Musings of the Jewpacabra

Thoughts on culture, comics, creativity, and other crap.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Apocalypse Eventually

Got to see X-Men: Apocalypse today and I have two major take-aways from the movie. 1) It’s nowhere near as bad as some reviews are making it out to be and 2) 3D effects add nothing to movies like this.

Let’s start with the movie itself. X-Men 6... or is this X-Men Pre-3? It’s so hard to know at this point since X-Men 4, First Class, was a prequel to the whole run that didn’t, in any way, feature actors from the later timeline (substituting in James McAvoy for Patrick Stewart and so forth). That was fine on it’s own since We could all just think of it as X-Men 0 and pretend the case was closed. But then that movie got a sequel, Days of Future Past, that was also a sequel to the first round of X-Men movies as took place, partly in the past and partly in the very far flung future of the whole series. Did that then make First Class #4 and  Days was #5, or was Days then First Class II and... whatever.

So, X-Men 6 concerns itself with the rise of Apocalypse. He’s a very powerful, world-conquering mutant (at least, back from when the world was mostly centered around the cradle of civilization) and a totally bad dude who has, though magic mutant means, come back to life after being buried, in stasis, under ground for thousands of years. Now he’s gathering together a set of lieutenants (who are dubbed his Horsemen), and wants to destroy the human world to remake it into the civilization he always wanted (read: techno-inspired ancient Egypt).

Of course, our heroes, lead by Charles Xavier, have to stop him, once they figure out all his plans. This includes putting together the First Class most people know about, including Cyclops and Jean Gray... It’s a lot to take in. The movie does a good job, though, of balancing most characters and giving just about everyone a few good scenes so they can shine without throwing too many people in and ignoring them for whole spurts of time.

Well, except for Wolverine, who has a long cameo in this flick (but then he has a short cameo in the fourth-first flick, so Wolvie cameoing isn’t such a big deal).

Most reviewers seem to focus on Apocalypse, saying he’s not much of a villain and that it’s a pity to put a great character actor like Oscar Issacs in the role and then cover him up with makeup and sadlle him with a one-note character. And maybe they’re right -- Apocalypse isn’t exactly a charismatic leader. Hell, he’s always been big on power, short on character, from all the media I’ve seen of him. Admittedly that isn’t a lot (I read half the Age of Apocalypse run and played a couple of X-Men games that featured him). He’s certainly a force, and one not to be fucked with, but an actual strong villain, one who has character to go with his power... not really.

Is that a big deal, though? It’s never left to doubt that letting Apocalypse have his way would be a bad thing. Sure, we don’t bond with him in the movie, hoping he might win, but we also understand how bad of a dude he is, how much he should be destroyed. Apocalypse must go, and the movie does a damn fine job emphasizing that point.

So no, I don’t agree with the reviews. Without getting into details about the full plot (since this is still a brand new movie and I’d hate to spoil shit for people), I will simply say that the movie balances the personal moments with the action set-pieces very well, and it does a commendable job of putting it all together without it feeling either too rushed or too long (something, in my opinion, the recent Batman v. Superman managed to fail at -- it was both too rush and too long at the same time, a feat of movie-making failure, to be sure). The best way to put it is that, as the third part of a trilogy of X-Men films (First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse -- X-Men Through the Ages), this is a movie fans will appreciate. If you liked the previous flicks, you won’t be disappointed.

In a way, that’s just about all fans of this series need to know. The last time a “trilogy” was closing out, it did so with X-Men: The Last Stand, and that was a cinematic travesty that got everything about this series of films wrong.

Now, let’s talk about the 3D effects for a second. I caught this film on a 3D screen, and however the film was originally plotted out -- if they thought about using 3D when they filmed it or not -- it did not put the 3D effects to good use. Honestly, the film was kinda muddy in places, blurry in others, all because I don’t think the film could keep the effects up with the needs of 3D. Once special effects kicked in and everything started whipping around, the movie just got hard to follow in 3D -- the effects couldn’t stand up to the onslaught.

I’m sure there are movies for which 3D is a necessity (everyone tells me Gravity and Avatar were both most-watch films in 3D -- I saw neither that way) but X-Men: Apocalypse is not one of those movies. If you have a choice in the mode you view it, go for a standard presentation. It’ll look much, much better I’m sure.

-----

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, X-Men: Apocalypse pretty conclusively shows that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is no longer in continuity. So whether you end up liking this new flick or not, at least we can all agree that it’s a good flick for that reason alone.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Crouching Something, Hidden... Meh

Although I don’t normally tend to list it among my favorite movies of all time, the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is certainly up there. I don’t watch it as often as the other films on my list (which I posted a little while ago) but it is a beautiful, powerful movie that serves as a fantastic example of wuxia. Well... I say that having not watched as much wuxia as some, nor am I Chinese, so the cultural connection I feel to it is lacking (since I don’t have one).

Admittedly I’m not a scholar of wuxia or martial arts films in general like I am of blaxploitation films, but I do enjoy the films I watch, especially the ones that are well produced, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best produced films of the genre I have seen.

What makes that movie so good, at least from my western perspective, is all the things it gets right. The acting is great, with standout performances from Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh. So many of the performances are so good, so much emotion is conveyed from the actors, that the only way to truly appreciate the acting is to watch it in its original language with subtitles. I say that as someone that normally hates reading his movies (primarily because I always have two other things going while I watch and having to keep my eyes focused for any length of time eats in to the amount of time I have to work while I watch). Crouching Tiger commands your attention, though, so having to devote yourself to reading while you watch so you can enjoy it is worth the investment.

Not that performances are the only thing to enjoy. It’s regarded as a well filmed, well produced, well fought martial arts movie, with great set design, fantastic fight choreography, and a deliberate, story-book tone. Everything about the original movie is thought out, and the attention to every detail is seen in every scene.

The biggest slight I’ve every heard lodged against the movie is that, for eastern audiences, the movie is just one among many films like it and not, as it was to the west, a new and innovative film giving new life to the martial arts genre. Sadly, I don’t think anyone is going to feel like the sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, is anything other than one more martial arts movie among the pack.

One thing I’ve seen reviewers say about CTHD II is that it’s just a cheap cash-in on the name of the original, a direct-to-video sequel is an attempt to make a little more money on the name recognition of the original. I have my doubts on that fact, since it’s a Netflix production, so the only one making money is Netflix, and even then only through subscriptions, which Netflix would get whether or nor it had a long-in-the-works sequel no one asked for. In fact, in many ways sequels people really didn’t ask for its Netflix’s bread butter -- the Wet Hot prequel, the awful Fuller House, and the upcoming Gilmore Girls movies. A Crouching Tiger sequel is just one more continuation the online distributor could give to it’s select fans, an easy decision for the company that shows it listens to people and figures “why the hell not?” when someone asks for one more continuation to a beloved property.

The big issue, though, is that CTHD II is far removed from the magic of the first film. While Michelle Yeoh returned to work with the choreographer of the first flick, Yuen Woo-ping (now acting as director in the second installment), they’re the only returning faces, and neither of them seem nearly as interested this time around. Yeon lacks the presence she had in her first outing -- maybe she couldn’t recapture the magic without Chow Yun Fat (who couldn’t return, spoilers, due to his character being dead) or was just bored by the awful script -- making her scenes vastly less interesting to watch than they should be.

Yuen Woo-ping, too, doesn’t seem to have brought the magic this time around, but again we can probably find reasons for this. For one, the director of photography and the editor for this film each lack the ability to work with the subject matter properly. Scenes are filmed too close to get a feel for the action, and the editing is choppy and erratic, both problems common in western film-making (and this film is a eastern production, not eastern like the first flick).

The story, too, is decidedly lacking in this film. The love story between the two leads (balanced out by a second story between younger warriors) gave the first film a sweeping feel. The two tales rotated around a exploration of the wuxia culture, and the first film took the time to delve through the story beats, never rushing but also never stalling for time. It was a confident script that knew the story it wanted to tell and how to tell it.

CTHD II has none of that confidence. Like the action, the story of the sequel is choppy. Scenes of comedy butt up against scenes of high drama, interspersed with action set pieces, all of which is put together to get the story from point A to point B. None of it flows, and even the action hardly feels necessary to the plot.

Even the story-book style of the first movie is lost in the sequel. The colors are hyper saturated, the effects over-produced. The film feels less like a movie and more like an overly long episode of a soap opera, something meant for TV, with a TV budget, and then released as a movie because the Weinstein production company was still involved in its production for some reason.

In the end, what it really brings to mind is a mini-series writ small. It’s funny because there was a mini-series based on the original Crouching Tiger novels called New Crouch Tiger, Hidden Dragon when it was released here in the west. If someone had said CTHD II: Sword of Destiny was a sequel to that production (which had markedly lower production values and an over-all soap opera like feel to it) I doubt anyone would have questioned it. I’m sure reviews would have said “faithful to the source material, a strong continuation of the story”.

Instead, though, we had a vastly better production, a movie beloved by many in the west, one that stands head and shoulders above this direct-to-Netflix sequel. Did we need a sequel to CTHD? I don’t see why not -- the original was largely based on the fourth book is a series of five, so if the right team had come together to make any of the other books into films (prequel or sequel), I think it could have bee a winner. Sword of Destiny is not that production, and for all but the most die-hard fans that have to see everything Crouching Tiger, the sequel is better ignored than watched.

Before watching this flick I would have assumed I was a true fan. Instead, though, I found yet another movie I could ignore while I worked on other stuff.

[wronghands1]

[tastefullyoffensive]

by Wrong Hands

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Gaming for All

A friend of mine was talking about an assignment he has in one of his college courses. They’re studying the acting of playing by playing and then discussing it. It’s a BS assignment, through and through, but he mentioned that a lot of the guys in the class are talking about how they like to play video games and how it’s so special and cool that their girlfriends/fiances take part.

Comments like that do annoy me. That’s not to say that I think girls shouldn’t game or to make some blanket statement that women don’t game. Quite the opposite -- I’m a feminist through and through (because, in the end, I think we need equality for all in everything). What annoys me is the condescension towards women inherent in the idea that “girl gamers are special”.

What do I mean? Well, let’s look back at the history of gaming. Video games, and RPGs, and whathaveyou, are considered the preview of dudes. The classically depicted nerd is a guy -- slovenly, ugly, brainy. When a nerdy dude in pop culture comes up against adversity they conquer it through the power of their intelligence. Contrast that with girls who, when they are depicted as nerdy, find their power, their cool, but unleashing the pretty girl inside them. She’s All That is mocked for using that trope, but even a recent movie like The DUFF falls prey to that same issue.

When it came to gaming, a pursuit for the nerds back in the day, there weren’t a lot of female heroes for girls to hold up to the same level of Mario, Simon Belmont, or Sonic. Sure, a lot of series got female characters to play as eventually -- Princess Peach Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 -- but before they were heroes they were prizes in a castle to be saved. And, often, after they had their time in the sun they went back to being something to be saved. Princess Toadstool is more often than not captured by Bowser so the Mario Bros. can rescue her. She’s had four games where she was a playable hero out on an adventure, and in one of them (Super Mario RPG) she was still the damsel in distress for most of the game.

This would seem to put games out of reach for most women. “These are games where we save you. Go play with your barbies and let us do the work of men.” Games marketed to girls suffer the same issues as toys marketed to girls -- they’re candy colored and feature fairies and unicorns. Just look at Disney for an example of this -- they have Marvel and Star Wars, but all the toys are for boys despite them having a female fan base itching for female heroes in those universes. Disney won’t release a Black Widow figure, though, because those toys are for boys. It’s dumb.

Which gets us back to the issue of classifying “gamer girls” as special. Why is this condescending? Because girls, like boys, want to play. If we say, “these toys over here are for boys,” and then a girl wants to play with them, it makes her an oddity. She’s wrong, some how, for wanting to play with the toys, for wanting to play the games, and by saying “you’re special” we’re in effect just giving her a pat on the head before she goes back to her barbies.

Instead of saying that “girl gamers are special” and making a point to show this, instead we should say “girl gamers are our equals.” They play the same games everyone else does, they share the same toys everyone else does. Everyone gets a chance to have a Black Widow and a Princess Leia in their their Mario and Contra Dudes.

The attitude that put girls apart from boys in gaming is what causes men to react so poorly to women gamers, sexually harassing them and chasing them out of the industry. This needs to stop. We’re all equals and whether you want to play as a dude or a chick, and guy or a girl, whatever your gender or sexuality, gaming in all it’s forms should have room for you.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

You Got...

Recently I’ve been watching playthroughs (on YouTube) of the Mega Man Game Boy games (having already watching playthroughs of the main games in the series by RoahmMythril and PikKittyRose, both of whom do much better jobs playing through those games than I’d ever manage). In the midst of watching all these games, though, a little flight of fancy struck me.

Capcom, for one of the Mega Man anniversaries, needs to put together a true compilation of the Blue Bomber’s exploits. Sure, he’s had Anniversary collections in the past, but only the first collection had the “complete” series at the time (which, even then, didn’t include Mega Man and Bass/Rockman and Forte) while more recent collections only covered the NES era -- Mega Man 1 through 6. None of these collections touched on the Game Boy games at all, which is a real tragedy since Mega Man V GB doesn’t borrow from the main series entries (unlike I through IV).

But sure, you’re going to say, putting together a “proper” collection is unnecessary since you can just most/all the games through legal, downloadable means, such as the Nintendo eShops. Maybe, but that’s why the collection should sweeten the pot and do something Mega Man hasn’t seen since the Genesis -- go the route of the Wily Wars.

For those unfamiliar, the Wily Wars was a collection of remakes of the first three games, giving them extra spit an polish. It also had a system where, once you beat the games, their weapons were unlocked to take into a final special “Wily Tower” that served as an overarching “plot” for the compilation. Let’s take that idea -- playing through the games to unlock weapons and content, and extrapolate it out further.

Firstly, let’s get all the games loaded into the same engine. The first 6 won’t be hard, since they all used largely the same engine to begin with -- the way I propose it the games would all have to be remade/ported to the engine of the newer two games in the series, Mega Man 9 and 10, but since those were more or less NES games for modern systems, they at least provide the engine we need.

Harder will be Mega Man 7 and Mega Man 8. Both of those games were made for the next generation(s) of systems and don’t really fit the look of out NES/Neo-NES era compilation. But hey, people online have made NES-style “demakes” of 7 and 8, so why can’t we? We already have the engine in place at this point, so it’s more a matter of getting the sprites together and some new enemy coding for the bosses. The series, even when changing generations, still felt more or less like the series -- Mega Man doesn’t evolve much, game to go, nor do his enemies, or the tricks Capcom would throw out.

And since we’re putting in the effort to demake these two, let’s go all out and include Mega Man and Bass in the set as well. Then our whole collection really is an overview of the whole series, start to finish.

(To appease some gamers, MM7, MM8, and MM&B can also be included, in emulated form, as unlockables. That way anyone that doesn’t like the ports can at least play the originals.)

So now we have all 11 games (including MM&B) in one place, all running the same engine. Let’s then talk unlockables. Once you beat each of these games in their original mode (in the case of the demakes, their “Classic NES” mode instead) you would unlock a few things. One, you’d unlock the boss weapons to bring into the other games (call this “arranged mode” -- completing arranged mode is for trophies and bragging rights, but only original/classic would unlock new bonuses).

Two, beating the games would unlock new heroes to play in the other games. This could be as simple as the different versions of Mega Man can be played in the other games (so Mega Man 5, with his upgraded buster, could go into Mega Man 1 and clean house). Certainly some limitations would be necessary, such as Mega Man 1 (without his slide) wouldn’t be able to play through Mega Man 3 through 8 because he couldn’t clear the levels... or the levels have to be slightly rearranged for him to take sliding out of the equation. Other times, this would include new mechanics into the older games, like P-Chips (and the P-Chip store) showing up in the early games when playing with a later version of Mega Man.

Plus, we could have other heroes show up as well. Beat Mega Man 3 and unlock Protoman for use in the various games. Beat Mega Man and Bass, gain Bass for use. Additional hero unlocks could be possible, like maybe have Roll available after defeating Mega Man 1. You could even go the Mega Man Powered Up route and have bosses become playable characters (although that would require even more programming, so that might be too much for this compilation, especially if Capcom tried to do it on any kind of safe budget).

The third item, and one that is actually pretty economical, is that clearing the NES era games would unlock remakes of the Game Boy games. Beat Mega Man 1 and Mega Man 2, Mega Man in Dr. Wily’s Revenge would show up (since that game was a semi-sequel/remake of the first two games). You could do this for each game -- beating MM2 and MM3 unlocks MM II GB, and so on through the series.

Why is this economical? Because by and large all the assets for these games have already been ported into our big compilation since we have the NES run already loaded in. We’d have to remake the levels, but all the rest of the work is done -- it’s just some object assembly and boom, more games.

Sure, Mega Man V GB would need to get some spit and polish since it doesn’t borrow assets from the NES games, but that’s one game we have to upgrade (and we already did this kind of work for the SNES/PlayStation games so upgrading a Game Boy game that used NES style assets won’t be so bad). If we’re really going out there, we even might even want to think about renaming Mega Man V GB to something more appropriate, like Mega Man in Attack of the Solar Robots (working title), and then doing new iterations in the Game Boy series, Mega Man V through X, to round out the series properly. Just a thought.

Even Mega Man and Bass would get a little portable love since that game, too, had a portable sequel, Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chōsensha for the Wonderswam system. It would need some cleanup work, of course, and we might have to tweak elements of that game to bring it fully inline with the rest of the series (for starters, the game only featured five collectible weapons -- let’s get that up to eight).

Beating those portable iterations would unlock further bonuses, such as “nostalgia mode” where the main games could be played in black and white (using a filter, obviously). Plus, there were some collectible weans exclusive to the portable games, like the Quint pogostick and the Punk Buster, that would become unlocked for use in the giant, cross-series weapon chest.

Finally, with all these games being brought it, let’s finish out our Wily Wars setup. Let’s first bring back the Wily Wars tower (which would need to be demade slightly to bring it back down to NES standards) so that the whole of the series is all located in one place. Then let’s add a second, bigger Tower after that, a final last scenario for players to play through once they’ve completed all the games in the series. This is the last hurrah, the big showdown... and it serves as a nice capper to the series if Capcom never makes another Mega Man game (which seems possible at this point, since the series creator left and no further games in any part of the greater Mega Man universe have been announced).

This idea would never happen, obviously -- it would cost money, so much more than Capcom can make just releasing emulated ports to eShops. And yet, this is better than any of that, and at 60 bucks it would probably get more interest in it than people would devote to any one game in the series. For most of us, maybe we’ll buy one or two of the games from the eShops, those we loved to play back in the day (I know Mega Man 2 and Mege Man 3 are the ones I care most about) and that’s, what, ten or fifteen bucks Capcom makes? But with a compilation like this, I’d spend the $60 or so without having to think twice. it’s a value for everyone involved, players and game company alike.

A guy can dream, right?

[darkmoonfirelyte]

On My Mind...

I don’t want to wade deep into sensitive and/or political issues here. However, this has been gnawing at me for a little over a month now, and I felt I should jot it down. In case you are wondering, this has to do with the movie Nymphomaniac.

The movie in questions (which is really two movies, parts 1 and 2, that act as a whole saga) are about a girl and her sexual awakening and quick and sudden fall into needing sex all the time. It got decent reviews when it came out, and I will admit straight off I was curious about how frank the discussion of sex in the movie would be. It is certainly frank -- in that regard it did not disappoint. Certainly that wasn’t the reason I stopped the first half (Part I) of the movie and didn’t go back.

What caused me to stop the movie was a scene early on (before the movie supposedly gets really dark with its sexual topics). The scene in question is about two girls, our supposed heroine and her friend (neither of whose names I can remember at this point) having a bit of a game, trying to have sex with as many guys as they can on a train before it reaches some stop or another. That’s the setup, and the scene resolves itself finally when our little anti-heroine gives a man a blow job on the train and (through the convoluted rules setup in the scene) wins the game (and a baggie of chocolates, for some reason).

Suffice it to say most of the movie, up to this point, was not very good.

Anyway, in this scene, the man she is going to give a blowie to explains that he’s headed home to his wife so that the two of them can have sex to try and have a kid (since this is around the time his wife is ovulating). The main character tells him she’s going to give him head, to which he tells her “no”. Repeatedly, no less. Eventually she forces her hands down his pants and then gives him head, and after a while he stops saying “no” and just goes with it.

That alone was enough to make me a little uncomfortable, but then in a movies titles Nymphomaniac, one that isn’t a XXX skin flick that revels in being lurid, you expect there to be some uncomfortable topics covered. Part and parcel with the territory, naturally.

However, what made me mad (and made me shut off the flick) was that afterwards, the two narrating characters (the movie is told in flashbacks so that each sexual conquest can be discussed and the characters can justify her actions or not as the case may be) talk about it. The words they use (and I’m paraphrasing here) are that she “did him a favor by taking the pressure off.”

This is what loses me. She raped the dude. With her mouth, sure, but oral is still rape. It’s played off like, “well, he’s a dude so he really wanted it,” and she’s a young, flirty girl, so the assumption is she can do no wrong. Maybe because he was an older man he is presumed to have wanted it because he didn’t fight her off harder? That’s what the movie implies (and, at times, flat out states).

The thing is, though, those are the exact same reasons male rapists give when they force themselves on a woman. For them it’s rape, but this movie depicts it as just a fun little incident because the genders were switched.

It strikes an attitude I’ve heard before about other situations. The assumption is that men can’t be raped by women because men are tougher so they can fight them off better. It’s an attitude we, as a culture, need to change because it downplays the fact that these situations can happen.

Also, for the record, Nymphomaniac sucked. It was boring and self-indulgent and took too long to get going. Even ignoring this scene it was a very well film piece of shit. In short: don’t watch it.

[throknar]

[uncannyarchived]

AND SHE’S BRUCE WAYNE’S COUSIN

[christopherjonesart]

If you’re going to reference pop culture, know your source material.

[christankyleg]

Every lesbian needs a cousin

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Only if we’re talking current Batwoman. Silver Age Batwoman (Kathy Kane, circa 1959), was introduced as a counter part to batman and also as a way to differ comments about the weird sexual dynamics of Batman and Robin (ie, he was totally fucking his ward) -- she may have been his beard, but she was his straight beard. However, with the introduction of Batgirl in the TV series (a different Batgirl from the one first introduces in comics, mind you), Batwoman was phased out and Batgirl/Barbara Gordon became the de facto counterpart to Batman.

Plus, that doesn’t even take into account the Batwoman from the DCAU animated film, Mystery of the Batwoman. There, she was actually three women (spoiler) all sharing the costume and nom de plume of “Batwoman”, one of whom was totally into Bruce Wayne and his *cough* Wayne Manor (if you know what I mean).

So, to be the most accurate, any Batwoman, then, has at best a 20% chance of being into girls, not dudes, so Batman has a decent chance at scoring some Bat-Strange.

Of course, to be most accurate, every Batman needs a Catwoman, but that’s a different symbol entirely.

*pushes up nerd glasses*

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Going Forward by Looking Back

If it wasn’t obvious by the sites I run (Castlevania RPG and the Inverted Castlevania Dungeon), I’m a huge fan of the Castlevania series. I really like the older titles (even if I suck at them) but the newer, Metroidvania titles are good in their own right (by and large). I do tend to think the series has lost its way in recent years, especially with the reboot, Lords of Shadow series, but no matter the highs and the lows I will always be a fan.

Sadly, it does seem like Konami is losing interest in the saga. The Lords of Shadow sub-series has gotten decent reviews and okay sales (from everything I can find), but Konami let their lead designer for the series, IGA, leave for greener pastures (basically so he could go off and make Metroidvania games on his own). They’ve also commented that consoles are not their focus -- mobile is, and who knows what that means for the venerated series I dig so much.

It does get me thinking that the Castlevania IP is still viable, it just needs the right leader taking the reins. So if I might make a suggestion, Konami, let’s go back to the beginning (more or less) and take a stab at what you used to be so good at. Let’s make a much more classic game like the ones of yore.

My suggestion, though, might bother some purists. I don’t think we need a remake of the original game in the saga. Hell, we’ve had a ton of those, certainly not the least of which were both Castlevania Chronicles (itself a remake of an older remake) and Super Castlevania IV (if you buy in that it’s a remake of the original and not a sequel like I still contest). No, let’s take one step forward and look towards Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest for our remake to help draw attention back to the series (and maybe bring some business in for dear old Konami).

The first question should be, “why on Earth would you want to remake Simon’s Quest?” Let’s face it, the game is really not that good. The original is clunky (like the old Castlevanias were at their worst), difficult, and just hard to get through without a strategy guide and a better translation than the one Konami originally provided. The game has issues, no doubt.

The reason I think we should take another look at CV2 is because it’s a connection between the old games and the eventually Metroidvania series. The game features an pen world, RPG elements, and a pace unlike the other games in the series. It was Metroidvania before that was even a thing. A good remake would bring in the fans of the classic series as well as those people looking for another fix of Metroidvania goodness.

So how would we want to proceed? Well, firstly we’d want to update the graphics. Not just a 16-bit style spit and polish like Adventure ReBirth got. No, if we want Simon’s second adventure to shine, we’ll need to give it the Symphony of the Night treatment. This game needs to be pretty and, in the process, Simon has got to be smooth as silk to control. This game has to outshine most everything that came before.

In the process, let’s give the game a whole new translation. The old one was terrible, with clues that were impossible to parse. Let’s remove the mystery, make the secrets a tad easier to find (and maybe hide a bunch of new stuff in there), and make everything easier to understand with townsfolk that will give advise you can actually use. Sure, throw in some references to the old, terrible translation as a way to say, “yeah, we’re in on the joke, too.” Maybe put a graveyard duck somewhere in there for the hell of it. But make the game make sense.

And then, while we’re at it, let’s make the RPG system work. In the original your currency was also your experience so often it was a choice between purchasing items you needed or gaining a level. Let’s streamline and separate the money from the experience. All the later games made it just that simple, so it doesn’t seem like a step in the wrong direction -- you’re just course correcting for the Metroidvania crowd.

This could be a game that works, and heck, it’s a savvy move, Konami. With all the remakes and sequels already in the series, the one game no one would expect you to revisit is Castlevania II. You could get some interesting PR and make a game that bridges all your fandoms and demographics. Go forward by looking back.

And hell, you never know, the game might just sell well enough you could even make a third official game staring ol’ Simon. He’s bee retired long enough -- let’s bring the original hero out for another round, eh?

[darkmoonfirelyte]

It’s a Game. The Big Game.

So I want to talk about a movie that came out over a year ago. It may seem like I’m late to the party to do a review of it, but that was kind of the point. The movie I want to talk about is Ender’s Game, and the reason I’m only now getting around to discussing the movie is because Orson Scott Card, the author of the book the movie is based on, is a bigoted asshat.

As I’m sure you probably well know by now, Orson Scott Card very much does not like gay people. I’ve read a variety of quotes from him (likening gay people as “less than human” and a whole bunch of other idiotic hate-speech), and the more I’ve read the harder and harder it’s been to divorce the man from what he writes. I can’t buy his books any more because I don’t want to support the guy -- voting with my wallet, as the saying goes -- and when it came to the movie, I couldn’t in good conscience buy a ticket for the movie (nor buy the Blu-Ray when it came out) because I didn’t want to support him.

When you think about it, Card may not be behind the movie being made (he just sold the rights to the book to Lionsgate) but if the movie did well, he’d presumably get some kind of percentage, they’d make sequels, Card would get more money, and on and on. As it turns out, many, many people had the same thought I did because the film, Ender’s Game, did rather poorly at the box office -- on a budget of $110 Mil it made $125 Mil (worldwide, mind you), just recouping it’s budget but probably not recovering its advertising budget. This weak reception has all but guaranteed the film series is dead.

This is great news and yet, at the same time, a little sad. While I’m firmly in the “fuck Orson Scott Card” camp, and I’m totally happy he won’t make more money at this point (although his books are selling to plenty of his fans, so it was only a qualified victory). And yet, the film actually wasn’t all that bad at all and, if the author behind the series wasn’t a raging douche-nozzle, it would have been nice to actually see more movies set in the universe.

Let me state that I dug many of the Ender books -- while the later books following Ender got... weird, I like the original Ender’s Game novel, and the Shadow series (what I read of it before his politics were brought to my attention) were solid stories (even if they didn’t ever reach the height of that first novel). I wasn’t able to get into Card’s non-Ender works, so deciding that I didn’t want to support the author was no big issue for me -- take it or leave it, I’d read the best of his works, in my opinion, and could just walk away.

I certainly understand that not everyone shares my opinion of his books, nor does everyone feel the need to boycott him the way I do (as evidenced by the fact people still buy his novels). I have to stand by my morals, though, and I just can’t support the dude.

Which, as stated prior, really sucks because the movie was actually pretty good. Following pretty closely to the main beats of the novel, the film goes along with Ender near the end of his schooling before his monitor (which keeps track of everything he sees) is removed. This is part of a series of tests designed to see if Ender can hold up to the pressure of combat, somehow, and eventually take to “battle school” where he’ll learn to be an effective space commander.

Why does he want to be a space warrior leader guy? Because the Formics -- an alien race that tried to invade Earth years before -- are out there in space, amassing an army, and we, the humans, need to stop them from coming back to finish the job they started. Ender knows this well, and he wants to do his part.

That basic outline is the same for the book and the movie (and for those that have read both, most of the twists and turns of the book are duplicated in the flick). It’s a decent plot, but one of the things I found was that it was done better in the book than the movie. There are a lot of little twists and turns, pushing Ender this way and that, that aren’t played properly in the movie.

For instance, when Ender’s monitor is first removed near the start of the book, we’re lead to believe he’s washed out of school and won’t get to be a space commander. It’s all revealed to be a test, but his sense of loss is palpable. In the flick, though, we already know the military is still watching him because we have a scene where they tell us as such. So when they come out later and say “hey, Ender, it was all a test. Sorry, brah,” we aren’t surprised like we were in the book.

Most of the meat of the story is played like that, telling us beforehand because the produces didn’t trust we could handle all the little twists and turns. We’re not dumb, but the producers thought otherwise.

More egregious, though, are the times where they tell us what’s going on instead of showing us. The biggest case of this is the series of battles in Battle School, all of which take place in the zero-g environment, allowing the students to get a feel for fighting in space as well as the tactics needed to do it effectively. In the book, a lot of time is spent at Battle School, showing us battle after battle, letting us get a feel for Ender’s command strategy. The movie, though, gives us all of two major battles, one of which Ender barely participates, and then tells us, “he’s a brilliant commander and obviously our last hope.”

How? Why? Because they say so? Well, okay...

So no, the film isn’t as good at storytelling as the book. That’s liveable, though. What we do get from space combat is pretty effective (especially the later battles in the movie after Ender conquers everyone in Battle School). The production values are solid and everything is, at least, well produced. It’s got a slick, futuristic sheen that really works for the subject material.

Thankfully the acting is also spot on, by and large. It’s hard to find a large, diverse cast of child actors that can all actually act, but there aren’t a lot of missteps from the performances. Sure, we don’t get nearly as much time with all the characters as I would like but I’d chalk that up to the rush the producers were in to get through all the source material. For the same reason we didn’t get many Battle School battles we also don’t get to learn the back-stories of all of Ender’s closest lieutenants. They had two hours of movie and probably three and half hours of story -- stuff was gonna get cut.

Battle School? Cut. Back-stories? Cut. More time on Earth with Valentine and... uhm... Ender’s brother (shit, what was his name)...

Peter. Right. See, Peter was barely in the movie at all, so his role as Ender’s dark side, his motivation to be better than his darker half, is lost. Likewise, his sister Valentine is supposed to be Ender’s conscience, but we barely see her either, so the emotional connection is barely felt.

And I think this is the big issue with the movie -- everything had to be cut down for the film so we lost so much. It would have been better to have the book divided into two movies release a year apart -- the film would have had time to breathe and all characters and big sequences could have come across on screen properly. Certainly what was shown was well made (if rushed and a little dumbed down) so I have faith later entire would have been done pretty well, especially if they’d been given more time.

But then we’re back to the fact that this movie didn’t do well and I didn’t want it to, either. The film is great and we needed more of them (especially with this first book, maybe divided up before and after Battle School) but we also don’t need more movies, and we certainly don’t need to give Orson Scott Card any more money.

Doesn’t stop me from feeling torn about it, though.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Coin Flip: Chick Flick

I have gone on the record, repeatedly, saying that I will watch anything at least once. Any movie, any TV show. You can put me in front of it and I’ll willing give it a shot. So long as it’s not anime (because reasons) I’m on board for watching something if I haven’t seen it before.

And sometimes even anime makes the cut. As my wife will attest, forcing me to watch My Neighbor Totoro was an... interesting experience. Certainly my live tweets of that movie were entertaining.

A number of people (male and female) have said, “oh, you really need to watch Pitch Perfect.” I’m not exactly certain why they felt this was a must-watch movie for me since I’m not exactly a fan of musicals (if by “not exactly” we mean “not at all”) nor do I go out of my way to watch competition flicks (be they sports, cheerleading, dance, etc.) -- all these movies end one of two ways: either with the team winning and learning something in the process, or with the team losing and learning something in the process. Learning is always involved, because apparently to compete is really to learn about yourself.

And yet, repeatedly, I was told Pitch Perfect was, somehow, a must watch. So, when it randomly popped up while I was channel surfing, I figured it was time to bite the bullet and get it out of the way so people would stop harassing me.

I will say that the movie is pleasantly amusing, but I really don’t get what all the hype is about.

For those of you that haven’t seen the movie (which may be most of us since I primarily discuss Sci-Fi, Horror, and Superhero Flicks on this blog), Pitch Perfect concerns itself with the world of competitive a capella (a competitive world I have to assume doesn’t exist -- in one of the better running jokes in the movie the absurdity of this plotline is pointed out with such a straight face, you laugh yet go, “wait, please tell me that’s not a thing”). One group, the Bellas, are trying to rebuild themselves after terrible incident at the previous year’s national competition (because every competition ends in “Nationals” -- again, it’s properly absurd).

Enter the grumpy “alternative” chick, Beca (Anna Kendrick), who will end up finding herself and becoming the key member that not only helps all the girls in the group pull themselves together, but also the leader that gives them the edge they’ll need to be a force at Nationals. It’s a pretty rote plot, really, and you can see most of the beats coming a mile away.

That is, really, one of the many issues I have with this movie -- despite pretending early on the movie is above the tropes of the genre (when told that the a capella groups get together and sing in competitions, Beca asks, “for fun?”) it very quickly snuggles into hitting all the same beats every other competition movie goes through. Seriously, swap out singing for dancing and this would be another Step Up flick. Shift it to basketball and it would be the first Lady Hoosiers. It’s a tired plotline and it’s hard to care for the characters when everyone is going through the same motions we’ve all seen before.

Beyond that, there were a few major plot issues I just couldn’t get my head around. Beca is a DJ (as in she takes two songs she finds online and mashes them up, and somehow making these mashups makes her think she can be a professional DJ). Her dad doesn’t think this is a good career path, but Beca swears she just wants to go into the music industry. So the deal is she has to do well in school and try to meet new people (since she’s such a loner), and if she does that, he’ll pay for her to move to L.A. and get a job in the industry.

All fine and dandy -- gives her character some motivation. And yet, she gets into competitive singing, yet another job in the industry he says he doesn’t think is worth her time, but instead of having issues with this, he acts like this is a great idea. “Of course you should sing,” he probably said in a deleted scene. “Music is obviously a great career path, and I say that with a straight face. I am in no way countermanding a point I made earlier. Not at all.”

Plus, there’s a scene part way in where Beca accidentally (very much an accident) destroys property at a performance with the Bellas. She is then arrested and her father has to bail her out. He’s very upset and even says something about how, “this is a terrible waste of her time and talents.” How can this guy, who plainly hates the people Beca is hanging out with, who manage to get her into trouble, then be fine with her being a part of this group a few scenes later?

Plus, for the record, nothing is EVER said about that arrest again. That’s just another dangling plot point that was plainly set up for “friction” and not to actually motivate anyone. No one ever pays for damages, she’s never taken to court (at least, unless that’s the plot of Pitch Perfect 2). It’s just this thing that happens and then goes away.

Honestly, if Beca hadn’t been played by Anna Kendrick -- a very funny, very gifted actress -- she would be an awful person. But she is, so you just end up shrugging off her attitude and many of the movie’s issues because Kendricks is so damn likeable.

And that’s really how most of the movie runs -- it doesn’t always make sense, but the characters are largely likeable and the music is pretty good (I’m pretty sure the flick has a platinum-selling soundtrack so, if you’re really into top 40 pop hit-mashups sung a capella, this is the movie for you). It’s a decent enough flick, and it’s good to see another female-driven movie (there just aren’t enough of these). I wouldn’t give this movie an A+ by any standard, by I didn’t hate it while I watched it, so I guess that’s something.

So now I’ve seen it. Please stop asking.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Terminated (Or Something)

As one of the apparently relative few to see the new Terminator movie this weekend, I find myself in a position to discuss a big-budget holywood movie before too many other people. Terminator Genisys turned in respectable money this weekend, actually beating projections for the five-day long weekend (starting on Wednesday before anyone even had time off, because Hollywood), although those numbers are a bit anemic when you consider the kinds of bank movies pull in now. T5: The Re-Judgement-ing grabbed north of $40 Mil over the five-day, $27 Mil for the exclusive weekend, and while those are decent figures, it’s not what the studios probably wanted to hear.

For perspective, Mad Max: Fury Road made the same amount ($40 Mil) in just three-days and it was speculated to be a flop (although it’s become quite a smash due to good word of mouth). T5 did worse, over-all, and it’s doubtful it will have the same kinds of legs as MM4. But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, once the dust settles over this long weekend and people get tired of seeing dinosaurs fight (over in Jurassic World), T5 could find its legs. I just don’t think it will.

See, for as much as it gets right, Terminator Genisys is just not a very good movie. It’s decent, don’t get me wrong, and for all the nay-saying I did a few months back when it’s seconds, truly wretched trailer came out, the movie wasn’t the out-and-out disaster it could have been. I mean, sure, I saw it hoping it would be a bomb, just because sometimes I love to watch shitty movies (my collection is full of them because there’s a certain charm to a terrible film). My expectations for T5 were low, they were exceeded, and I came away happy with the couple of hours I spent in the theater.

But that doesn’t make the new movie a good flick, just a watchable, tolerable one. It’s not bad, so it’s better than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and it’s not boring, which puts it ahead of Terminator Salvation, but it’s just not very good either.

The movie does start pretty well (especially if we ignore Kyle Reese for the moment). The future we see at the start of the movie is the same one glimpsed in the first two flicks -- bleak, dangerous, full of terminators. But there’s hope, since John Connor is about to lead his armies to Skynet to hand the machines one last, fatal blow. It’s a moment to cheer.

We’re then shot, from there, through time to the start, more or less, of the first Terminator. Kyle Reese shows up in 1984, has to protect Sarah Connor, blah blah blah. Except that “blah blah blah” doesn’t happen -- Sarah is already tough enough to take care of herself, and she has a terminator protector to boot.

(Hopefully this isn’t spoilers for any of you. Everything I’ve mentioned so far as in the trailers, so I consider it fair game to discuss.)

This whole dynamic allows us to see scenes from the original flick mirrored and moved around to great effect. The issue, though, is that this part of the movie is, maybe, a third of the whole flick (at most), and then the movie degenerates into another “run from the bad guys slog” like the rest of the series has already done. All the truly effective villains are wiped out in the first half of the movie, and what we get (which I won’t ruin even if the trailers already have) is a terminator that, while probably effective on paper, just doesn’t come across as much of a threat.

Although maybe that has more to do with the film’s rating that what the director wanted to do. Terminator Genisys, like Salvation before it, is PG-13. While, certainly, movies have become more violent and directors can get away with a lot in a PG-13 movie, the movie always felt like it was too eager to please without knowing how to do effective scares, and I have to assume part of that is because the truly effective scares would have required an R rating -- Genisys is a surprisingly bloodless movie, especially for a Terminator flick.

The big issue with the movie is casting, though. Not Arnold, who once again manages to find a performance as the T-800 that works (superior to his shoddy, bored work in Terminator 3). Not Emilia Clarke, either, who is able to make her Sarah Connor have an edge yet still convey a vulnerable side (just as Linda Hamilton was able to do -- if anyone nails the continuity between characters in this movie, it’s Emilia Clarke).

No, the big hole in the casting chart is Jai Courtney. So far, in all of the various movies I’ve seen him in, Courtney has failed to impress over and over. He’s good at being big and saying lines, but it never really feels like he invests in his characters (this is an issue I used to level against Channing Tatum as well, but Tatum has won more over in recent years, so it’s not like I’m purposefully expecting Courtney to fail -- he does it all on his own). Besides which, Courtney in no way feels like a proper stand in for the Kyle Reese of old (as played by Michael Biehn). Kyle is supposed to be half-starved, lean, with wild eyes and a permanent case of PTSD -- in other words he’s supposed to be the opposite of the huge, cool, collected terminators the heroes have to fight.

Courtney, though, while displaying none of the emotional range (as I commented before) is also too big, too healthy to be a warrior from the future. He’d play a good terminator, for sure, but as a human in this movies he’s lacking.

In the end it just becomes difficult to invest in the movie because you can’t care about one of the main heroes of the movie. I wanted to like this flick, and when I shut off my brain and just let it wash over me it was a good time. As the “proper sequel” to Terminator 2, though (which is what James Cameron called in an interview recently) it’s lacking.

I’m sorry, I already have the proper sequel to Terminator 2. It’s called The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and it’s amazing.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Mega Flight of Fancy

I suck at video games. I don’t make much of this since it’s just a fact. I’m decent at current games since the industry has long since tried to make sure everyone can play through most games to the end, but achievement hunting is pretty much out for me (I’m not good enough at most games to meet all the necessary requirements to do the obtuse goals they love to set out in achievements), and I’m simply a liability in any kind of one-on-one or team-based combat games. Don’t rely on my to aid you is what I’m saying.

My lack of skill is especially prevalent in older games, especially during the NES era. I love to watch people play those games, but I’m certainly never going to be able to play through the Castlevania or Mega Man series any time soon (especially ironic since I run two different Castlevania websites). Thankfully in the age we live in I don’t have to stress over that -- YouTube has me covered. I can watch people play through just about any game I lack the ability to make it through myself, so while I might never get to the fortress stages of Mega Man 2 I can still appreciate the awesomeness of that area’s music with the proper ambiance of the blue bomber blasting his way through Wily’s hordes of enemies.

One series I’m perfectly happy watching instead of playing, though, is the Mega Man Battle Network series. I’ll be honest, while the mechanics of those games look fun, the story is absolutely atrocious. It’s the vague future where everything we do is online, programs have personalities, and the internet is a fully realized 3D world (that, eventually, even the humans can some how explore if they can find a way to jack their own minds into it -- like the Lawnmower Man except somehow even shittier). Anyone with even a vague idea of how computers work will rebel at just about every story beat, meaning for me I end up rolling my eyes during every cutscene.

Now, yes, I recognize the game series is meant for kids (certainly, like Pokemon, it has an anime I’m never going to watch, and not just because it’s anime and I hate anime), but a kid’s program of any kind doesn’t have to have a terrible story. This one is just so painfully bad, from a writer’s perspective, I just can’t see how even a kid could tolerate the plot of any one of the MMBN games.

As I said, though, the games look really fun to play. Mechanics-wise, I kind of dig the strategy of figuring out which attacks to use and getting the right combinations to use to clear your enemies out before they manage to kill you. It’s a neat concept and, if you can ignore the story, the execution looks top notch. However, Capcom being Capcom, there is one issue holding the series back, especially in later entries:

Capcom doesn’t like to put in effort. Once a series is established, especially when it comes to the blue bomber, they seem to want to simply crank out titles with as minimal effort as possible:

For the original Mega Man, the graphics didn’t change much after the very first entry, and by Mega Man 4 all the beats of the series were fully established -- slide, charge shots, fight bosses and gain their powers, plus gain upgrades for your robot companions. There were a further 6 entries in the main series with only minimal variations on those beats (MM7 and MM8 upgraded the graphics but kept the mechanics the same while MM9 and MM10 reverted the series to it’s retro stylings and “innovated” by actually removing things like sliding, charging, and animal companions). When the series moved to the Game Boy, they just down-converted the 8-bit graphics to greyscale and left things largely the same -- even the bosses were almost entirely the same. The only game in the main series to show any spark of creativity, Mega Man and Bass, reused two bosses from another game.

(Although, not to short shrift the Game Boy Mega Man V which did have at least a different plot from any of the NES games even if it otherwise played the same. Points for at least changing up things a little.)

And this is a pattern Capcom loves to follow. The Mega Man X series, which I adore, established everything about it in the very first game. It’s Mega Man, but now you can get upgrades to your powers (dashing, air dashing, charged shots for not just your buster but also boss weapons, armor upgrades, etc.) while you fight enemies that are based on animals (like Flame Mammoth) instead of humans (Flame Man). Then it went on for 8 main games (and two Game Boy Color rehashes), and only one game was at all different from this formula -- Mega Man X: Command Mission, which was an RPG that was, from everything I’ve seen about it, absolutely terrible.

“What about the Street Fighter series?” you may ask. Sure from the first to the second game a lot changed. You could pick more than one character, you had all kinds of moves you could do (instead of maybe being able to pull off the dragon punch of hadoken). SFII did introduce a whole roster of characters with all kinds of different capabilities. But then, Capcom being Capcom, there were untold rehashes: Street Fighter II Turbo, Street Fighter II Hyper, Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Super Street Fighter II, and on and on. Many of these saw multiple console releases (there were three for the Super Nintendo, for example) not to mention all the different arcade releases. While the main titles may have innovated (and that’s debatable the deeper into the series you got with the various rehashes of the Alpha “sequels”), Capcom still tried to find ways to bleed the well dry.

All of which gets us back to my main point about Battle Network. In the first game you explore the internet while fighting the evil Navis of the World 3 (WWW, or, as we call it, the World Wide Web, which is just weird). In the end, after fighting various Navis based on bosses from the first two original Mega Man games (like Elec Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, Guts Man) you then took on Wily and, after that, got to explore a couple of bonus secret areas for the hell of it.

The next five games in the series all used this exact formula. And the graphics. And most of the same lesser viruses, and even a few of the Navis. The formula was set in stone and there was very little variance from one game to the next. Sure some new mechanics were thrown in, but little changed from one instance to the next. If you’d played on Battle Network game you largely played them all.

Watching the games, though, it occurred to me that this insistence on cranking out the games could work as a bonus if Capcom wanted to put in the effort (maybe for an anniversary release). Since all the games use the same graphics (and just change up areas), a collected edition could be put together that merged all the games into one long entry. Players could start in the first game in the series and then play through, keeping what they earn and moving through through one giant net as the story progresses through all six entries. Sure, some areas would have to be reworked (Sci-Lab, a key location in the series, would have to be reworked to be consistent from one game to the next), difficult would have to be revamped so that later entries were completely easy because of how overpowered the player would be by even the end of the second game, but with the right tweaks an epic saga could be put together.

Heck, Capcom already did that once with Mega Man. The Genesis saw The Wily Wars, a compilation of the first three games in the original series (with upgraded graphics, no less) that allowed you to bring weapons from one game into another (no more mysterious reset button for Mega Man each time he finishes an adventure). Doing something similar for the Battle Network series is possible for the same reason -- it’s all right there, and it gets rid of that pesky reset button Mega Man always suffers through (despite the games being link plot-wise, you still start right back at the basics for your Navi).

Of course the story would still be terrible, but at least the game would be epic. Maybe have a “skip” feature added in. That would work...

[darkmoonfirelyte]

This is the Dawning of the Age of Ultron

Having just seen the new Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, I figure it’s a good idea to give all you movie goers out there a heads-up about the flick so you know what to expect. Before we get into details though, let’s get this out of the way up front:

Avengers: Age of Ultron is a very good flick. Very, very good. If you’re a fan of the Marvel series you will not be disappointed, in general, by this movie. You may, however, get annoyed by some scenes, you may not enough all of the movie, and you may feel like they could have done more. And, if you’re never seen a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie before now, this is definitely not the first one to jump in with (and we’ll get to the whys in a bit). It’s a very good movie, but it’s not perfect -- so long as you don’t set your expectations too high, you’ll enjoy the movie.

I’m not going to spend this review (and this basically is a review -- I don’t need to do one of my series-spanning rants since I’ve discussed the MCU repeatedly in the past) tearing everything apart showing all the ways the movie failed. That said, there were a few missteps that are worth pointing out.

To begin with, this movie runs at a very fast clip. Part of the joy of many previous movies in the MCU is that you get plenty of time with the characters to get to know them better even if there is all kinds of action going on. Time with Cap as he banters with Black Widow, or goes to visit Peggy Carter in the retirement home. Time with Tony when he’s snipping sarcastically along with the kid on some random farm, or grabbing lunch with Rhodey. The quieter moments are some of the best in the series, and while we get a few downtime scenes (like a moment where all the Avengers try to lift Thor’s hammer) this movie is mostly action and plot at breakneck (some could even say Quicksilver) speeds.

The movie could have benefited, basically, from slowing down a touch and giving us all more time to breathe before we have to rush off to the next scene. Within the first few seconds we’re already starting up the big plot of this movie (the rise of Ultron), and once the villain is revealed (much earlier than I anticipated), the movie is in service to his machinations. Rush here, rush there, retreat, rush again.

Now, some of this could have been because, allegedly, the movie was originally three and a half hours long and had to be trimmed down by a whole hour. If that is the case (and we’ll all see when the extended cut comes out on home video later this year) then that means there were probably a number of fine character moments left on the cutting room floor. Many of my complaints here (and further down in this review) could all stem from how much footage could have been removed.

Not that I don’t see what they’d have to trim the movie down some. If it really was three and a half hours long, that’s a big movie to release in theaters. We’re not talking a complaint on the part of the people watching (although not everyone is built for a movie that long). It’s more a matter of basic scheduling (time is money): The longer a movie is, the fewer times it can be played in a day. If Marvel wants their box office receipts to be huge (and they do because they’re a business) they have to get as many showings in as they can. The more money Avengers 2: Electric Boogaloo can make, the better number they can report for the opening weekend, which makes this movie a more boastable success (and shows just how much farther DC has to try and travel with their movie universe if they want to compete).

And Avengers 2 has to be a success, make no mistake -- the first flick made so much money (crazy, “let’s fill a swimming poll full of cocaine” money) that anything less would make the second flick a flop. Hell, I’d be willing to wager that if the second movie doesn’t make more money than the first it will still be considered a flop (probably leading to reports like ”What did Marvel do wrong with Avengers 2″ and “With their first flop, has Marvel’s formula run dry?”).

So, with so much on the cutting room floor, other issues I had with the movie could be explained away. For instance, there are a number of cameos and smaller appearances from characters that you would expect to be larger. Warmachine gets a few pivotal moments during the flick, but he’s largely absent from most of the run time. Falcon (introduced in Cap 2) is even more absent, getting two very small scenes (and, like, one line) but nothing else -- and since they had to pay him no matter how much he showed up on screen, that just seems off.

Maybe it’s just my wanting more with these two characters I like (they’re both very affable, charismatic characters). But then if we think about people that maybe have only seen one movie in the whole MCU, Avengers 1, it’s even weirder. Neither Warmachine nor Falcon show up in that flick, so anyone coming into this movie fresh will be confused by these blink and you’ll miss them moments with characters that don’t matter much. Why include them if they aren’t going to do much or even get an explanation for why they’re there?

And speaking of weird oversights, we don’t really learn people’s names in this movie. Sure we know who Cap and Black Window, Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor are. But you’d be surprised to hear their names very often. Falcon is never named once. I think Rhodey is called out once by his real name and once more as Warmachine. I know these characters, I’ve seen their movies, but for other people (non-cinephiles) this is one of those decisions where someone could go “who was that again?”

This is even worse for the new characters introduced in this movie: Wanda and Pietro Maximoff (Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver respectively). I think they’re only named once in the whole movie so if you miss it then you won’t know who they are. Now, don’t get me wrong, their backstory is pivotal and you do understand their motivation, but its a two and half hour flick and we get one sold development scene with them. More time is needed to really appreciate these characters.

So the movie isn’t perfect. I think expecting it to be, though, misses the point. This isn’t the end of an arc (no matter what Marvel may want you to think by calling it Phase II. This is the middle chapter of a larger story: the Infinity War. Even since Thor 2 we’ve been building up to the Infinity War will all the talk about magic gemstones and universe ending gauntlets. This movie, while self-contained, has to serve to masters -- what came before and what’s clearly coming after. Phase III of the MCU is going to be huge (10 movies and counting) and all the groundwork has been setup in this part of the epic. Like any second part of a trilogy (and this is the second part, make no mistake) we always are left wanting more, knowing that we’ve only just scratched the surface of the larger epic to come.

Now, sometimes that plan doesn’t always work out. Need I remind anyone of the Matrix series to see how to fail at making a preplanned trilogy? But this is Marvel. So far they’re given us nothing but good movies...

Well, except for Hulk and The Incredible Hulk but those were early in the run and they’ve course corrected.

What I’m saying is that this movie is good. Avengers 2: More Avenging, Less Filling is a very solid movie that you will enjoy. But it’s not the end of an arc, so don’t expect it to be. Go to it for what it is (and what it does right) and just accept the flaws. If you go in with the right expectations you won’t be disappointed

[lordwanjavi]

Kerry Callen > A Callen Parody

[chubbymon]

These are all gold 😆

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Trooper and Jawa

Sometimes you just get a fun, ridiculous idea that won’t fit in a tweet. Trooper and Jawa is one of those ideas, a blaxploitation thriller set in the Star Wars universe. Tell me you wouldn’t watch something like that.

I dunno why it is I like blaxploitation movies so much. I’m white. Like, really white, “any less black and you’d be clear” white (to quote the movie Go). It’s not like the culture of the era (’70s black culture, to be specific) strikes a chord with my own person sensibilities (at least, outside the idea that those of use outside the upper 1% are stuck looking in without, probably, having a chance to become one of the 1%). I certainly can’t stand the pacing of most ‘70s movies (which are universally slow), and many entries in the blaxploitation era are really, really bad.

Sure, some of that can be chalked up the being 30, 40 years removed from when the movies were made. Acting, cinematography, script, pacing, on and on and have changed in the intervening years. I’m sure 20 years from now we’ll look back and many movies of those generation, blockbusters that made so much money, and go, “why the fuck did we like that again?” Everything shifts.

And yet, knowing I’ll find many of the movies in the genre cheesy (for all the aforementioned reasons), I still enjoy so many of the flicks. The stand out for me is Blacula since it’s blends the blaxploitation genre with my other personal fave: classic horror movies. For my money Blacula is one of the best Dracula-related flicks out there (not that it’s a high-bar to get over -- most Dracula adaptations are also really, really bad).

So yeah, every once in a while I get an idea for a blaxploitation movie I’d love to make. Of course, I’m white so I doubt that will ever happen (the couple of african american film makers in my area I’ve taken the idea of making a blaxploitation flick idea to have said, “you can’t do that because you’re white,” which I guess I can kinda understand even if I would be reverent to the genre). Trooper and Jawa is one of those ideas that, if I had the means and were on Disney’s payroll and could somehow convince them it was a good idea (as if), I would make it.

One’s a tough-talking, down-on-his-luck former stormtrooper. The other is a cut-throat black-market dealer with a secret heart of gold. Together they solve the hard cases and help the needed on Tatooine. They are Trooper and Jawa.

Scene:

"We've been from one side of this hell-hole of a galaxy to the other and we still aint found that damn fugitive bounty hunter. Searched through every saralac pit, jungle moon, and den of scum and villainy we can find. That honky just don't want to be found."

"Un dee dee."

"I hear ya."

Seriously, I don’t know about you but I would watch that movie.

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Superheroes on the TV

As I have commented in the past, I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As and out-and-out DC fan who wouldn’t give a rats ass about Marvel comic books, this does actually cut me a little deep. I want DC to beat Marvel at everything, and yet they don’t sell as many comics nor do they have as many good movies (although Man of Steel does show the promise of a turn around in this department). The one front DC has Marvel beat is on TV, and now even that looks like its starting to change.

Back in the day, superheroes were hard to adapt off their comic book pages. The hyper-color capes and tights are hard to translate into the real world without them looking dorky, and for many, many years super powers were too expensive to replicate. CGI has done wonders for translating superpowers to the screen, and costumers have managed to find ways to make superhero outfits work in the “real” world. But for a long time the best adaptations of superheroes were in cartoons.

in the ‘90s and ‘00s heyday, DC and Marvel fought back and forth on the little screen (television, not iPads), and there are many fans of the cartoons that spun out of that era. Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, the Justice League (Unlimited). There were a lot of cartoons that did justice to the characters, and it’s hard to choose which series was best since they were all so good. Your favorite heroes may not be so great on the silver screen (I’m looking at you, Batman and Robin), but on television the Batman we always wanted was fighting it out in the DC Animated Universe.

It wasn’t until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, though, that it felt like the time was right for live-action super hero films, and ever since that flick the market has only been getting better and better, with Marvel easily stealing the show.

DC, though, has learned from the past... well, sort of. While their movies are still only ramping up for the great DC Cinematic Universe, on television they have managed to carve out a fine showing for their heroes. Sure, even a few years ago it look pretty dire -- Smallville is a wretched piece of shit and Birds of Prey was so bad it couldn’t even make it to a full season on the incredibly forgiving WB network despite the promise of maybe, one day, sort of having Batman in it if you prayed hard enough.

But then along came Arrow, a TV show that learned from the since of series past while borrowing more than a smidge from the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight series. Everything on the show is given a grounding in reality (at least up until third season), and the production values, writing, acting... it all lines up to create a series that treats the comic book material with respect (even as it changes things around). And it’s Green Arrow! If anyone character would make a good TV hero, no one would have suspected it would be Green Arrow. Sure, the dude is just Batman in a greener, more Robin Hood-y guise, but there’s something so ridiculous about a guy with a bow and arrow fighting crime.

But Arrow just works. Sure, it’s a little schlocky in places, and the production values aren’t always up to the material (so many terrible CGI shots of boats and islands in the early going). But it tries, and it tries with respect. This has been continued in Flash, Arrow’s spin-off show and the second series in the DC Television Universe. There are even plans for a third show, Justice Friends Forever (not the actual title), plus an animated spin-off, Vixen. In short, the CW has done a lot to create a solid DC universe (and, in the process, make up for the sins of Smallville).

And yet, DC still doesn’t quite have their act together. On another channel, CBS, DC will be airing Supergirl, which, from all reports, will not be related to the CW universe (which kind of makes sense since TV channels aren’t always fans of promoting each others’ shows). Then there’s Gotham on FOX, which is about the early days of Batman and isn’t at all related to the CW universe or CBS’s Supergirl. Plus there’s Titans in production over on TNT which doesn’t seem to be related to anything else at all, and Krypton in production over at Syfy, which won’t be related to anything even if it wanted to since it’s set 100 years before Superman (or Supergirl, or Arrow, etc, etc.).

In short, if you’re a fan of DC’s character’s this is a great time for TV, but if you’re hoping for DC to create a cinematic universe on TV that rivals what Marvel has managed to do, you’re shit out of luck. Hell, none of the TV shows DC has in production are related to the DC movies, either, as evidenced y the fact that the Flash on TV won’t be the same one as the Flash on the silver screen (even that I’m pretty sure they’re both supposed to be Barry Allen).

Contrast that with Marvel. Aside from a few cartoons for the little ones that aren’t related to the main universe (which, from the sounds of it, Marvel is even reconsidering soon), Marvel has tried to stake out the same universe between TV and movies. This started with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which is obnoxious to write, so we’ll just call it Shield from now on), which started after the first Avengers movie and was directly influenced by events in Thor: The Dark World (with a couple of Thor characters popping up in Shield) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which totally blew up the back half of Shield’s season). In this respect Marvel has done a great job in tying all their properties into one universe (and just as soon as Shield season 2 comes to Netflix I’ll be catching up on that season as well to see what else has happened between all the properties).

The issue in the early going, though, is that Shield is really not a good show. Sure, after the first eight or so episodes it improves from bland and mediocre to mildly enjoyable, but it was never anywhere near as good as it’s cinematic partners, nor did it ascend anywhere near Arrow. And so, for a while, it seemed that DC could at least hold the high ground on TV. They could know fuck all about movies, but DC fans could take solace with the boob tube.

Then came Agent Carter, which was such a smart move on so many fronts: a female-led “superhero” series (in a world where only men get solo-outings normally) with good production values, smart writing, and solid acting. Plus, it gave us more of the 40s and 50s time period, which we just didn’t get enough of in the first Captain America movie (we could have had a whole series of those flicks as far as I’m concerned, and not just the one -- Cap fighting Stalin; Cap taking on Nixon; yes please, sign me up!). It was everything Shield really should have been. And, high-praise indeed, it was at least on par with Arrow. You really can’t ask for more, right?

Well, that was before Netflix got involved and unleashed Daredevil. And, dear lords, that is my new high-bar for superhero television (and remember, I don’t even like Marvel, really). Daredevil is well written, well acted, well-though-out. And it feels of-a-piece with the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe. I could seriously see watching an episode of Daredevil and then seeing the main character show up immediately afterwards in a big-screen movie and I don’t think there would even be a moment for me of going “this is weird.” It’s cinematic TV.

And thus, there’s my dilemma. I want DC to win. I want them on top because I love their characters. But now, in every respect (especially since DC can’t seen to get a cartoon off the ground to save their lives -- oh, Young Justice, you died too soon), Marvel is winning. And I’m enjoying it.

What does that say about my fandom?!

[darkmoonfirelyte]

Of Ghosts and Those that Colloquially “Bust” Them

Over the past few weeks there has been pretty constant discussion about the new Ghostbusters movie(s) that is (are) coming out. It started with the buzz over the new, all-female cast of the Ghostbusters (as some have recently taken to calling it, Lady Ghostbusters). For many, the concept of any new film in the franchise is shocking and deplorable, which I can’t really argue with. I mean, we’ve all seen Ghostbusters II, and that was a pretty wretched piece of shit (no matter how memorable a few scenes may have been).

However, those that complained that an all-female cast violated the very concept of Ghostbusters just have their heads shoved up their asses. I find it confusing that people would complain about this, since there’s nothing I can see from the plot of the first movie that would indicate the busting of ghosts is a male-exclusive job. As I remember it:

Three professors (and their token, not nearly as educated, black friend which is a whole other conversation we should be having instead) devise a way to fight ghosts while, at the same time, rebelling against the U.S. EPA.

That’s the plot, and nothing about the core description would indicate the need for men or women to play those roles. You could do a shot-for-shot remake of the original movie with just a distaff cast and everything would seamlessly work the same. No role in the original movie needs to be played by a man or a woman in a theoretical remake.

Now, sure, if we re-staged the film to different setting maybe we could justify a case for an all-male lead cast. Certainly if we set it early enough in the last century we could state “women just wouldn’t be as likely to have the educational background professional connections to play these roles”, although that’s more a reflection of the time we’re talking about and not the abilities of the women themselves (lady scientists have been around for a long, long time, so it’s more the fact that early 20th century America sucks that would cause this casting issue). Of course, if we set the movie in the 1940s around World War II then women would once again take over the duties inherent in the busting of ghosts since the menfolk would be over seas fighting Nazi ghosts.

Simply put, women can fight ghosts as well as men and whether it’s an all-male cast, all-female, or some mix thereof, there is nothing about the concept of fighting ghosts that dictates gender.

Having said that, I will fully admit I wasn’t all that enthused about the third Ghostbusters movie before the online furor started up, but this was down to to the casting -- none of the ladies chosen have thrilled me on screen before, but we all have our own tastes. If they’d cast different women in the lead roles I probably would have been paying attention earlier and would be more excited about Lady Ghostbusters than I am.

But, as I noted, there was a big online to-do about it. All kind of people (men, mostly) came out of the woodwork talking about how this new, distaff film would ruin their memories of the older movies (as if Ghostbusters II hadn’t already done a good job of that). Sony, the company behind the films, eventually “caved” (at least, that’s how other online commenters stated it) and have gone on the record that the new Ghostbusters movie is just one of two films in the franchise they’re working on -- they’re also doing a “traditional” all-male Ghostbusters.

Now, building a new franchise with multiple casts in the same world could be a good move. I certainly don’t think every franchise coming out needs to be built upon interlinked cinematic universes. Certainly right now only Marvel has managed to do a cinematic universe that works well, so it’s hard to gauge how good an idea this is.

I will say I like one of the actors attached to the film, Channing Tatum, and that’s a hard thing for me to admit. Back when I first saw the dude in films he didn’t seem like he could act. However, as his career has gone on, he’s proven to have a deft eye for roles as well as solid comedic timing. While I wouldn’t have associated Tatum with the likes of Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, and I certainly don’t think he’d make a convincing nuclear scientist/college professor, I could certainly see him in a scene stealing role akin to the to his parts in the 21 Jump Street movies. He could be the token dumb guy hanging out with his scientist friends.

Come to think of it, after Lady Ghostbusters, let’s make that movie: a racially inverted Ghostbusters with three black scientists and their token, under-educated, white friend. I would watch that movie in a heartbeat (and it wouldn’t even need to be a blaxploitation riff to get my money, although I do love those flicks).

As far as the Men and Women dueling films are concerned, I hope they both make money -- if they’re good, let’s have them both be successful. Then they can cross over, mix up their casts, add n the all-black team I talked about, and then eventually all of them can work together to fight Blacula.

Because, at the end of the day, what I really want is another Blacula movie. Let’s make that happen, people!