So. Just saw ANT-MAN for a second time, just because. Hold’s up – this one really works. Not GUARDIANS-level transcendent, but really good.

Anyway! Long story short: By now you’ve heard that there’s quite a bit of Universe-building business sprinkled throughout this one – multiple cameos, two post-credits beats and a no-name name-drop. But on my second viewing, I’m reasonably certain I caught a glimpse of something that’s either a sly inside-reference, the most well-hidden Easter Egg since Cap’s prototype shield on the workbench in IRON MAN (the first one) …or I’m seeing things.

Obviously, to say/show more would be a MASSIVE SPOILER even if I’m wrong, given the sequence it occurs in. So I’ll put the rest of this after the jump:

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MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE ON:

Okay. So, ANT-MAN’s version of Chekhov’s Gun Finishing-Move is “going subatomic,” i.e. using the Ant-Man suit’s shrinking capabilities to reduce one’s size down below that of the building blocks of life – useful, but super-dangerous because if you shrink too far you hit the point where physics and reality no longer matter and start slipping through the cracks in space/time, and in the film’s backstory, doing so led to the death of original Ant-Man’s wife Janet “The Wasp” Van Dyne (hence why he’s adamant that his daughter Hope not use the suit herself, hence the conscripting of Scott Lang as the new Ant-Man.) Using this technique ultimately turns out to be the only way for Scott to defeat YellowJacket in a deadly situation, and he winds up tumbling down through the Subatomic World in nifty, possibly COSMOS-inspired sequence (there’s a Tardigrade!!!) that starts out straight-science and then goes all Cosmic Marvel. 

At sub-atom size, Ant-Man continues to drift through the kind of hazy/colorful psychedelia Marvel has thus far used to represent “otherworldly” spaces like Thanos’ domain, finally winding up in a fractal space where he’s finally able to finagle an escape back to reality – though he can’t remember anything he saw or did there. It’s enough, however, for Pym to imply that he’s keen to go looking for Janet again…

Anyway! At one point in the process (during both the “shrinking” and “escaping” shots), we pass through what vaugely looks like a cloudy mountain-range of some kind. In the upper right-hand corner of the frame, I’d swear you can see (partially masked by “clouds”) what appears to be a gigantic humanoid figure looming over the scene. It’s brief, it’s not “pointed out” and it could be anything – but it sticks out to me because it’s there both times.

Here’s a snap from an in-theater recording I found online (I’m not linking to the original, I’m generally against phones/cameras in theaters and if there turns out to be an issue here I’ll glady remove it.) Anyway:

And HERE’S a version I’ve highlighted to show where I’m seeing the “figure”:

So. Assuming this is “something,” who or what is it? Marvel overseer Kevin Feige has already confirmed that the subatomic/cosmic stuff in ANT-MAN is meant to be a really tiny tease at how “The Other Side” can look/work for DOCTOR STRANGE, so that leads me to think this could be an early sighting of either Eternity or Infinity – in the Marvel Universe, esoteric cosmic concepts (see also: Death, whom Thanos is in literal love with) have semi-physical embodiments that you can meet and talk to if you have the ability, and Stephen Strange is one of the folks most often doing that talking. Here’s what they look like:

If there’s ONE reason to be excited about comic-book continuity being a “movie thing” now, outside of just “because it can be,” it’s that the medium is rife with great material that really only works when it has a Universe backing it up. Among the best examples of that: “Suicide Squad,” a long-lived DC cult-fave whose knockout premise (an Government program that offers conditional pardons to incarcerated supervillains if they agree to use their special powers/skills for off-the-books, high-risk covert dirty-work assignments) just wouldn’t be as much of a knockout if we didn’t “know” these people were the assembled nemeses of a whole planet full of Batmans, Supermans, Flashes, etc.

Tragic news. Saturo Iwata, the colorful CEO and “public face” of Nintendo since 2002, has died of an ongoing health issue at the age of 55.

Described as a “genius programmer” in his youth, Iwata begna his gaming career working at Nintendo-affiliate HAL Laboratories on classics like EARTHBOUND, the KIRBY series and BALLOON FIGHT. His elevation to CEO at Nintendo – the first man not descended from the company’s founding-family to ever hold the position – was widely seen as an overdue turn toward modernity for the fiercely-traditional company, and he became a familiar and beloved presence to gamers and the gaming press for his participation in the offbeat, humorous Nintendo Direct internet presentations.

The most important thing, obviously, is sympathy and condolence to Iwata-san’s friends and family, but there is no overlooking that this is an incalculable loss to the video-game world. It was an open secret that Iwata was the main business-side force pushing the last giant of the Golden Age into embracing the modern game-culture more enthusiastically – in 2013, when the company was facing a financial shortfall, he famously took a major pay-cut in lieu of firing any employees. Without him, the future direction of the company and indeed the industry feels suddenly more uncertain than it has in a long time.

Just because I’m anticipating being called a spoilsport or overly-negative because reasons, I feel like briefly mentioning that THIS feels like genuine gods-honest hope to me:

I still have no real “faith” in JJ Abrams. I think he’s an average technician (at best) with deeply limited vision and terrible creative instincts. But he clearly has passion for this, and so does everyone else involved so far – even Ford. Sometimes that can override a lot. OR I’m just a sucker for puppets and model-work and monster-costumes and I’ve missed BTS reels that are something other than mocap suits and greenscreens SO. MUCH…

This might work. This might actually work.

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2:28 –  Oh, snap! So that’s what happened to Batman’s parents! Whew. Man, I was worried they were never going to tell us!

As I’ve said before, at this point I (and anyone else on my “wavelength” about this stuff) needs to suck it up and accept that Warner Bros and DC have consciously decided that 90s COMICS: THE MOVIE (better-than-ever art/visuals, pointlessly dark/grim, thematically-unrecognizable characters) is the way they’re going with their Cinematic Universe. You’ve got to have some way to distinguish these things, and since Marvel/Disney current has the market cornered on no-bullshit fun n’ wonder superheroics, they’re going hard and heavy for the Frat Rat set: These are Muscle Milk-chuggin’ collar-poppin’ ballcap-reversin’ Ed Hardy-stylin’ Nickleback-blastin’ sick abs-flashin’ Axe Body-Spray smellin’ Bro Actioners that happen to feature DC Comics characters; deliberately – and they’re going to have to be judged as such.

At the very least, it looks pretty gorgeous on a strictly visual side. Warners’ “please write thinkpieces about this” pitch to the non-fanboy press (particularly regarding their wishy-washy approach to continuity) is that they’re making Real Cinema(tm) versus Marvel’s assembly-line pulp; and if that’s your story Snyder is the guy to tell it – at least in trailer form. He looks to be back in his own comfortable style here, rather than the Christopher Nolan emulation from MAN OF STEEL.

We get our basic plot from this, too, which looks to be about what you’d expect: Bruce Wayne is mad about all the 9/11-by-way-of-Akira-Toriyama destruction caused in MAN OF STEEL – “Batman V Superman: We Meant To Do That, Honest!” – so he pulls his Batman gear out of mothballs and picks a fight with Superman, likely with a little egging-on from Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who has Kryptonite and is up to something nefarious with the corpse of General Zod that I don’t think will be the huge surprise* they’re betting on it being. Also, Wonder Woman is there, looking… actually, nothing to even snark about there – she looks on-point. Snyder knows women-in-action, and complaints about Gadot not being able to sell the physicality appear fairly unfounded.

See also:

• I think Superman speaks approximately one line of dialogue in this trailer. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume we were introducing this character on the heels of a BATMAN movie, not the other way around.
• “You don’t owe this world a thing, you never did.” Well, good to know there’s some ideological consistency in the Kents’ shitty parenting. Maybe this is more deliberate “modernizing,” Clark Kent as a Gen-Xer defying his Me-Generation ‘boomer parents? Or just more bad writing.
• Apparently Gotham City and Metropolis are right next door to eachother. That’s dumb.
• “Retired” Robin-costume in a glass case, reminding us (like we needed it) that this is Frank Miller’s aging fascist asshole Batman from TDKR. So is it Jason, Tim or Dick? FWIW, rumors have pegged a Nightwing’d Dick Grayson showing up in one of these movies – possibly this one.
• #1 reason to not go the trendy “figgity-tech-dweeb-because-Apple-get-it???” route for your super-genius supervillain: Listen to Eisenberg utterly fail to sell “Black and Blue! God versus Man! Day and Night!” or “The Red Capes are coming! The Red Capes are coming!” and imagine it coming out of an actor with gravitas and conviction. Hell, not to go with the obvious, but think about Gene Hackman tearing into prose like that.
• Bruce Wayne – billionaire with a lifetime of combat experience able to afford any training equipment he could possibly need – preps for his Batman-ing by gettin’ swole-up workin’ the Big Tire. Totes epic. Pound it, ‘bro.
• All the scenes of Batman in motion look better than the character has ever looked in terms of a physical presence onscreen… and also like cutscenes from the Arkham games.

Kidding aside, though, this looks… alright. Probably enjoyable, though I imagine I’ll be rolling my eyes if the Sooooooo Seeeeeeeerious tone of this trailer is what plays out for the whole thing. Superheroes are inherently silly, particularly DC’s roster of mostly pre-WWII Depression Era wish-fulfillment avatars. The “awe” or “mythic” aspect of them shines through best when it exists in-tandem with how intrinsically goofy they are (think Captain America instructing the cops in AVENGERS, or any Alex Ross painting ever) – not when it’s trying to supplant (or apologize for) it.

In case you forgot they were making this, here’s the trailer for the GOOSEBUMPS movie – which for whatever reason seems to be not making any kind of big deal that Jack Black is supposed to be playing the “actual” R.L. Stine:

The basic premise here (all of the “iconic” Goosebumps monsters escape into the real world, knowledge of the books is the key to beating them) feels like it’s relying on a ready-made audience eager to cheer on the appearance of each famous creature – the climax of CABIN IN THE WOODS but for kids and stretched-out for a whole movie. Good pitch, but is the audience there? I could be totally off-base, but do the Goosebumps books actually have any kind of following among contemporary (read: born after the series big moment in the 90s) kids?

A few years back when I was working in a used book store, I remember we would constantly get huge collections of old Goosebumps stuff in. And while we’d sell out of it just as constantly (as in: People would see our huge wall of GB books and buy like 20-25 at a time) it was almost never to kids in the “target” audience – always older Gen Y teenagers impulse-buying for nostalgia.

So I can’t help but feel like doing “JUMANJI, but for Goosebumps” is sort-of a missed opportunity – if the main audience for this property is now college-age “O.G.” Goosebumps megafans, the idea of these creatures turning up and being actually “horror-movie scary” (preceded, obviously, by college-aged protagonists reminiscing “ironically” about reading Goosebumps as kids and how “they totally aren’t/wouldn’t be scary NOW!”) sounds like a more interesting feature – in fact, whoever owns the rights to ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK? Feel free to steal that.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and there’s enough “current” fandom for these things combined with the 90s nostalgia crowd to give GOOSEBUMPS legs. Sony certainly seems to think so, as they’ve positioned the film for a Halloween-ready October 16th U.S. release.

This is for real: Japanese robotics engineers Suidobashi built a fuctioning, weaponized, human-piloted mecha called The Kuratas. An American firm, Megabots, built one of their own – a two-pilot (because of course) beast with similar capabilities… and then challenged their Japanese counterparts to a fight. Between the robots:

…a challenge which Suidobashi has now accepted, because “Giant robots are Japanese culture” – though they appear to stipulate that they first want both robots to outfit for melee combat, as opposed to their current functions.

Alright, then. It’s not quite where this sort of thing was supposed to be by now… but I’ll take it.

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It’s one of the biggest blockbusters of all time and a cross-generational classic for action fans, yet on its initial release it was treated by many as a punchline about “dumbed-down” Hollywood moviemaking. 20 years later, is there something smarter and more profound hiding behind the big explosions and bombastic speeches of ID4? Really That Good aims to find out…

Yeah, I’ll say it – this could be the best film of the year, and whether or not I’ll be able to engage is going to be contingent on the degree I can ignore Fassbender’s bizarro-world accent (it doesn’t even sound like Fassbender’s usual voice) as Steef Chowbes STEVE JOBS.

I’m sorry, but it’s incredibly distracting and not just because everyone on the planet knows what Steve Jobs’ voice sounded like and this ain’t it. The performance looks fine, cinematography is gorgeous, you know Danny Boyle is going to turn in something enjoyable (even garbage like TRANCE is watchable when he’s in charge,) the supporting cast looks great and whatever else you can say about Aaron Sorkin as a screenwriter he’s almost perversely well-suited to this material.

But that voice… GAH! Halfway through I started compulsively imagining this as a full-on parody, totally expecting Christoph Waltz to show up as Bill Gates and challenging his rival to a “bat-TEL ooph OH-furly man-hert Eee-yor-pean ACK-Sehn-TET Eeng-KLISH dihle-hock!”

Still rooting for this one, of course. Even if it falls more on the “brilliant but necessary asshole” side of things, we’re well overdue for a real-deal, deep-dive dressing-down of the Apple Cult and “slick” tech-scenes in general. Great performances have shown through obviously “wrong” casting elements before (Anthony Hopkins didn’t look or sound a thing like NIXON) but sheesh… this is gonna take some lifting, is all I’m saying.