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...That just Happened; a Spoiler-Free Review of Amazing Spider-Man #698 - Updated with Spoilers at the bottom

Now, I've read Spider-Man for a while.  I weathered the later parts of the JMS run, yes I am talking about Gwen Stacy/Norman Osbourne's kids.  Hell, one of my fondest comic shop memories was being a boy when the final issue of the Clone Saga and summarily shitting on it for a solid hour with older, cooler customers.  I enjoyed much of the post Brand New Day run.  I stopped reading at about Spider Island because I wanted to lighten my pull.  Anyway, I would say that the revelations made in ASM #698 rival those earlier ones.  Before I get into the vitriol though, I will say that as a writer, fake in my case, I understand where Slott is coming from.  Comic books thrive on new directions.  They're fictional characters, and the big reveal makes sense given events of the book, and the fact that it's a fucking funny books, so rules of what have you are arbitrary.  I mean the twist does make sense given the focus of the last year or two of the book, which I've skimmed.

Yup

However, as a fan of Spider-Man though; I absolutely hate every last fucking thing about it.  I loathe this new direction.  I'm hoping that this was an attempt to break the internet to push sales up for #700.  I do.  As yet again, it seems like another cheap fucking shock tactic that'll be sustainable for maybe 6-12 months of stories, until normalcy has returned.  Now, this may seem harsh as I'm getting mildly irate about the fate of fictional characters, but it's more than that.  I'm bothered that we all know how this is going to work out.  You troll the core fanbase; they get irked, as is happening here; this gains some legitimate "organic" "legitimate" media coverage; you get non fans into the stores; you get a six month bump; the "nerds", myself included come back to the book, and we repeat.  I mean it's really that well it sounds like an abusive relationship really.  And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.  But it's just an irksome, inglorious way to take things.  Who knows, I may be wrong; it happens, constantly; this entire blog is a monument to that.  I don't know; maybe this is the greatest thing ever, but my gut reaction is that it' just another cheap fucking twist to do get people, more popular ones, obviously, to do this very thing that I'm doing.  It's a vicious cycle.  Seems like a cheap, but rational and prefaced but just dirty feeling, twist that we'll go through for like 6 months-year.  Honestly, I think this may be one of the more reasonable responses to this that you'll see come tomorrow. So the verdict: I can respect the bold writing choices made by Slott; as a fan of Spider-Man I fucking hate this. I just hope this is a swerve before the new series.  Please?


UPDATE - SPOILERS BELOW









Yeah - Dock Ock switches bodies with Peter Parker; Parker dies in the feeble Doc Ock body.  Octavius is now Spider-Man; he's going to bang MJ.  Octavius tried to marry/bang Aunt May.  Weird.  Not sure how much juice is there. 

World's Shortest Movie Reviews - Skyfall

It's awesome. 

So, I saw a bunch of movies of dramatically varrying quality- Here we go (in Mario voice) mid summer wrap up is what we'll call it.

As the above overly literal title, if we can call it that, suggests I have seen a metric fuck ton of summer movies.  This due in part to the fact that it's something to do on Saturday in the early afternoon, for the most part.  Aside form having my Saturday morning's free typically, I blame the wildly vacillating quality of cartoons...fuck that's sad; I do consider myself a bit of a cinephile with far more pedestrian leaning  tastes which seem to grow more prosaic as I spiral aimlessly through the miasma of malaise that is adulthood.   With that little bit of good old fashioned fanboy self loathing, which is what I should probably call the site, covered let's get on to the talkies (in an approximation of chronological viewing order)

The Amazing Spider- Man

I had rather low expectations for this film when.  It seemed, as gleaned from trailers, to be a joyless reboot of the Spider-Man franchise.  I did not have much faith in the dude from Social Network.  I was leery of the Lizard as a movie carrying villain.  I did not know if the tonal shift would really work as there was something fitting about the anachronistic aw shucks-ery that seemed to permeate the pop art cum action franchise of Raimi.  I was mostly wrong though.  As you've already made your decision to see this movie, you oh fictional, illusory reader, I feel that my purple opining may be more irrelevant than usual.  By that same token, irrelevance is the crux of the genre fare vanity blog... back to the movie

It by and large worked.  Yes, you're watching a fair approximation of the first film.  Yes, Garfield is actually likable in the film and brings the snippy prankster Spider-Man that Maguire's rendition did not embody.  And that is at the heart, so to speak, of this mandated reboot, due to issues of rights.  The film is not the same pop art pastiche that Raimi provided.  IT does embody the slightly grittier space of Super Hero film making of a post Nolan Batman summer super hero blockbuster.  And it works, by and large.

THe reason that it works, frankly, is that there is simply a stronger supporting cast in it, and a more likable, in my opinion, Spider-Man.  Martin Sheen steals every scene he is in, and Sally Field reminds me that Smokey and the Bandit movies existed.  Emma Stone is a better Mary Jane as Gwen Stacy, she's sassier, than Kirsten Dunst.  (In doing so, she adds a much needed level of personality to the sainted and sullied comic psuedo heroine...all she ever really did was die and be perfect/ have bastards with Jack disease/ powers in an oft maligned story arc, rightly so).  Anyway, the film is geared toward the slightly more modern film goer, as the last franchise closed up shop not that long ago.  It is not "total ass".  The Lizard looks less silly in the film after a while.  His motivations in this modern world, and world of suspended disbelief does make his motivations shoddier.  He never seems fully justified in his motivations, and his plans are scurrilous at best.  He is merely the needed villain... He's serviceable I guess you'd say.  So the review is that it was a decent reboot of the franchise, and that's about it really.

Savages

I went to see this at the behest of a female associate.  I am not trying to absolve myself of seeing this film, merely providing contest.  Needless to say though, we did have something to talk about after the film.  On the one hand, you have Oliver Stone's return to the realm of madcap violence/ escapism.  On the other hand, you have a patently ridiculous affair, not an insult, that does not go far enough, insult.  In our desensitized times, I wonder if the film went far enough really, as per ultra violence.  Yes, there are some grizzly things unfolding on screen, but for a movie that was touted to me as a return to Natural Born Killers form, I felt that it did not go far enough with its frenetic descent into the blood letting.  Also, the dialogue is a bit corny in spots #wargasms. And that's really the issue with the film.  It is again serviceable.  The cast fully inhabits their scene devouring archetypes.  Taylor Kitsch is not immediately repellent to my, the target demographic.  Everyone is okay.  There was a bit much as per dude ass in the film.  Bottom line: enjoy it on the television.  While there are moments of mad spectacle, there are not adult theater prices worth.

The Dark Knight Rises

It's really good.  Sure, the myriad twists and turns are predictable to fans of the Bat.  No, nobody is going to top Heath Ledger for captivating menace.  THe set pieces may not be as crazy as DKR, but they're still at the top for the summer.  Anne Hathaway steals scenes.  Bale's Batman voice is still goofy.  Tom Hardy's Bane voice is also kinda goofy, think Bronson.  But at the end of the day it fits into the pre established franchise, obviously.  It's a fitting conclusion to the trilogy.  If you don't see it, the terrorists win (back in my day we called white people terrorists).  Personally, I found it to be less thematically ham fisted than Batman Begins, yet not as engaging as The Dark Knight, although much of that is attributable to Ledger, obviously.  The movie works; I did not think the first hour dragged, and some of the plot holes in the film will bother me, um, forever is the word.  Overall though, it's winning summer entertainment really.  Hence the shortness of the review; your mind is made up on the issue of being entertained.  Seriously though, go to the movies and see it.  It's worth the adult admission for the sheer spectacle of it all.

The Watch

As a fan of "The IT Crowd", and amateur Richard Ayoade impersonator, I was willing to forgo my initial apprehensions about the quality of this film.  Then, I read the myriad negative reviews of the film and tempered my expectations, as I have done with many a thing in life.  Then, I saw the movie.  It is a movie.  It has a beginning and ending and actors and a soundtrack, and I'm sure at some point a script.  At the same time though, it's kinda shitty really.  IT seems like everyone is on board for the proceedings, but at the same time it's just that the film isn't really doing anything new.  IT has some good moments, and they are all more or less in the trailer.  To that end, it is predictable to a fault, and it squanders a good cast.  Everyone is operating form a comfort zone of sorts, and things don't gel as well as you would expect them to.  It's not utterly humorless, but it is nothing that you haven't seen everyone else do better in another film really.  And that's about it really.  

The World Ends with Cruise - The quickest movie review ever- Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I enjoyed it. Tom Cruise runs a lot. He's pretty fast for a little fellow. The action scenes were inventive and well put together. I also enjoy Simon Pegg; Paula Patton is very attractive; Jeremy Renner doesn't get on my nerves. He gets on some people's nerves apparently.

So that happened - Cabin in the Woods Review.

It was awesome. That's really about it. If you're looking for an enjoyable and incredibly meta rumination on genre fare that is both all encompassing with clever dialogue and that is rather funny, go see it.

Granted, it was not traditionally scary really, but I did get some decent jumps in. Pretty much, a cogent review analyzing the greater over arching themes of the film would greatly diminish your enjoyment imaginary reader. So with that in mind, I feel that keeping it terse would really be appropriate. Pretty much, every review I've read of it has been accurate. It is fundamentally what would happen if you took the self aware snark of the original Scream and applied it to the entirety of the horror genre: the entirety. You take that and then you frame it with an interesting and logical (as much as can exist in horror films) overall narrative. To get into any more detail would spoil some of the more amusing moments in the film. To do this would rob you of the overall enjoyment of the film hence the intentional vagueness.

However, the film has some very minor faults which are as follows. 1) Yes, apparently you do have to spell everything out for the modern American film audience: nature of the beast. Judging by comments made by other theater goers outside of the Sunday late show...some people do need everything explicitly stated to them at the movies. 2) The ad campaign for it really does do the film a disservice: yet again nature of the beast. Pretty much, you have to illustrate the hook in the ads to separate it from the common horror movie. Fortunately it ends there. Problematically though, the campaign, as always, revealed some things to me, too many really. It happens.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I feel remiss saying this about a horror movie, but it really was delightful. Yes, I would use the word delightful to describe it. If you love horror movies as I do go see it. Anything else said would diminish the viewing experience. Just try and avoid reading about it on the internet. Try and avoid the rampant spoilers that are around. Go see the movie with an open mind and with reasonable expectations and enjoy it. That's really it; it's really just fun genre eschewing fare that is beyond meta which fits our troubling, disconnected times and has titties in it.