Tag: comics
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Robert Downey Jr.’s got a bum ticker in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man
Jon Favreau’s Iron Man finds just the right tone for a superhero movie, pitched somewhere in the sweet spot between Spider-Man’s emotional melodrama and Batman’s grim vengeance. This blogger, a former lover of comic books (that stopped keeping up with them partly out of frugality, and partly lack of brain bandwidth), sees two high water…
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A god walks among us in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns
It’s probably my own fault for buying into the hype, but Superman Returns left me cold. There’s not a lot of drama implicit in the story of an omnipotent alien from another planet, and I just can’t buy the “god walks among us” metaphors. Spider-Man is a real, troubled human being burdened with great responsibility;…
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Brett Ratner’s X-Men III: The Last Stand is lost in a densely self-referential world
God help me, but I agree with Harry Knowles’ review. Sometimes you need a fanboy to point out what’s wrong with a movie crafted for fanboys. He picked up on the absurdly sensitive Wolverine, the important Phoenix backstory cursorily related in hammy exposition, and the sudden and arbitrary shifts from day to night. But the…
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Fascism by Common Consent in James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta
For all the negative buzz regarding V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore’s total disavowal of James McTeigue’s adaptation, I was surprised to find that the film kept far closer to the book than I expected. Closer, in fact, than the two other travesties of Moore’s comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Perhaps not…
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Fantastic Four
Did they learn nothing from Spider-Man 2, clearly the pinnacle of the superhero genre (and I will fight a Marvel Team-Up with anybody that dares disagree with me)? Fantastic Four is an aggressively stupid series of one missed opportunity after another. It just narrowly escapes one star by making me laugh a handful of times.…