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Oh my: J.J. Abrams’ ‘Superman’ script

Posted in Action Movies, Jeff Holland, reviews, Threat Quality with tags , , , , , on February 20, 2013 by braak

I may not agree with the internet’s current collective conclusion that Man of Steel will be terrible for some reason (apparently “At one point Clark Kent has a beard” is just too “out-there”?). But I can see why people would be at least very guarded in their enthusiasm.

Because let’s face it, this is still Warner Bros., the company that heard Brian Singer pitch a sequel to a 30-year-old movie where Superman doesn’t really do anything other than lift heavy things, Superman Flyby1bail on Lex Luthor’s court date letting him to go free, and stalk the ex-girlfriend he left pregnant five years ago. They heard that pitch and said, “Of COURSE that is the movie we should be making.”

And then there’s the news that the announced Justice League movie is going back to the drawing board, for the silly little reason that no director will sign onto it because the script is some kind of abomination.

(I don’t even know how that could be – I mean, we TOLD them how to make a perfectly good Justice League movie. It’s like they didn’t even listen!)

Also not helping: the possible Kickstarter-funded documentary reminding everyone of every ridiculous, wrong-headed idea for Tim Burton’s Superman Lives project that flamed out just before America could get a load of Nicolas Cage in a rubber electro-suit and laugh along with Braniac’s sassy gay robot sidekick.

So look, I get it. The odds of a Really Good Superman movie are, at this point, not terribly great. But even if it’s not a great movie – if it does not even surpass Superman Returns somehow – it is still not the biggest misfire we could get.

For that, we can look to J.J. Abrams’ script for Superman: Flyby.   Read more »

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On Fictional Character Names, Or “God I wish I’d thought of ‘Hannibal Chow’”

Posted in Action Movies, Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags , , , , on December 14, 2012 by braak

So, we’ve got some new speculative science fictional motion pictures coming out, involving Giant Things Crashing Into Or On Top Of Each Other, and they all released trailersImage this week.

That is goddamn insane, to ask me to have opinions about Superman AND The Lone Ranger in the span of a day. Be more considerate, Hollywood.

But what amused me the most about After Earth (which is bafflingly named, since the Will Smith informs his son that the harsh alien landscape they have crashed into is, in fact, Earth, so don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining, movie!) and Pacific Rim (probably the most relaxing name a film about giant robots fighting monsters can have) were the character names.

Will Smith’s character, you see, is named Cypher Raige.

A screenwriter who was possibly not M. Night Shyamalan sat down, wrote something like, “Ext. – Earth Not Earth?, Night: CYPHER RAIGE looks on at his clone son, forlornedly…” and saw NOTHING THAT MIGHT NEED EDITING.

So yes, I’ve just been laughing at that name in my head all week.

Then came Pacific Rim, and…well, here:  Read more »

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Things I Have Learned from Skyfall

Posted in Action Movies, Braak, reviews with tags , , , on December 3, 2012 by braak

James Bond is a character who can teach us many lessons about how to survive this cold, cruel, confusing world, and so I like to try and extract what lessons are available for my edification.  The following are a few notes that I picked up from Skyfall:

1. Bitches can’t shoot straight.

2.  Get those black ladies out of the field and behind a desk, pronto.

3. If MI-6 is fucking up, it’s probably because you just need to put a dude in charge.

4.  Preferably one who cut his teeth shooting Irishmen.

5.  If you go to a casino in Macau, and there is a giant komodo dragon slithering around in a pit, then someone is going to get eaten by that komodo dragon.  (This rule is called “Chekhov’s Komodo Dragon”.)

6.  If you see a naked lady in a shower, the best practice is to take off all your clothes and just get right in the shower with her, even if you have only talked to her for two minutes an hour ago and she doesn’t know you’re there and her boat is full of armed guards.  (This only works if you are James Bond, I guess.)

7.  James Bond is hell of ready to let suckers die before he kicks everyone’s ass.  This is called “professional courtesy,” you should learn it.

8.  Dame Judi Dench made grenades out of shotgun shells, glass, and nails, which she used to murder some mercenaries.  That means that Dame Judi Dench is ten thousand percent more rad than you or your mom.

9.  Albert Finney is impossible not to like.

10.  Times are tough for white people these days, what with all the computers and minorities, but as long as we’ve got our invincible murder-machine ready to cap suckers and maybe take a couple names if he remembers to (he probably won’t remember), we will be all right.

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Armchair Screenwriting: That ‘Justice League’ Movie

Posted in Action Movies, comic books, Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags , , , on October 26, 2012 by braak

So apparently now that Warner Bros. doesn’t need to worry about how much of Superman it actually owns, they’re gonna go ahead and just make a Justice League movie next year, to be released against Avengers in summer 2015 – though that’s a hell of a turnaround time, considering they don’t have a cast or director in place.

It’s also comically, stubbornly refusing the Avengers individual-films-then-an-all-star-jamboree model of franchising. Instead Warner Bros. is banking on the idea that it can introduce a bunch of characters in Justice League, then spin them off into their own franchises.

And look, this does sound incredibly hubristic, but if you’d have asked me five years ago if Avengers would have been successful…well, I’d have still been too thrown by the notion that people went to see a Thor movie to even field the question posed to me. So it’s not impossible, just…a daunting task, I suppose is the most diplomatic way to put it.

But unless they think they’re going to revive the Green Lantern franchise, this is not likely to pay off as expansively as Warner Bros. probably hopes.

I mean, look at it this way, the line-up is most likely going to be:  Read more »

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Chris Versus The Movies: Is Battleship the Worst? (Yes.)

Posted in Action Movies, Braak, crotchety ranting, reviews with tags , , , on May 24, 2012 by braak

Man, you guys.  I wasn’t even going to write about this, until Charlie Jane Anders posted up this article from The Wrap, which is about how The Hunger Games and The Avengers are doing so well that there’s no money left for Battleship, and it contains a quote from Universal’s domestic distribution chief Nikki Rocco in which she says:

In my heart of hearts I feel ‘Battleship’ would have fared much better if in its third week ‘Avengers’ wasn’t doing $55 million.

This is basically the same thing as saying, “I believe that if pizza weren’t so successful as a food product, more people would be lining up to buy my turd sandwich,” in that yes, duh.  Of course people would rather see The Avengers nine times than see Battleship.  I would rather watch The Avengers nine times, and I hate watching anything twice.  I would rather watch no other movies for the rest of my life, and watch The Avengers every single day until the Four Horseman annihilate the world at the front of a wave of radioactive space sludge than watch Battleship.

Because Battleship is a turd sandwich.

Read more »

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Avengers Ramp-up! ‘Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD’ is Also Hilariously Awful

Posted in Action Movies, comic books, Jeff Holland, reviews, Threat Quality with tags , , , , on May 2, 2012 by braak

To get psyched (well, more psyched) for this weekend’s Avengers, I’ve been spending a little time catching up with the previous films. Y’know, Iron Man 2, Incredible Hulk, Nick Fury…

Oh, have you not watched Nick Fury? Because son, you are in for a treat.

Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD is what happens when a not-all-that-bad-actually script by David Goyer meets the two things that can utterly destroy it: Soap opera actors and a mid-90’s TV-movie budget of I’m assuming about five hundred bucks.

I imagine Goyer’s initial enthusiasm upon hearing his script had gotten picked up (“Oh man, first Blade and now Nick Fury? Things are finally looking up for ol’ Lucky Dave! What’s next, BATMAN?!”) was crushed pretty completely fairly early on, but I’m not sure which piece of information would’ve really done it:

“Well Dave, it’s gonna be on Fox. And even though this format hasn’t worked for Doctor Who or Generation X, they seem to want to keep on trying.”

Or

“And we’ve got David Hasselhoff attached. He’s got some interesting ideas on how to play Fury. Something about ‘crazy, sweaty, a bit drunk, and walking around in this weird bowlegged crouch like he’s got a load in his pants.’”  Read more »

3 Comments »

John Carter, Sad Hero of Mars

Posted in Action Movies, Braak, crotchety ranting, reviews with tags , , , , , on March 23, 2012 by braak

Well, word is that John Carter (of Mars) isn’t going to do so well – certainly not enough to make back its budget, or merit any sequels. This is kind of a shame, because I think it was pretty much a lot of fun, but at least now I can talk about what I think was a kind of a glaring problem with the story that I’d have felt guilty talking about before.
Read more »

14 Comments »

We Have Seen ‘Ghost Rider 2′ and Now You Must Feel Our Hate

Posted in Action Movies, comic books, Jeff Holland, reviews, Threat Quality with tags , , , on February 21, 2012 by braak

Haaaboy. Ghost Rider 2. OK, let’s just get into this, with a series of thoughts on it, since I don’t feel it’s worth a whole review-type post.

To say Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is better than its predecessor (which the movie only barely concedes actually happened – it even rejiggers the scene where Johnny Blaze sells his soul so that it looks…well, so it looks more like if Neveldine/Taylor had done the first film featuring a guy who is not Peter Fonda Satan) isn’t just damning with faint praise. It’s implying that the film doesn’t have a whole host of its own problems, so I guess if GR1 got a 1 out of 5, then GR2 gets a 1.5 out of 5.

That’s because the couple things it does right ARE massive improvements over the first film, but even that’s debatable (in that Braak and I debated over whether or not they were actually better).

Non-arguable point 1: Setting the film on the desolate, barren roads of Somewhere In Eastern Europe is much closer to the spirit of the character than having him drive through Dallas or Houston or wherever the first one was set, and having Ghost Rider deal with city cops, which is just kinda stupid.  Read more »

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Ghost Rider’s Satan: Best Dad Ever?

Posted in Action Movies, comic books, Jeff Holland, Threat Quality with tags , , , on February 20, 2012 by braak

In preparation for tonight’s surely 100% positive viewing of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, I decided to sit myself down and watch 2007’s Ghost Rider, just to make sure there weren’t any nuances of the narrative that I’d failed to notice last time.

I ALSO decided to skip past the prologue, wherein a young man learns his agent thinks he looks like a young Nicolas Cage enjoys a carefree life in the carnival, and also fast-forward past any moments that aren’t necessary to the plot – which meant pretty much every scene involving Eva Mendez and Donal Logue.

This meant I watched a 45-minute cut of Ghost Rider the other night. And…it still wasn’t all that good.  Read more »

1 Comment »

Ghost Protocol: The Best Mission Impossible Since That Last One You Forgot About

Posted in Action Movies, Jeff Holland, reviews, Threat Quality with tags , , , on January 9, 2012 by braak

Remember how after The Incredibles came out, the people making Fantastic Four had to scramble to rewrite their third act because Brad Bird had basically trumped everything they’d been doing?*

Well, it turns out by making Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, he’s basically screwed the next James Bond movie. Sorry, Skyfall, you’re gonna have to make Daniel Craig jump off of some pretty tall and unusual things now to compete.

It’s weird to praise this as the “best” Mission Impossible movie because that implies a level of quality control that’s not really existent in the franchise. Because there’s nothing about it that actually MAKES a franchise, despite the recognizable title and consistent lead actor.

Franchise isn’t the right word, then. Brand name. Anyway, even the presence of Tom Cruise isn’t required for it to be a Mission Impossible movie. If fortunes had turned a different way, Ving Rhames might be the headliner on this thing.  Read more »

8 Comments »

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