Here’s Batman and Catwoman from “Dark Knight Rises” on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but the “Nolanverse” costume/character designs – Joker excluded – just keep looking worse.Yeah, yeah, “haters gonna hate;” but just LOOK at those monstrosities – they look like they made their suits out of old tires. I’m sure the movie will be fine, but between these two and Bane it’ll be fine in spite of how bad everyone looks. Ugh.
I’m not sure why this story hasn’t yet gotten more attention today, but “Amazing Spider-Man” director Marc Webb has confirmed to MTV that the film isn’t just re-telling the title character’s origin story… it’s re-writing it, too. More after the jump:
Speaking to MTV, Webb delivered the “headline” story that – as pretty-much everyone has been guessing since the first teaser – the mystery of what happened to Peter Parker’s biological parents will form the background continuity of the (hoped-for) new series. But buried amid the quotes was this doozy, which seems poised to confirm some of the speculation that came out of the “sizzle reel” presentation back in February:
“This is probably a reveal,” [Webb] said, “but there is no wrestling match in this movie. The character is evolving in a different way. It’s about finding a balance between iconic elements of the ‘Spider-Man’ mythology—like how Uncle Ben’s death transforms him emotionally—but it happens in a different way.”
No Wrestling? Well, okay, maybe a necessary concession to reality – unlike the early 60s, people pretty-much know that pro-wrasslers don’t generally issue take-on-all-comers challenges to random folks off the street now. But the circumstances of Ben Parker’s death – shot by a criminal who pre-vigilante Spider-Man had earlier let escape – strikes me as one of those perfect/necessary details you just can’t change without essentially creating an entirely different character. Then I think back to some educated-guessing Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci did back when the aforementioned “sizzle reel” showing took place. Said Devin:
“There’s one more thing I took away from this footage presentation: I’m worried that Uncle Ben’s death is changed. In the footage Ben has to come to school when Peter gets in trouble for humiliating Flash Thompson using his new powers. He tells his nephew that because of this incident, he had to change his shift at work. I am willing to bet that this shift change leads to his death in some way. But the footage (which felt really comprehensive) doesn’t have Peter using his powers to make money, or a scene where he lets a criminal go. Could Ben’s death just come from the shift change? That would be a massive disappointment, as the set-up of his death in the original origin is, frankly, perfect. Again, there’s not enough to know, and I’m not against this film changing up things to find its own identity, but not having Ben killed by a crook Peter let get away is like having Bruce Wayne’s parents killed by a drunk driver. It just doesn’t work.”
Sigh. Still waiting for something significant about this movie to look interesting/optimistic without some kind of gigantic caveat.
Here are three things that are more or less constant in terms of how I view the world:
1.) There are essentially two kinds of people: THINKERS and BELIEVERS.
2.) The previous statement refers to the manner in which one looks at the world, NOT necessarily to whether or not one is a “person of faith” – though, obviously, there are some incidenta correlations.
3.) While the situation may have been different in the past, Believers haven’t been doing much in the way of long-term good for the world in a long, long time; and today they function almost exclusively as a series of annoying roadblocks holding the rest of the world back from a better future.
Anyway…
When right-wing muckraker Andrew Breitbart passed away suddenly earlier this year, the mainstream news outlets that he’d made a career of slandering with bogus “bias” charges bent over backwards to be generous and recall the good points of the guy; partly out of deference to his grieving family, but also perhaps in the knowledge that his legion of ill-informed followers – Believers who’d absorbed the ridiculous mythology of the Liberal Media Boogeyman whole – were poised to descend upon them en masse if they did otherwise.
Try to keep that extension to goodwill in mind, as you read the comments from Breitbart’s acolytes posted on this Breitbart blog post announcing the death of actual journalist Mike Wallace.
Some choice samples from the comment thread:
“A charming socialist is still a socialist.”
“Obama has one less vote now.”
“A shining member of the mentally retarded left-wing liberal mainstream media, the people who conspired and lied, AND CONTINUE TO CONSPIRE AND LIE, in order to advance an equally retarded left-wing liberal agenda, an agenda that CREATED America’s Second Great Depression.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“WHAT EVER! Sorry for Chris, lost his Dad but all this nonsense about this liberal knucklehead being legendary is so much baloney.”
“Wallace personally caused SeeBS to be involved in several costly lawsuits by his skewing of the facts(remember Gen William Westmoreland) . Wallace was a commie ideologue, plain and simple. Every a$$clown on “60 minutes” was, whether it was Wallace, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, and worse of all, Andy Rooney.”
“Wallace was a sham. He refused to go after hard left figures(he once refused an assignment to interview Bill Ayers in 1974), yet some of his harder-hitting “stories” turned out to be somewhat less. Like most media, he was a commie ideolgoue first, and it showed in his reporting.”
Adorable.
For all the nonsense about “voter fraud” currently slithering through the media – both as a desperation-gambit to suppress Democrat-leaning voters during the election and fuel the accusations of Obama’s illegitimacy after – it bothers me a hell of a lot more that some of these people are actual voters. Churchill may have been correct when he called Democracy may be “the worst form of government except all the others;” but forgive me if I seem increasingly less romantic about a system that holds the governing input of the ignorant and the paranoid “equal” to that of the intelligent and the rational.
Patrick Sauriol’s revivified Corona Coming Attractions has a rumor up purporting to describe the trailer for “The Man of Steel;” which many are presuming (still without a shred of real evidence) has been secretly constructed for a surprise debut in front of “The Dark Knight Rises.” It reads a little fishy to me, reading like a fanfic made up from guesses about the context of the more well-known set reports and “spy” photos, but if it is legit then the trailer is set to reveal that the film will be giving Kal-el some value-added features to go with the usual Faster/More-Powerful/Able staples.
Learn what it may be (and polish up your “hurr durr Zack Snyder likes to mess with the camera-speed” jokes) after the jump:
THIS COULD POSSIBLY BE A TINY SPOILER
The alleged breakdown says that the trailer includes the expected montage of Young Clark Kent learning to use his powers, and that one of these scenes depicts him “…spinning a pencil in the air using telekinesis.” Yup, that would be new.
Assuming for a moment that any of this is legit, my guess would be that “telekinetic levitation” isn’t so much an entirely “new” power as it is part of a way of explaining the mechanics of one or more of the other powers (i.e. “this is how he makes himself levitate/fly”); a to-be-expected result of having the must-provide-explanations-for-every-damn-thing Nolan Brothers producing and working on the screenplay. Either way… I honestly don’t have a problem with this.
Superman’s power-set has pretty-much always been ill-defined. Originally, he just did whatever a normal human could do only MUCH better – he didn’t fly but rather just jumped insanely high, he could see through walls because his eyes were just that strong (“heat vision” was literally “I can look at you so hard it BURNS!”) and he was even super-smart to boot. While over time it evolved into the specific-powers-manifested-in-Kryptonians-via-exposure-to-radiation-from-Earth’s-yellow-Sun form we know today, throughout the Golden and Silver Ages Superman would routinely sprout outlandish new powers “just because;” a tradition that carried over into the earlier movies with… mixed results, to say the least:
So, yeah. Telekinesis? I can roll with that. Now let’s just see a trailer for the damn thing so we can get a sense if this is going in an “Avengers” or an “Amazing Spider-Man” direction…
I’ll be starting my weekend-long stint at PAX East tomorrow afternoon. If you see me around the floor, feel free to say hi – in addition, I’ll be featured at the following two panels on Friday night:
6:00 PM – “BLANKETY BLANK PANEL” (Manticore Theater)
A gamer/geek centric version of The Match Game. Should be a blast!
10:30 PM – “ESCAPIST MOVIE NIGHT” (Wyvern Theater)
Escapist editors, Shamus Young, the LoadingReadyRun crew, The Space Janitors, myself and others present select episodes of The Escapist’s most popular shows (including some never-before-seen new stuff!) preceded by a live Q&A.
See you there!
The big question of the “Ted” trailer was “is this funny without the profanity?” The general-release trailer says: “Pretty much, yeah;” though it does appear to have the “you have now seen the whole movie” problem…
I like the red-band better, less for the profanity and more for how great the build-up/fake-out/payoff reveal of Ted plays out; but this one obviously does a better job explaining the “E.T./Hobbes/Elliot sticks around and becomes the immature holding-you-back buddy from an Apatow movie” premise – which I still think is kind of inspired. I really hope they’ve already licensed a Talking Ted, because that will be a big grown-up gift later this year…
I can’t decide if it’s more of an asset or flaw that this is so clearly the Seth MacFarlane Comfort-Zone in live-action – i.e. Ted/Whalberg are so very much Peter/Brian or Stan/Roger, Kunis turning up and Patrick Stewart doing his best Patrick Stewart Narration parody – but the bear legitimately cracks me up. Plus, it looks like they went to the New England Aquarium, so that’s pretty awesome.
People have been uploading what look an awful lot like unfinished scenes from “The Amazing Spider-Man” unlocked from a Kelloggs promotion to YouTube, and they look… not very good. Not very good at all. But, again, they also look unfinished, so maybe the benefit of the doubt is in order. The Escapist points me to a set that has all three together:
Yeah… that’s pretty painful.
I’m willing to consider, until proven otherwise, that the “messin’ with a mugger’ scene is presented extremely out-of-context; i.e. that maybe this movie’s version of “I was a self-centered wrestler first” is “I started out as a massive douchebag.” Because otherwise… wow, that is show-stoppingly horrible stuff as presented here. Set aside the fact that stand-up-comedy-Spidey (still) doesn’t seem to work in live action – I stand by my original appraisal of “Dane Cook as a Power Ranger” – and whole thing still feels… “off.”
It’s a weird distinction, I realize, but in the comics/cartoons/whatever Spidey verbally dressing-down the bad guys generally comes off as “playful;” partially because his sense of humor is generally so corny (THIS is the thing Sam Raimi “got” that few others ever do – even when he’s Spider-Man, Peter Park is still a total dork.) but also because you’re reading it to yourself and can make Spidey sound agreeable to you. Everything about this clip feels exactly the opposite of playful and/or agreeable. Spidey comes off like a bully here – from the awful “stop hittin’ yerself”-style douchebag humor to the “come at me bro!” stance and posture. Couple that with the ugly visual scheme (though, again, this is probably an unfinished scene) the still-not-working black eyes and the fucking MUZZLE FLARE on the webshooters (duuuuuuuuuuuude! hardcore!!!) and this continues to look every bit the awful grimdarkedgygritty bullshit version I was soooo relieved we avoided the first time around. BUT… it could be out of context, so who knows?
That bit in the bathroom, on the other hand… you’ve got decades worth of superhero movies to steal from, and you choose to steal from “X-Men Origins: Wolverine!?”
Remember that joke-that-snowballed Kickstarter project to build and install a life-sized bronze statue of Robocop in Detroit? It fell off a lot of people’s radars, but it’s still going on and seems to have entered the home stretch – not only have they officially licensed the image from MGM, the foam version of the final product is now being assembled in Canada so that it can be shipped to Detroit and cast in bronze by a local company.
Still to be decided is exactly where in the city the statue will be installed, though the most likely candidate is a private plot of land owned by Imagination Station, which has been a contributing partner to the project from early on.
I know that a lot of people find this whole project to be in bad taste, i.e. non-Detroit-residing film nerds putting a statue referencing a movie about a crime-ridden future dystopia up in a city currently facing a very real crime-ridden present dystopia; but I say the more the merrier to pop-iconography like this. New York could use a Spider-Man or Ghostbusters statue, while we’re at it…
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 