I’m very fond of the idea of Spider-Man being “in” the Marvel Cinematic Universe, officially. His brief scene in CIVIL WAR handily demonstrated the innate benefit of this kind of character brings to the proceedings, and I’m excited by the prospect of maybe potentially seeing Spidey and The Hulk interact, even if only for a single scene.

More solo Spider-Man movies, on the other hand? I’ve pretty much resigned myself to keeping my expectations low. SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING will all but certainly improve on the disastrous “AMAZING” movies (it’s still astonishing just how awful those were); but it’s equally a given that this will be the first MCU project to not be the “best” version of its own material – no one making modern superhero movies has managed to outgun Sam Raimi yet, and I don’t expect this to break the streak:

We’re really still going through with this, huh?

At this point, unless WONDER WOMAN is a miracle the DCEU as a meaningful feature franchise thing is basically all through with but the shouting. Yeah, it’ll come out, but it’ll be the new TRANSFORMERS i.e. a technical moneymaker that culturally exists as a punchline – not a great ending for such a storied stable of characters and ideas. For now, the big takeaway is that it looks like Batman is driving a robot (something they had him do in LEGO BATMAN as a joke about absurd Bat-vehicles) and that Amber Heard even looks good floating around in a goofy plastic body-stocking. Oh, well.

If somebody did this to something I’d loved as a kid, I’d want to punch them in the taint.

A Spanish-language teaser has dropped for that MEGA MAN cartoon I feel like we all sort of forgot had been threatened awhile back; i.e. that one that reworks the character as a generic teen-superhero with Resting Dreamworks Face. It’s… not promising, to be charitable:

…Ooof. What’d they do to you, old friend?

MST3K made the 90s bearable for me. Let’s see if it can do the same for this latest catastrophe. Continue reading →

Now this is the definition of long overdue: A retrospective documentary on Larry Cohen, one of the all-time great unheralded cult filmmakers of the 70s and 80s:

I almost feel disingenuous putting “Season 1” up there, since it feels really unlikely (to say nothing of a bad idea) that Marvel’s first genuine full-blown misfire gets a second season – especially now that they’ve added PUNISHER to the docket.

As ever, remember that the full text review is over on Geek.com – the print version, for purposes of presentation, does in fact differ from the video version, which is not just a strict live-read.

Trying something a little different here: Testing out the prospects for a podcast featuring me and my brother. Threw it up on YouTube to see what folks think in terms of numbers, feedback, etc – a “real” version (assuming it gets to that) would be an audio-only thing most likely.

Pretty free-form, we mainly end up discussing BATMAN V SUPERMAN, SPLIT, Disney movies, the 2017 Academy Awards and local Boston-area pseudo-celebrities. Like I said, a rough “pilot,” but hopefully it’ll give you an idea of what the dynamic would be like on a “regular” podcast. Had fun recording, hope it makes for a good listen – if you’d like to hear more, share this around and (if you haven’t already) please consider contributing to The MovieBob Patreon. Enjoy!

This series made possible in part by contributions to The MovieBob Patreon