fit much more into the "cosmic" direction Marvel Studios is taking. I really hope MCU Phase 4 lives up to the potential. Wasn't Namor also part of the FF/Fox deal? #Illuminati

On 6/28/2018 at 8:48 PM, Jables said:

[Pic That Would Make Sense if SONY Would Let Marvel Studios Handle Their Shit]

Wouldn't 

it 

be 

nice

Maybe in MCU Phase 7 after Disney buys SONY Pictures.

24 minutes ago, Jables said:

I immensely enjoyed Hateful Eight and Django Unchained more on the second viewing. Tarantino telling the Manson story is 1) going to be a hoot and 2) going to probably be one of the best Tarantino OST's.

Fucking Nostradamus over here getting me all excited.

Panchlation: I agree and am now very much looking forward to the OST as much as the film.

Meh. I always hated when Morbius had crossovers in the books on my monthly pull list as a kid. But, hell, if someone can make me interested in Cloak & Dagger on TV then I guess I'll give this a shot, too.

Nine months later I've got nine (fairly) recent slices for ya. 

Avengers Infinity War 
A- 
It’s Thanos’ movie, and one of the few superhero films ever where the villain is the protagonist. It's been out for two months now, so if you haven't seen it or heard about "OMG dat ending!!!11!" then I don't know what to tell ya. I saw it twice in IMAX and loved it for all it accomplished and attempted to accomplish. Excelsior! 

Deadpool 2 
B+
The same, meta 4th wall breaking jokes run a little thin, and making Deadpool want to be a dad was kinda off-putting—it was almost trying too hard to be a "real" movie. But it was still action packed and funny as hell. Can't be mad at that!

Rampage
C-
I never played the 1980s(?) video game, but I do love a good, dumb action movie with the Rock. Unfortunately this was just dumb and not very good at all.

Solo: A Star Wars Story 
B
As an avid Star Wars fan I went in to this fully expecting a raging dumpster fire. However, what I got was a mediocre sci-fi action film with a few bonafide gems thrown in named Chewie & Lando. Worth seeing on a big screen with lowered expectations.

Action Point
D+
I was expecting a Jackass film mixed with a raunchy 70s style comedy in the vain of National Lampoon or Meatballs, but it was not even close to either of those films in quality. I also thought way more of the OG Jackass crew would be in the film, but it was just Knoxville & Pontius. And pretty much all the real "stunts" they did were in the trailer. 

Upgrade
B
This is not new territory in sci-fi, but it managed to feel original—like a great episode of Black Mirror. The cast was completely unknown to me and they all did an adequate job, but the direction is what reall saves this tightly paced little film about artificial intelligence and revenge.

Ocean’s 8
C
Disappointingly unclever, slow, and unfunny. It has a meaner spirit to it that was not in the first film, which this is desperately trying to clone. The cast was amazing, so if a better director were to come on board with a better script, I’d definitely be down to see a sequel as I’m a sucker for a good heist film. (Watch Logan Lucky if you want a recent example of what a good heist film is, not Ocean's 8.)

TAG
B
A great cast with a seemingly weak premise yet it managed to be both heartfelt and funny if not peppered with some really weird character twists.

Hereditary
C
The hype train on this film has left the station, but I was not aboard. Toni Colette’s performance is great, and she has two scenes in particular that really shine in a disturbing way. However, Gabriel Byrne is utterly wasted. The pacing is glacial for the entire first two acts, and the third act (keeping it vague to avoid spoilers) just all kind of comes at you at once. It needed more build up and better pacing for me.

Incredibles 2
A-
Jack Jack saves this movie. I was really feeling like this was a grade of B or B+ tops until I really sat and thought about Jack Jack—every sequence he was in was pure gold. The action and pacing is nowhere up to par with the original, and the villain’s motives are also a bit too similar to Syndrome from the original. However, the aesthetic is still on point, there’s more Frozone, and, of course, Jack Jack. Next time though, Pixar needs to utilize their famous story editing method to clean up Brad Bird’s clunky plot and problematic script.

Jurassic World 2: Fallen Kingdom
C
Universal is mimicking what Disney is doing with Star Wars--soft reboots of a beloved franchise. This had the same basic plot as Jurassic Park 2, but it is more on par in quality with JP3. This movie also has criminally less Goldblum than JP2. I mean, the trailer makes it look like Ian Malcolm is gonna feature heavily in the film and Goldblum did a lot of press, so my expectations were dashed when he had essentially a cameo. Add thirty seconds on to the trailer and you've got your sum total of Goldblum in JW2.  

I liked this movie more than Axels. I do agree with most of his criticisms though. The biggest problem with this film is also its greatest asset--Brad Bird is credited as the sole writer. The guy is good, but the plot to this film is waaaaay too clunky, and the villain's motives are too similar to the first film. In short, it's nowhere near as original as, well, the original. Bird could've utilized arguably the best storyhouse in modern cinema to punch up his script, but likely he let ego override, and the film suffered for it. But that's just speculation. What's fact is the script is weak.

However, for me the good outweighed the bad in the end. Jack Jack saves this film. Uncle Frozone and Dash were great, too. Elastigirl & Mr. Incredible where also on point. I also dug the new superhero characters, who all shined in the third act. Violet, however, was...angsty  And angsty teens are annoying. And while her behavior is arguably fair to real life, watching a character whine about inane shit for most of the film is not entertaining. Edna Mode's short scene were great though. And I absolutely love the aesthetics and style used in the Incredible verse. Every scene looked gorgeous. So for me this was not a sequel not quite on par with the original but ultimately a win. I'll definitely own it on home video and I might even see it again in the theater since I've got MoviePass.

On 6/16/2018 at 6:23 AM, Drifter said:

what was the animated short?

It's called Bao, after the Chinese oversized dumpling. I haven't had one in ages, but when I lived in Japan you could get them for hella cheap at the 7-11 and they were so good. Anyway, the short is set in Toronto, and it's an extended metaphor for  the relationship between a doting Chinese-Canadian mother and her jerky son. It's not  one of my favorite Pixar shorts, but it's definitely one of the most unique ones. There's a particular moment that has a lot of people talking...

I found this video of someone making bao using the actual recipe form the film. It's pretty cool, but it's like a level or two above my culinary skill set.

I'd like to re-read the original Maxx run one day, but there's just so much other stuff on the "to read" list. I wonder why Keithi s publishing though IDW and not IMAGE?

 This new Batman crossover sounds interesting though; I'll likely check out issue #1 and see what's what.

@The NZA S1 is 10 episodes.

S1E4

Four episodes in and we get an origin for the cloak. A pretty great origin, too. And one very distinctly tied to the setting and culture in New Orleans and SE Louisiana. 

Nerdist apparently is doing an after show for each episode. I skimmed over this one as it has the show's creator (who worked on Heroes and DD). I also finally went to IMDB and realized where I recognize the actor who plays Tyrone from--he had a roll on the outstanding HBO miniseres "The Night Of."

16 hours ago, Iambaytor said:

That's not what he's talking about at all, but keep on carrying that torch if it keeps you from accepting the fact that you're a shithead.

Tsk. So nasty.