Category: Uncategorized

PAX schedule stuff PLUS "big" announcement

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Okay folks, things have been and will be “sparse-ish” in the daytime ’round here for the weekend, as I’ll be at PAX East for most of it. I’ll probably turn up at the con itself around 4pm or so tommorow (got some business first) and be around for most of the evening after that… Saturday and Sunday? We’ll see what happens, but I’m planning to be at as much as possible.

So… since I can’t really blog from the con; I’ve gone and done the unthinkable… and signed up for Twitter. Yes, I’ll be tweeting from PAX – follow me @the_moviebob. Let me know in the comments if that hyperlink works or not – Twitter’s urls are weird, and I don’t know if it “takes” like that. If it doesn’t, just look up “the_moviebob” on Twitter itself – the other ones just called “moviebob” AREN’T me.

Minimum Underdrive

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The second trailer for “Cars 2″… looks like sub-Dreamworks pablum. As that also handily sums up the first one, I’m not sure why the fact that it’s so crummy-looking is being treated as a news-item everywhere else in the blogosphere…



I mean, didn’t we all kind of “accept and deal” with this already? “Cars” is the very bottom of the Pixar barrel artistically, but as a merchandising-franchise it’s their biggest cash-cow. I could be wrong, but wasn’t it a “big deal” awhile back that the Cars-brand had displaced Hotwheels as “the” toy-car line? So… “everything else” is the ‘real’ Pixar stuff, and “Cars” is the crap they have to make to PAY for the ‘real’ stuff. I thought we’d been through this already…

Thing is, I kinda feel like there’s TWO angles at play here, but only one of them is “open” about itself. On the one hand, dedicated film-geek Pixar afficionados tend to dislike “Cars” because it’s such a step down from the rest of the lineup – that’s the “open” one.

On the other hand… “Cars” is ALSO the most “different” Pixar movie in terms of it’s vibe and frame of reference: The other movies are about monsters, action-figures, superheroes, lost-worlds, robots… stuff film-geeks (generally) love. “Cars,” on the other hand, is “about” rural small-town values, Middle-American normalcy and NASCAR culture; all things that “geek culture” to a large-degree actively abhors. Other Pixar movies drop references to Harryhausen and Kurosawa, “Cars” has Larry the Cable Guy as it’s co-lead. We (geeks) tend to see Pixar as an “US” outfit, but “Cars” is a “THEM” movie – and that kinda pisses us off, right?

Am I nuts, or is that just a teensy bit of the story here? Not so much, “this is why people think ‘Cars’ sucked – because it DOES suck – but maybe “this is why people CARE that “Cars” sucks.”

Are "The Inhumans" the next high-concept superhero movie?

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Badass sez yes, though the source their quoting I can’t make heads nor tails of…

Originally part of the extended “Fantastic Four” family, “The Inhumans” were sort of a dry run at the big-idea cosmic stuff that’d later be such a big part of the Marvel cosmology. They’re a whole hidden race of superhumans of various powers and abilities, the result of alien experiments on early humans creating a seperate, super-evolved strain. In a lot of ways they also seem like any early stab at the X-Men – their King is a guy named Black Bolt who never speaks, because his voice is so loud that even a whisper can level a city. My favorite Inhuman is “Lockjaw,” a bulldog the size of a small car that can teleport. Really.

This sounds really fishy to me – The Inhumans have never been especially popular, and the pitch is really, really out-there (Badass has an anonymous quote implying that they’d be retooled into something a bit more traditionally-superheroic, which would be a bummer) but you never know. FWIW, their origin is tied to aliens called Kree, who’re the nemesis of suspected “Avengers”-heavies The Skrulls.

"Water For Elephants" – Take 2

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People who read the book… help me out here:

…is there ANYTHING going on in this that makes it anything other than “Titanic”-but-at-a-Circus? And, if not, am I correct in assuming that that business at the end of this trailer is “The Iceberg?”

The Red Skull looks like The Red Skull

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Entertainment Weekly has the first full-body view of Hugo Weaving as The Red Skull. As is becoming redundant in the Marvel Studios films, he looks like he just walked off the page… save for the understandable decision to put “HYDRA” insignias where you’d traditionally expect a Swastika or SS logo to go. HYDRA is still a Nazi-affiliate in the movie, of course, but this gets around the thorny problem of selling action figures and Halloween costumes with specific Nazi symbols on them – plus, isn’t it illegal to even PUT a Swastika on something in a lot of Europe at this point?

ALSO: Latino Review sez they know who the villain(s) are in “The Avengers” – actual discussion of THAT after the jump, as it may be considered a SPOILER:

So… Latino Review claims to have confirmed the worst-kept secret in the Marvel Movieverse: The Avengers are up against The Skrulls… and that they’re there as hired guns for “Thor” heavy Loki. Amusingly, if true this makes the plot the most literal “mashing-up” of the traditional “Avengers” origin -where they initially teamed against Loki – and “The Ultimates” where they fought a (boring as hell) reimagining of The Skrulls.

Skrulls – like a lot of the early Marvel concepts – are basically “comic-ized” versions of 50s pulp-scifi tropes; they’re literally an alien race of bug-eyed Little Green Men shape-shifters. They’ll almost-assuredly get some form of makeover for the movie, but I’m hoping they fall a little more on the “Star Trek” side than the “ID4” side – it’d be a trip to have The Avengers swatting around a bunch of pointy-earned green guys in purple onesies; especially if you’ve still got Loki around to be the more serious “big bad.” (I wonder if they’ll opt to use “Ha! I’ve actually been a SKRULL all along!” to write any supporting characters out of the various franchises…)

ALSO: Devin says he knows the basic outline of “Dark Knight Rises.” If he’s right, it mostly gives a big “yes” to most fans’ Occam’s Razor speculations (i.e. what the most likely plot possible was) and doesn’t seem to give away any major twists – at least nothing you couldn’t have guessed at. Still, click with caution.