The Greatest Thing Ever Made

 
Yes.  No hyperbole this is the greatest thing you will ever hear on this Earth.  The high concept is that it's "The Office" with Super Villains. IT has the finest voice cast that the great city of Baltimore has to offer.  The sound engineer, director, and author are beyond reproach.  It is "Meanwhile at the Skull Base".
www.theskullbase.net

It was a 2 movie Saturday: Evil Dead and GI Joe: Retaliation; I saw them so you don't have to see one of them.

So, on Saturday, one of my compatriots and I were on the way to the cinema, smelly movie theater - it's warm out, near my apartment, The Sanctum Skantorum.  Unnecesary exposition aside, we had originally endeavored to see the GI Joe, but then I had the revelation that we would be walking out of the theater saying, "Man, we should have gone to see Evil Dead."  So, we went to see Evil Dead.  We made the right call.

Buzz's Girlfriend...Woof?

Anyway, Alvarez's Evil Dead, technically the second remake of the first film (as well you've seen Evil Dead 2, right?), got the job done.  Yes, it's largely humorless and does not have that "screwball" *sigh* ethos and manic slapstickery.  What it does have though is a taught 90 minutes of reverent gore.  It truly is a modern version of the source material.  I say this as (I am by no means the first person to posit this theory) the majority of modern horror films and reboots, baring the resplendent Cabin in the Woods, are humorless affairs more concerned with the severing of tendons, grandest of guignols, and are by and large less concerned with the bon mots of burnt up dream hopping murderers.  By and large, that is the zeitgeist of the genre - largely humorless torture porn, although this film escapes being mere torture porn.  However, while the remake, reboot, regenesis, Rerun Berry does not have the manic humor, it is not joyless.  Simply put, this film grabs you before the credits; it makes you wince in that brief time, and you are sold when the hapless, expendable youths make it to the dilapidated cabin.  This is of course assuming that you're a fan of the original or the genre or most importantly a fan of the screen being painted in swatches of blood, carrion, mung.  You should not take this to mean though that the film is beyond reproach.  Yes, you will wonder about the decisions made by the characters.  Yes, some of the characterizations will seem rote; you will see some tropes, but it's a horror movie.  Just go in, turn the brain off, wince, tell your friends, go about your day.  You won't feel that you've wasted $11, and that is the highest praise of all.

The highest praise for GI Joe: Retaliation was that it was the second movie I saw on Saturday.  Okay, a bunch of shit blew up.  Some of the fight scenes were pretty cool.  I like that Flint does parkour now.  The Rock was The Rock; the plot was amazingly convoluted for being so insipid; a bunch of other shit happened; a bunch of people brought their little ass kids to the 10 o'clock; I remembered why I don't go to the movies downtown; I forgot most of the movie, but it was better than the first one... although I miss Scarlet as she was hot.  Lady Jaye is hot too though, I guess.  Much like Wooderson in Dazed and Confused there's just something about redheads.  My predilection towards the fire crotch aside, the movie was resoundingly eh, serviceable but unremarkable in any real quantifiable way. 

May as well I figured. For, you know, science purposes...boner science?

So, wait, what? - No, seriously Angela to Gaurdians of the Galaxy? And Thoughts on Age of Ultron

All of those unnecessary straps and belts are making me wicked nostalgic though.

I mean I'm excited that Neil Gaiman is coming back to comic books.  As he is very good at writing them, this is an established incontrovertible fact.  So that's really neat.  I just for the life of me do not know why I'm supposed to be super excited about a character who is known mainly for legal disputes and pantyless action figures.  That's really it.  Don't get me wrong though I loved the character as a boy, mainly due to the pantyless toys (God, I wish that were more of a joke), and the angels were always really well designed.  At the same time though, does anybody really care about the ancillary characters of the Spawn universe in 2013?  I guess they obviously do as this was a major-ish story last week.  I don't know.  Yet again, really psyched about the Gaiman, even if that is the most seemingly random book to bring him back to comics, but kinda meh on the Angela.

Their plan to distract the Ultrons by recreating the opening to The Lion King did not work.

On a side note, so far Age of Ultron is thoroughly not shitty.  It's self contained, ships briskly, looks nice, and doesn't involve me buying an ungodly number of side books.  Ah back to that faint praise that we do here, and that I do every day in real life.  Granted, the one issue that I do have with the book is that you can really kind of tell that it was written two years ago and shelved, as the unceasing tumult of Marvel Now! has made character relationships in the book, costumes seem out of date(Now! has by and large been neat, if you just say fuck it to establishing a concurrent continuity) So, Age of Ultron so far, while incredibly decompressed and after thought-y, has only cost me $4 on books with Bryan Hitch art and a serviceable, "Oh, reality got boned and we've got to fix it storyline", which are quickly becoming the "We got locked in a _______ what about those crazy adventures" of comic books.  However, I don't know if today's youth as fondly remember the clip show, but I am not above a faulty, shitty allusion.  So, in closing, Age of Ultron is okay so far.  It's not reinventing the wheel, and while the main plot point is a well worn trope of the past few years; I can still find some enjoyment in a reality thrown all out of whack due to a time whammy; it's a Bendis book - surprised nobody has said that exact phrase yet.  So there you go, I don't consider it a waste of $4, and it's mercifully self contained.  And my one buddy is all about She Hulk's short hair in it, is weird. I guess we're back everybody, the royal we really.