These Are Your GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

There've been snaps from the SDCC trailer around for months, but this is the first official heroes-lineup still from James Gunn's GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY - the last new Marvel Studios movie before AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON and the first test of whether the Marvel brand can extend it's thus-far bulletproof box office credibility outside of the superhero genre; in this case, to a space-set scifi/action-comedy:

From left to right: Zoe Saldana as GAMORA, Chris Pratt as STARLORD, Bradley Cooper (voice) as ROCKET RACCOON, David Bautista as DRAX THE DESTROYER and Vin Diesel as GROOT.

In the SDCC footage, this scene (they're in a police lineup) served for irreverent tone-setting: following a big dump of action/FX footage, there's a hard-cut to this lineup, overseen by a pair of NOVA CORPS officers (including John C. Reilly!) who opine: "They call themselves 'The Guardians of The Galaxy..." [beat] "...what a bunch of A-Holes."

Big Picture: WORST MOVIES OF 2013

The Escapist : The Big Picture : MovieBob's Worst of 2013

THE RAID 2 Indonesian Trailer

In case you missed it: I'll be at MAGFest starting Thursday afternoon. Come say hi :)

Anyway, here's the first full trailer for THE RAID 2: BERENDAL, which supposedly takes place (or, at least, starts taking place) 2 hours after the end of the original. First thing I can say in it's favor: I'm glad they didn't try to contrive a way for this to all take place inside another fortified building. Instead, hero cop Rama (Iko Uwais) will be doing the Yojimbo/Dollars/Last Man Standing thing versus rival local and Yakuza-affiliated gangs in Jakarta. Director Gareth Evans also returns. Honestly, I don't need any reason to see this beyond that baseball-bat beatdown at 1:58...

Come See MOVIEBOB at MAGFEST 2014!

Hey guys! Just a quick FYI: I will be at MAGFest from Jan 2nd to Jan 5th this year, and should you see me on the floor your invited to come up and say hello (unless, y'know, you can tell I'm in the middle of something like or phonecall or whatever.)

Officially, I'm scheduled (you can see the whole MAGFest Schedule Map HERE) to appear at four panels on what they call the "MAGES" circuit:

"THE POLITICS OF GAMING" (Friday 1pm-2pm)

"ARE AAA STUDIOS STILL CREATIVELY RELEVANT" (Saturday 11:30am-12:30pm)

"PROMOTING GOOD GAMING COMMUNITY" (Saturday 5:30pm-6:30pm)

"GAMES AS A NARRATIVE MEDIUM" (8:30pm-9:30pm)

I'm also planning to bring copies of SMB3: BRICK BY BRICK with me to sell (probably cash only, but we'll see how my Square Reader is working) and sign on request, for anyone whose interested.

Look forward to seeing folks there!

ASM2 Blog Starts Teasing Venom. I Know, You're Shocked.

I called yesterday's rumor/speculation that, if Green Lantern turned up in JUSTICE LEAGUE he'd be the John Stewart version "one of the easiest" things to predict in genre film right now. THE easiest thing to predict? That Venom will turn up in the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN movies. Because it's always the mid-90s somewhere, and because Venom has always moved a shit-ton of merchandise for Marvel - so long as you don't include "comic books" as part of the merchandise.

Anyway, Sony has a Daily Bugle Tumblr running as cheezy viral marketing for the movie (attributed to Fredrick Foswell - heh) that basically blogs references to Spider-Man characters as fake news articles. he most recent update is a bit about Herman Schultz - aka The Shocker, but what jumped out at me was the name "NYPD Special Crimes Unit Detective Stan Carter."

Ah. Okay, then.

I'll err on the side of not totally spoiling what may or may not be a plot detail in the movies (go HERE and read the entry if you don't care), but Stan Carter figures prominently in a mid-80s storyline revolving around a serial shotgun-murderer called "Sin-Eater" (for awhile it was trendy for every "city" superhero to get at least one "what if he fought a real-life style killer?" story) that also involved Daredevil and the death of long-recurring character Captain Jeanne DeWolfe.

The main thrust of the Sin-Eater arc was that his identity was especially hard to suss out, with only Daredevil's recognition of his heartbeat to go on. The long-term ramifications come in when Daily Bugle reporter Eddie Brock lands what he believes is an exclusive interview with a guy who confesses to being Sin-Eater... and, suffice it to say, he's not the guy. Brock didn't so much lie as jump the gun, but he's disgraced and unemployable as a result; which is why/how he winds up contemplating suicide in a church that happens to contain the The Symbiote Suit and... you know the rest.

Here Comes MAN OF STEEL 2's Innevitable Stupid Racial Controversy

I was chatting with a good friend about the MAN OF STEEL sequel recently, and the one thing we could both agree on is that it feels very, very likely that Warner Bros. etc has no real binding plan for this thing (or that, at least, they don't have one anymore) and that the film is probably going to be one of those projects that goes into production without a final script. That's not necessarily a bad thing - IRON MAN was being shot while they were still figuring out the third act and who the villain was.

Maybe we're wrong. Maybe it's a complete misreading of the production stories. But right now, the image emerging is that something that went into pre-production (prior to the release of MAN OF STEEL, back when WB was sure that Nolan/Snyder/Goyer had delivered an AVENGERS-level game-changer or a TRANSFORMERS-level moneymaker) as a Superman sequel with maybe some "world-building" cameos from Batman etc morphed into a "Batman vs. Superman" movie, then a "Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman movie - possibly also featuring The Flash...

It's like we've blown right past the point where we could've been making "MAN OF STEEL PART II: SORRY ABOUT MAN OF STEEL PART I" jokes and the Cosmic Treadmill is rapidly taking us in the direction of "MAN OF STEEL 2: OKAY, WE FUCKED UP, WE'RE SORRY, HERE'S JUSTICE LEAGUE, PLEASE STOP YELLING AT US."

This weekend's gossip started out in the ever-fertile realm of race-swapping casting rumors, namely that DC was talking to prominent black A-list stars - Hollywood-to-English translation: "Denzel Washington" - for an important role in the film. The initial guesses were that they wanted him for Lex Luthor, but I don't see that happening. Not that he'd be bad casting, more that it's A.) just inviting more DAREDEVIL jokes in the press and B.) I can't imagine even Warner Bros. being dense enough to drop a "group of white superhumans beating up the ONE black guy in the movie, who is evil" tableau into a situation where the lack of diversity in the genre is already so widely criticized. But I did find it plausible, at least in one scenario, that Warners could be talking to "Denzel or Denzel-types" for the movie...

Now, gossip site "Nuke The Fridge" says maybe that scenario is correct. Their guess (and mine?) That if Warners is talking to "name" black stars for this project, it's for John Stewart - aka The Green Lantern.

Okay, quick bit of catch-up: In the comics there've been four "modern" (read: post-Silver Age) Green Lanterns: Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner most prominently. But during the character's stint as part of DC's GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW double-act, Hal also had a "backup" in the form of John Stewart; an ex-Marine from Detroit who started out as an extension of GL/GA's recurring "Hal needs to get over his weird race issues" theme but proved popular enough that he started spending good chunks of time as "the" Green Lantern whenever Hal would be unavailable for this or that reason.

Honestly? That John Stewart would wind up being "the one" if Green Lantern ever turned up in a Justice League movie has been one of the easiest calls to make all along for two simple reasons: 1. a non-white face is the most visible way possible to immediately tell the entire world "This is NOT in any way the same as that terrible Ryan Reynolds movie you all hated;" and 2. while WB/DC has the advantage of the Justice League being a much more widely known entity in popular culture than The Avengers were prior to their movie, the "catch" is that very (VERY!) few audiences under 40 are primarily familiar with them from comics. If they know them, they know them from the DC Animated Universe JL/JLU cartoons. I don't think that's an exaggeration in the slightest: I'd bet that, if polled, there's a sizable part of the target-generation for this movie for whom Stewart - NOT Hal Jordan - is "the" Green Lantern.

If this turns out to be true (I'd say Denzel being considered is a 50/50 but Stewart being in the movie and/or JL is more like a 70/30), it would make him the biggest "name" on the team by far, with Affleck a close second as Batman. Maybe this is part of WB's overally strategy for this series: "We have the bigger-name heroes AND the bigger stars?"

UPDATE: Yes, I agree it's also possible that he could be reading for J'onn J'onzz, The Martian Manhunter. The reason I'd call that a remote possibility is that I seriously doubt even half of the people making decisions on this movie know that "Martian Manhunter" is a thing that exists.

Escape to The Movies: "THE WOLF OF WALL STREET"

The best movie of 2013.

...and also WALTER MITTY, which is not.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : The Wolf of Wall Street

Big Picture: BEST OF 2013

Here's a few minutes of distraction from The Holidays. Enjoy!

The Escapist : The Big Picture : MovieBob's Best of 2013

"TRANSCENDENCE" Gritty-Reboots "THE LAWNMOWER MAN."

This feels like the fastest we've gone from a teaser to a full trailer - literally a matter of days. I wonder if that has anything to do with the teaser essentially being a slow-reveal of Johnny Depp's face, and "Oh, it's Johnny Depp!" having gone from a boxoffice-benefit to a punchline over the last couple of years...




Anyway, this looks pretty damn good. Depp is a TED-Talky computer whiz with a mad on for The Singularity who gets assassinated by some kind of anti-technology terrorist group (the guy has "UNPLUG" tattooed on his writst), leading his colleagues to preserve his work by uploading his brain patterns into digital space which - spoiler alert for people who've never seen or read ONE other brain-uploaded-to-technology story - leads to him manifesting as a vaugely malevolent cyber-god.

Should be interesting, though I'm getting the sense I'll have to just accept that this is one of those stories where the back-asswards luddite guys wind up having been right all along or at least "had a point." Just once, I want to see one of these "tampering in God's domain!" movies where the visionary dudes trying to drag the damn species across the next goal-line of evolution are the heroes. For cinephiles, the main attraction is likely finding out if cinematographer Wally Pfister - making his directorial debut - is going to be the real deal. He's talked a lot of shit, and "Cinematographer of Great Movies Becomes Director of Middling-to-Bad Movies" is VERY common career story in this industry.

Does AGE OF ULTRON Have a Second Villain? (It Probably Does)

Latino Review has the best track-record of the independent movie gossip-hunting sites, even if they're by no means "always" on-target. But their big post-holiday (possible) "get" makes all kinds of sense. It doesn't sound like something that'd be a "spoiler" for the movie itself, but it does sound like it could be a spoiler for one of the other (by then previous) movies, so I'm putting it after the jump.

POSSIBLE SPOILER SPACE

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According to LR's sources (which a few other industry journos appear to be backing up) the secondary villain is BARON WOLFGANG VON STRUCKER, a perennial Captain America enemy and (traditionally) one of the surprisingly large number of immortal Nazis running around the Marvel Universe. In the comics he's technically the founder of HYDRA, but in practical terms he's become the guy you get when The Red Skull and Baron Zemo have been used too recently (or are dead.) 

According to Drew McWeeny at HitFix, the plan is for The Baron to be more of a guest-villain than a co-nemesis: He'll the threat The Avengers are dealing with as the film opens, and will primarily serve as a means by which the team encounters Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen). Even before McWeeny had jumped in, that's where my mind immediately went: The important things (character-wise) about Pietro and Wanda, in the books, are that they're siblings, they start out as villains and their father is a supervillain.

This is where it gets wonky: In the comcis, dad is Magneto and the twins are mutants (make no mistake, though - otherwise the pair are tied almost exclusively to The Avengers, they're not considered "X-Men characters"), which of course isn't going to work out because of movie studio business stuff i.e. only Fox can make X-Men movies. Strucker, meanwhile, traditionally has as lieutenants twin offspring of his own, Andrea and Andreas. McWeeny's story only says that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch will be "working for" The Baron, but it's easy to imagine Whedon etc. wanting to preserve that crucial "kids of a villain" element by making them Strucker's children in this incarnation... though it's equally easy to imagine Marvel waiting until the last possible moment to decide that, shooting dialogue "both ways" or having them be adopted on the off chance that Fox wants to start playing ball on crossovers (remember: it was supposedly only a matter of logistics and time that kept "AMAZING SPIDER-MAN's" Oscorp Tower out of "AVENGERS'" New York skyline.)

All well and good, but we're still a ways out from the actual shooting of this movie, which makes this kind of early for Marvel to be casting around (and psuedo-secretly, no less) for what might be a cameo at best. Which leads me to wonder if we won't actually be seeing Strucker a lot sooner - like say just a few months from now. At least part of the plot of "CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER" looks to be that S.H.I.E.L.D is being influenced/overtaken by nefarious forces, and "AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D" has been teasing "The Agency is going bad" as a substory for awhile. That's typically the sort of thing The Baron can be found behind, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if whoever they end up casting (supposedly Marton Csoksas and Dougray Scott are on the shortlist) ends up shooting a quick cameo (or post-credits stinger) so as to be revealed as the real power behind the throne in "WINTER SOLDIER." 

Escape to The Movies: ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

Not as good as the first time, still good, might as well go see it.

Also some WOLF OF WALL STREET (not a review) because why not?

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Anchorman 2

Now You Don't Need To See EXPENDABLES 3

The "EXPENDABLES" movies are, objectively, awful - even by the incredibly low standards of the "Hey, remember when action movies sucked but sucked in a different way than they do now?" genre. The sole (and evidently sufficient) reason they have for existing are the handful of shots where a bunch of actors you remember from the 80s are standing together in the same shot and you can get 1/400th of the charge you might have gotten if someone had actually made "RAMBO VS. TERMINATOR" in the early-90s.

Outside of that, there's no reason to watch either of them. And now here's the trailer for Part The Third, which helpfully eliminates any further need to do so by simply having everybody stand a line and acknowledge that yes, they're in this. The "new" blood includes Antonio Banderas, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes and Ronda Rousey as We Couldn't Get Gina Carano:

"The Only Chance For Salvation..."

At approximately 1:12, this red-band trailer for "BATTLE OF THE DAMNED" - initially framed as "Dolph Lundgren Versus The 28 Days Later Monsters," which would be entertaining enough as it its - becomes the Greatest Trailer EVER:

BRIAN FANTANA IS (PROBABLY) AN AVENGER!!!

So, uh... Yeah. Variety says Paul Rudd is Marvel's "ANT-MAN." He has the power to change his size, talk to ants and be considered an integral part of "Avengers" history mainly because he was there that day. No confirmation of whether Rudd will be playing either the Hank Pym or Scott Lang version of the character.

The Big Picture: "COPYWRONG"

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Copywrong

Wrong Note

Here's a trailer for "GRAND PIANO," in which Elijah Wood is a concert pianist who is informed mid-performance that a mysterious sniper is planning to shoot him if he misses a note. Really.

Where Did "WELCOME TO YESTERDAY" Come From?

Whoa. When was the last time the first 20 seconds of a trailer (for an original movie) immediately made you decide the movie had to be seen? Here's "WELCOME TO YESTERDAY," a Michael Bay produced scifi movie (which clearly owes more than a little to "CHRONICLE") which opens thusly: A teenager is watching a home movie of his seventh birthday and catches a glimpse of himself - as in his present-day teenage self - standing in the background.

Here's That Shia LaBeouf Movie Critic Short (UPDATED!)

UPDATE III: Un. Real. LaBeouf has taken to his official Twitter to apologize for not giving proper credit for having been "inspired" by Clowes' comic. One small problem with that: The film is effectively a shot-for-shot, word-for-word, panels-as-storyboards adaptation without credit. That's not inspiration, or even homage - it's straight-up plagiarism. LaBeouf is being more or less pilloried for this as we speak - which, since he's been wealthy and famous since his mid-teens will have no real career impact, but for now it's kind of amusing. I wonder if he actually does that "NoNONoNoNononononononoNoNONONOnoNo!" thing in real life?

UPDATE II: The video has been password-locked, in the wake of nobody being able to figure out if LaBeouf asked permission to film Clowes' comic (the author claims he doesn't know what's going on) and no one being able to answer if this is A.) a not-terribly-talented actor doing something idiotic or B.) a not terribly talented actor trying and failing at some kind of elaborate James Franco-style "life as comedy sketch" bit.

UPDATE I: The piece weirdly makes no mention of this, but it appears to be based on this Daniel Clowes comic:


I'll give the kid this: Making your "directoring debut" a short about how miserable, deluded and meaningless movie critics - online critics especially - are when you're best (exclusively?) known for "TRANSFORMERS" and "KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL" displays some serious "I don't care how I'm percieved" swagger. I mean... sure, that sort of thing is generally better reserved for when you've actually done something, but points for brass all the same.



Some of this is actually painfully well-observed in an "Okay, who blabbed?" sort of way - "roundtable" junket interviews really are singularly miserable, bizarre little pageants of feigned mutual non-resentment - which is why it's sort of dissapointing that it doesn't build to anything more interesting than "critics nitpick their betters because they're sad about their lives sucking."

INTERSTELLAR Trailer Teases Return of the Good Version of Christopher Nolan

It's been easy to forget - after the (legitimate) down-marks handed him by "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES" and "MAN OF STEEL" plus the (murkier) transformation of his name into a synonym for inappropriately-grim movie adaptations of... anything, really - why everybody got so excited about Christopher Nolan in the first place. Once upon a time, the "big deal" about "BATMAN BEGINS" was that a legitimately great, exciting new(ish) filmmaker was going to make a Batman movie.

This teaser for "INTERSTELLAR," though, serves as a big reminder of the other reason to be glad the Nolan Bros. are mostly getting out of the superhero business:



Show of hands on who would've thought, even five years ago, that Matthew McConaughey would "work" as a voice of sombre inspiration? I'm in love with this teaser, and not only because I'm SO onboard with the the idea that our semi-abandonment of space-exploration as a virtuous goal worth striving for being a goddamn disgrace - which seems to be the implicit them at play here, or at least one of them (it was also one of the dozen or so interesting thematic points raised but for no ultimately purpose in "MAN OF STEEL," so maybe this is a "thing" for these cats.)

Of note: The screenplay for this, by Johnathan Nolan, was originally developed with input/collaboration from Steven Spielberg for him (Spielberg) to direct. He bowed out, Christopher Nolan stepped in. So this is potentially sort of a reverse-"A.I." in as much as we've got a brilliant, anti-emotional, aesthetically-clinical grump taking over a Spielberg project as opposed to the reverse. That should be interesting...

Escape to The Movies: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

Relax, it's fine.

Also, "SAVING MR. BANKS"

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Within Five Years, Every Movie Sony Makes Will Be a SPIDER-MAN Movie

Do I still talk about how great "THE AVENGERS" was too much? Probably - but even I'd be doing it a lot less if the success of that particular film (and the Marvel Cinematic Universe) wasn't hovering so much of current Hollywood business-dealing like an omnipresent specter. In the same way that "HARRY POTTER" sent everyone with money to spend in the movie business scrambling to lock down a kids/YA fantasy franchise of their own, the mad rush now is to set up multi-film/cross-genre "worldbuilding" movie brands - preferably using superheroes but not exclusively, since Universal has been making some noise about bringing back the Universal Monsters for a "seperate-films-followed-by-a-team-up" project of their own.

Other than Marvel/Disney, the guys in the best shape in this regard are Fox; who're holding onto the comfortably expansive "X-MEN" franchise strong and hoping that second time will be the charm for "FANTASTIC FOUR." Warner Bros is approximately one Martian Manhunter away from throwing up it's hands and saying "Fuck it! "MAN OF STEEL 2" is now "JUSTICE LEAGUE 1." And Sony? Poor Sony has only James Bond - whom they are obliged to treat gently - and Spider-Man... whom they are demonstrably content to ride hard, put away wet, pass around the yard and rent out to visiting foriegn business associates over the weekend.

The studio has already set up dates for three sequels  to "THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN," one of which lands in just a few months. Meanwhile, they've invited five "superstar" writers - Alex Kurtzman (ew), Roberto Orci (eeeeeew), Jeff Pinker (eh), Drew Goddard (oh?) and Ed Solomon (didn't know he was still working) - to work out a "universe" built around the extended Spider-Man mythos. Currently on the docket: A solo "VENOM" feature (because I guess it must still be 1995 somewhere...) and a villain-centric "SINISTER SIX" movie (soooo... will they not be teaming up in the main series? What are these other three movies about, then?) The interesting name is Goddard, since he's also developing the "DAREDEVIL" project for Marvel's "DEFENDERS" run on Netflix.

I imagine the only reason no one is saying "BLACK CAT" yet is solely because they haven't bothered to write her into the movies yet, whereas Eddie "Venom" Brock is being namedropped in viral marketing already. After that, I look forward to seeing what kind of surefire masterpieces can be grown from fertile seeds like Man-Wolf, Rocket Racer, Prowler, Morbius: The Living Vampire (okay, that one could be good) or The Spider-Slingers. What a time to be alive.

EDGE OF TOMORROW trailer needs more Kill

"EDGE OF TOMORROW" is the hopelessly-generic, boring title given to this otherwise pretty damn good-looking Japanese light-novel adaptation in the belief that it's original moniker - "ALL YOU NEED IS KILL" - was just too damn awesome for the average audience to wrap it's brain around. Seriously, WTF? People would actually be talking about that title - "All You Need is KILL?' What is that? What does that even MEAN!??" They wouldn't be able to get it out of their heads. (And did no one suggest calling it "RESPAWN," which still sounds better and would "click" with it's intended audience?)



The premise is one of those "why didn't I think of that?" high-concepts: It's "GROUNDHOG DAY" meets "GEARS OF WAR." Tom Cruise is a green recruit in a war against alien invaders who gets killed in his first deployment... only to find himself somehow stuck in a "time loop" that causes him to wake up alive and well that same first-day of service every time he dies, able to use his gradually improving war skills and specific foreknowledge of what not to do to fight a bit better and progress a bit further each time. Emily Blunt's character (a fellow soldier who has become a wartime celebrity for having developed inexplicably superhuman combat skills "somehow") is called either "Full Metal Bitch" or "The Bitch of War" in translations of the original, which I assume won't be the case here.

The Big Picture: TOO MANY VILLAINS

"Bob, why won't you just stop talking about this movie based on stuff you're a huge fan of in an insanely popular genre in the medium that you make a living reporting on???"

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Too Many Villains

GODZILLA Teaser... teases

I really like the way this opens. The rest? I can go either way - with apologies to every other genre filmmaker on the planet, Spielberg only makes the "scenes of people looking in lieu of content" thing look easy. It doesn't look anything like director Gareth Edwards "MONSTERS," which I hated, so I'm thankful for that. Big overhanging question remains: Apart from the big-name main star, what is this going to offer that "PACIFIC RIM" didn't already deliver ten times over?



Interesting just how much this looks/feels like the buildup to the previous 1998 remake, minus the self-aware 90s humor. It's odd that two attempts to re-do "GODZILLA" for the U.S. now have (seemingly) focused exclusively on repurposing the original, which is really the extreme outlier of the franchise in terms of tone and focus. There was a period in my life when "Originally, Godzilla was meant to be DARK and SERIOUS BUSINESS!!!" was a really vital, noteworthy thing I wanted the world to know. These days? I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't be more pumped right now if this trailer (which does look good, don't get me wrong) featured a little less ominous portent and a little more giant-lobster punching.

We'll see.

JUPITER ASCENDING Teases Big Universe

The first teaser for The Wachowski's follow-up to "CLOUD ATLAS," which is alleged to be a more "conventional" (for The Wachowski's) sci-fi/space-opera narrative. Still closely-guarded story features Mila Kunis as a human woman targeted for assassination by an unknown-to-Earth interplanetary empire because she possesses a unique DNA signature that would allow her to usurp the current Queen of The Universe. She is protected by Channing Tatum, whose makeup and prosthetics are being downplayed by this trailer but is supposed to an albino human/wolf hybrid. Me, I want to know what's going on with the bulky winged-reptile guy at 1:29.

Escape to The Movies: OLDBOY

Oops. Forgot to post this Friday. Was preoccupied with the BOFCA Awards.

Intermission talks the soon-to-be new Wonder Woman.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Oldboy

What In Hell Is NURSE 3D?

Why, hello there, new most favorite movie I haven't seen yet ever...



h/t BAD

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Trailer May Have Just Shown You ALL Of The Film's Teases For Part 3.

Seriosuly. I'm pretty sure I just saw the "To Be Continued in Part 3" in the trailer for Part 2.



Buzz on ASM2 is that it's another problematic production in terms of what was set out to be made versus what Sony now wants, and some of what I've seen/heard floating around in the ether is supported by this new trailer, in which Peter Parker continues to explore the shitty revised backstory nobody cared about from the first reboot. From the look/sound of things, Richard Parker was killed because he stumbled on Oscorp's nefarious plans to create boring, catch-all "unified" origins for uninspired versions of classic Spider-Man villains - THE FIENDS!!!

Short version (because I'm on my way to work) is that the film really was/is supposed to primarily be about Spider-Man versus Jamie Foxx's Electro, with worldbuilding subplots (and maybe a cliffhanger finale) laying track for an ambitious (in terms of scale) third movie that may or may not feature an Unpleasant Half-Dozen of some kind; but that Sony is hot to have more of that stuff in the forefront of the movie - or at least it's marketing. Apparently a lot of the "Oh shit, is that...??" stuff prominently on display here was actually written/shot to be late in the game reveals, background gags and possibly even post-credit easter-egg materials but is now being shown off to make it look like the main movie isn't just "Spider-Man versus Boring Robot & Hoodie Smurf."

I can't confirm any of that, but look at pretty-much all the stuff involving Oscorp's lab (like those SIX doors sliding open, or those two "appliances" in the background) and tell me you don't feel like you just saw most of this movie's version of Steve Rogers running out into present-day Times Square.

...Or Maybe Eclipso?

I'm a baaaaaad widdle boy...

New POMPEII Trailer Goes Big

Y'know what surprises me the most about Paul WS Anderson's upcoming disaster movie, other than that it took someone this long to make what is effectively "GLADIATOR" meets "TITANIC?" That they didn't call it something else to prevent the average American audience from thinking "Uh... hey, babe? Did we ever see 'POMPE I?"

Gal Gadot is WONDER WOMAN in "BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN"

The "big" value of Wonder Woman as a character and icon is that everyone has heard of her. They probably haven't heard anything else, but they know the name, the look, the basic idea and - most importantly - that she's supposed to be the female equal to Superman: THE female superhero. What that means in terms of this current age of comic-hero movies is that, whereas Marvel/Disney will actually have to make and release a full movie for somebody like Ms. Marvel, all Diana has to do is show up and DC/Warners gets a certain amount of credit/cultural-cache re: overtures to female fans.

And now, show up she will: Warner Bros. has officially announced that the Gal Gadot, the former fashion model best known as Miss Israel 2004 and as Gisele in the "FAST & FURIOUS" movies, will play Wonder Woman in the mad scrambling clusterfuck to do something, ANYTHING with the DC properties as-yet untitled sequel to "MAN OF STEEL."

This has been underway for awhile - it's been "known" that Wonder Woman was in this movie to some degree pretty much ever since Warners started casting around for actresses who can aquit themselves in action scenes and wouldn't confirm or deny that this was the role. For awhile, the steady gossip was that Wonder Woman and possibly The Flash (not the same one about to get his own TV show, because DC/Warners just isn't good at this stuff) would be showing up in the film as cameos in their "civilian" identities, with their true selves being revealed either late in the game, post-credits or in subsequent movies. Maybe that "intel" was always wrong... but it wouldn't surprise me at all that this is a pretty recent development.

The fact is, this is a movie being assembled in free-fall. Warners was caught completely off guard by the reception to "MAN OF STEEL." The studio went gaga for what Snyder/Nolan had gotten up to on the feature (particularly that massive, meaningless-carnage finale that's now the most criticized part of the fiilm) and went into this Summer convinced that not only did they have their "AVENGERS"-killer but that they had the new answer to "TRANSFORMERS." Instead, while the film was still a HUGE moneymaking hit, it failed to meet their (foolishly made-public) sky-high projections and is now best known for generating a year's worth of trend pieces about how badly the iconic hero was mangled and who in the production is most to blame.

So while I have no doubt in my mind that "the plan" was always to start laying track for "JUSTICE LEAGUE" by having Batman show up in the sequel, I absolutely believe the stories that they made the decision to make him a co-star (at least in terms of promotion/title/etc) literally just days before announcing it at comic-con. By the same token, it wouldn't surprise me at all that Wonder Woman's presence in this film started out as "easter egg," got bumped to "surprise cameo" as the bloom continued to come off the MOS-rose and became "role we're going to hastily expand announce a year in advance" when the "Female-Led Movies Set Thanksgiving Records" trend-pieces started hitting on monday morning.

Honestly? It's really difficult for me to get excited about any aspect of this production so long as everyone guilty of"MAN OF STEEL" is still at the wheel. There was a moment there, right after "WATCHMEN," that the notion of Zack Snyder putting the DC Trinity onscreen would have been the biggest, coolest, most-exciting news to hit this genre since "they're giving Spider-Man to Sam Raimi!" Now? Tainted goods, and I blame Goyer (who has never been good) and Nolan (who is good, just not at this) for the most part. Just for one example: Not that it's anywhere near the most important thing, but look at the overall visual/design aesthetic of "MAN OF STEEL" and try to imagine a Batman and Wonder Woman who would "fit" into that. Not terribly exciting, if you ask me.

I hope this is good. I hope this works out. I hope whatever lightning struck to make "THE DARK KNIGHT" happen amid Warner Bros. utter incompetence within this genre can hit again. I have no real opinion on Gadot's casting - she's very pretty and you can easily picture her in the part, which are exactly the same qualifications Henry Cavill had for Superman, and I don't think it's particularly noteworthy (good or bad) that she was a beauty pageant contestant before being an actress. It's tempting to start in with "it's too early to have an opinion at all," but since they seem to be making this one up on the fly in response to whatever is currently-trending at the boxoffice, I'm not sure when it won't be "too early."

One Weird Trick To See If This Title Thing Actually Makes An SEO Difference For This Post About BEAUTY & THE BEAST

Because none of you listened, "ALICE IN WONDERLAND" was a huge hit and Disney has decided that live-action do-overs of it's fairytale back catalogue is the new hotness; hence "MALIFICENT" next year and similar updates of "PETER PAN," "LITTLE MERMAID" and more in various stages of planning. They haven't actually announced it yet, but it goes without saying that a revisiting of "BEAUTY & THE BEAST" - widely considered to be the best film of the studio's 90s Renaissance if not their best film period - is likely in the offing.

But now, if they do, they'll have to get in line. Christophe Gans - France's answer to Michael Bay, best known in the U.S. for "SILENT HILL" and "BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF" - has put together a big-budget live-action version of "BELL ET LE BETTE." It looks... very much like a Christophe Gans movie (though apparently on the family-friendly side). There are worse things to look like.

Belle et La Bête

The Big Picture: PINK IS NOT THE PROBLEM

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Pink Is Not The Problem

Meanwhile, In Japan...

Presented without (much) further commentary, the trailer for NUIGURUMA Z: GOTHIC LOLITA BATTLE BEAR; the first feature film to star Shoko Nakagawa (she's kind of like Japan's Zooey Deschanel, except she didn't have to make movies first - she's just sort of... "professionally quirky"), directed by Noburu Iguchi - late of the magnificent (and very NSFW) TOKYO GORE POLICE.

The film, based on a book and novelty song by otaku musician Kenji Ohtsuki, finds "Shokotan" (Nakagawa's professional name) as a girl who becomes a superhero by merging with her magic teddy bear to battle an evil counterpart who has unleashed "the largest number of zombies ever featured in a Japanese film" on the populace:

RIP Paul Walker, 1973 - 2013

Confirmed just over an hour ago, actor Paul Walker - likely best known as Brian O'Connor in the FAST & FURIOUS movies - died in a car crash in Los Angeles on Saturday, 11/30. He was a passenger, the car was a Porche belonging to a friend, they were apparently leaving a charity event. He was only 40 years old.


I doubt anyone would try and argue, even now, that Walker was one of the great actors or noteworthy movie-stars of his day. He was always one of those performers who seemed to have come up in the wrong era, and would've worked continuously in the 50s or early-70s when essentially looking like a walking Ken Doll and affecting unironic sincerity garaunteed you steady leading-man work (see: Alan Ladd.) By all accounts he was one of the good guys, and the FAST movies were among those that (eventually) knew exactly how to put him to good use - it's very possible that Vin Diesel's "exotic" pan-racial ubermensch character wouldn't have "popped" so notably in that franchise without Walker onhand as the "regular guy."

But he had an active career beyond that series, one that yielded as couple of bona-fide (if little-seen) classics that suggest he would've had a strong career heading into middle age as a character actor "handsome mature badass" type;" the unquestioned masterpiece of which was 2006's mind-bending pitch-black crime thriller RUNNING SCARED:



I'm also very partial to "EIGHT BELOW," where he played the main human component in what's effectively a wilderness-survival movie primarily starrting a group of dogs trapped alone at the South Pole.



He also had HOURS due out for mid-December, which if nothing else features a particularly novel twist on the "ticking clock" in the form of a baby hooked up to a life-support device that needs to be manually re-charged once every three minutes:



He was also active advocate for the preservation of endangered shark species, and operated the humanitarian aid group Reach Out World Wide.

Escape to The Movies: FROZEN

This is the year when something genuinely subversive got made in the form of a Disney Princess(TM) movie.

Spoiler-free review HERE (and embedded below.)

And here's where we start spilling ink on all those BIG SPOILERS:

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Frozen

All Three AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Villains (Possibly) Revealed...

...and do I even need to say it?

I'm putting the actual image (which if fake is a pretty good fake scooped from Twitter by ComicBookMovie) after the jump, because one of the three is still not "officially" announced even if it's the least surprising thing possible. Suffice it to say, sanding The Rhino and Electro - two of the most interestingly-designed iconic Spider-Man villains, easily - down to "Man In Hoodie" and "Boring Robot" is kind of an accomplishment in and of itself. "Different" is one thing - this is just boring.

Hit the jump for the "spoiler"...

Part of why I'm disinclined to think of this as a fake is the work that'd have to go into it: Make the fake image, print it out onto parchment-style poster and hang it in a plausible location.

In this case, the wallpaper screams "hotel conference room," which would suggest this was probably snapped at a merchandising meetup - i.e. "here's what you'll be putting onto lunchboxes and party-plates." Therefore, it's possible for this to be a "real" poster but not a final poster. I imagine it's pretty close, though.

The less said about Electro the better, at this point. I know that Rhino is here being drawn from Ultimate Marvel's R.H.I.N.O. concept... and I don't like it here, either. It really is amazing that the entire "Ultimate" experiment didn't yield a single not-shit new idea outside of the Samuel L. Jackson gag. Speaking of which, it looks like you can see a closer shot of Green Goblin's face on the billboard/screen in the upper right-hand corner - the gossip on this one is that A.) it's actually Harry Osborn who becomes the Goblin this time, and B.) this will be "Ultimate" Green Goblin - who's basically a less-interesting version of The Abomination.

BIG PICTURE: "Dog, Gone"

So here's a thing that happened:

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Dog, Gone

SON OF GOD Trailer Will Make Your Morning

Remember that cheeseball Bible miniseries from Roma Downey and company that the press felt obliged to pretend was a really big deal earlier in the year? Well, they've re-cut and added scenes to the New Testament parts and are releasing the result as a theatrical feature called "SON OF GOD."

The trailer is pretty (unintentionally amusing) on it's own, just for the spectacle of seeing the first Jesus Movie where Christ is being played using all the same "off" verbal tics and affect that people have been using to play "Christ-like" figures (think Neo) for a couple of decades... but... that last line. Oh my... that last line...

That Was Unexpected

In case you were wondering what the #BRINGBACKBRIAN thing exploding social-media overnight was all about, FoxTV has released this official (unlisted) video (SPOILERS)



So... yeah. Prevailing theory seems to be that this is a long-ball gag to pay off next new episode or maybe some sort of lead-in to the rumored Family Guy feature film.

Escape to The Movies: THE HUNGER GAMES - CATCHING FIRE

Here's my one-finger salute.

Intermission: "Franchise Dos & Don'ts"

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

MUPPETS: MOST WANTED Trailer

A spiritual-successor to THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER? You have my attention.

UK ROBOCOP Trailer Is Slightly Better...

...in as much as it makes the film merely look like a pointless, bland "modernizing" of the original; as opposed to the "eye-gougingly horrible shit" approach taken by the two U.S. trailers. Still, I could've gone on living quite contentedly having never seen Robocop do the three point landing bit.

Catching Up

Wow, who had a busy few days? Bob did. Here's some of what might've been missed while I wasn't posting:

SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD - REVIEWED for The Escapist (yeah, I'm doing this now)

AGENTS OF SHIELD: "THE WELL" - RECAPPED.

MARVEL'S NETFLIX SHOWS - Um... Talked About For Pageviews!!!

"CALL OF DUTY: GHOSTS" - On The Game OverThinker!

FXX To Essentially Become THE SIMPSONS NETWORK (Plus Other Stuff) In 2014

So... remember how FX - Fox's barely-watched teen/college-age basic cable channel - spun off a sibling network called FXX earlier this year? If so, remember wondering what sense that made, given how FX doesn't really even have enough content for one channel as it is? Well, now we have our answer: THE SIMPSONS needed a cable home.

And just like that, the basic cable landscape just got shook the fuck up.



Okay, briefly: A few months back, the magic-number of years and money passed for 20th Century Fox to put THE SIMPSONS up for cable syndication deals. This previously wasn't possible, because the syndication deals for the series were struck long enough ago that it was still not uncommon for network syndication contracts to include agreements that kept the series off of cable competitors. Hence why you haven't seen, say, TBS, TNT or USA using this show to fill rerun-blocs like they do with LAW & ORDER, HOUSE, FAMILY GUY, NCIS, etc.

But now that's over, and FXX has won the very competitive bidding war and can now run all 530 episodes from THE SIMPSON's first 24 season (subsequent seasons will become available as they conclude on Fox) whenever and however they wish on the channel. Even if you're in the "it hasn't been good since Season 10!" camp, even just that would a crop of well over 200 episodes to work with. And they have precisely zero incentive to not run this massive backlog of content from one of the most recognized and popular multimedia properties of all time as often as they possibly can.

The "dirty" secret of minor cable nets like FX/FXX (or USA, TNT, TBS, etc) is that they pull serious ad revenue by booking blocs of familiar "comfort food" TV reruns (either one show or similar shows, see: USA's daily LAW & ORDER: SVU marathons) largely on the calculation that people who keep their sets on all the time just for background chatter will just leave that channel running as they go about their home-stuff. THE SIMPSONS - whatever you may think of it now or previously - could not be more perfect for this: It's colorful, it's immediately recognizable, it's family-friendly and thus can be on at any time of day, etc. Hell, add in the obvious 90s Nostalgia factor and it's also the most ideal possible fit for the college/stoner/work-from-home "overnight programming" time-slots... which is why if you've got money tied up in Comedy Central or Adult_Swim, you are not about to have a happy morning.

The "special" programming possibilities are staggering, from ratings/ad-rev perspective. Consider: On Halloween, FXX could run all 23 "Treehouse Of Horrors" specials as a day-long marathon - I could see people building Halloween parties around that. Every Sideshow Bob story? Do-able. Smithers-centric marathon on Secretaries Day? A Moe Marathon? Holiday episodes? Hell, you don't think legions of devoted SIMPSONS fans wouldn't make lucrative "live tweet this" events out of, say, Bumblebee Man Night? Any half-decent programmer should be salivating at how easy this would make their jobs.

The deal also gives FX's On-Demand arm, FXNow, exclusive streaming rights to every episode - which, yes, likely means you'll be able to watch any of the 530 whenever you want on TV, mobile, PC, whatever.

My only immediate question is what (if anything) they plan to do about the significantly large number of episodes that were produced pre-HD. That handily includes all of the "Classic Seasons" and a good deal of the Silver Age, and its apparently why some network syndicators have dialed back on re-airing those because they worry people will be turned-off by non-HD visuals. Will they do an optimizing-pass on the classic seasons to make them HD-ready?

Heaving Is For ReEEaauggGgGGhhLlll...!!!

In 2003, 3 year-old Coulton Burpo nearly died during an emergency appendectomy. When he came to, he started telling people that he'd had a near-death experience and had gone to Heaven, where he'd ridden a rainbow colored horse with Jesus, met magically de-aged versions of people's dead loved ones and brought back a message from his own miscarried would've-been sister.

Oh, and not that you should read ANYTHING into this minor detail, but Coulton's dad Todd is a pastor (shocker!) who transcribed the kid's "account" into a bestselling book, which (amazingly!) the Burpo Family has been able to expand into a hugely successful ministry movement; because apparently American "pop-Christianity" wasn't embarrassing enough without stadiums full of clueless twits literally swaying in thrall to a not-even-Biblically-Correct spew of pablum from an oxygen-deprived 3 year-old.

And now it's a movie, starring Greg Kinnear (why?) as Todd. Interestingly, the trailer (maybe also the movie?) seems to leave out the detail of this guy already having been on Heaven's marketing team - which is kind of a weird detail to leave out of something like this...



I like how the trailer, while downplaying the proselytizing aspect (presumably the film will take a "true or not, isn't it INSPIRING!!!???" track since it's aiming to be a mainstream sort of thing) none the less manages to cram us much Christian Movie stock-iconography into the frame as well: Heartland sunsets? Firefighters? Soldier funerals? All that's missing is Kirk Cameron and a 1-800 number.

Yesterday on Twitter I got into a bit of a "thing" with the Reddit Atheism crowd, suggesting that they might want to ease up on their typical behavior (and maybe while they're at it those obnoxious "nyah nyah!" holiday-themed billboards) when it comes to Aronofsky's NOAH movie. Well, regardless of how I feel about Internet Atheists... even the douchey-ist of douches can have a purpose, and stuff like this is theirs. Have at it, fellas.

Escape to The Movies: MAN OF TAI CHI

"Finish him!"

ALSO: "Intermission," in which I probably make some movie critics grumpy.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Man of Tai Chi

MALIFICENT Teaser

It's kind of weird that Disney - named for a man who more-or-less invented the modern American concept of consumer-nostalgia - seems to have only figured out within the last decade that there are ways to mine it's back catalog other than the perpetual re-release cycle. MALIFICENT, for example, is a two-fer: Part live-action remake of SLEEPING BEAUTY, part spinoff/prequel giving as "tragic origin story" [eyeroll.gif] to its iconic villainess:



Someone is going to have to explain to me how an infodump of background-detail actually helps this particular character beyond getting her Disney Store merch to move a bit faster. The idea of giving Disney bad guys franchises of their own to go be entertainingly evil in - PG-rated versions of slasher/monster "villain as main character" series, basically - is a good one... but Malificent's whole appeal in this pantheon is that she's really the only straight-out Satanic "evil for evil's sake" major heavy Disney ever bothered to generate.

Seriously. Even Scar, Ursula and Jaffar at least have political "seize the throne" power as goals. Cruella DeVille had vanity. The Wicked Queen had both. Captain Hook wants revenge. Malificent is their "pure evil" baddie - there's no motivation for what she does in the story beyond what's played as feigned-outrage over a minor sleight, and she never seems to have a bigger goal beyond "feels good to be bad." That black-pit lack of depth and nuance is entirely where the interest lies.

Honest Trailers does MAN OF STEEL

With it's Blu-ray release now upon us and a surprisingly early amount of data about the sequel starting to hit, did we really need one more "fuck you!" to MAN OF STEEL?

Apparently, yes we did:

Big Picture: WHO WAS THAT IN THOR 2?

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Who Was That in Thor 2?

Is This GRIMLOCK?

The assumption for awhile has been that The Dinobots would be the new showpiece toys characters in the fourth Transformers movie, and I mean before they were officially calling it "TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION." Now, JoBlo.com (yes, I'm aware that they finally took the "Chud meets Maxim" routine revoltingly far a few months back - but a source is a source) says they've snapped some merchandising art that appears to show our first look at Dinobot leader Grimlock in his T-Rex alt-mode... and that's apparently the newly-redesigned Optimus Prime riding on his back.

I'll say this much: You have to be pretty bad at... well, everything if you can fuck up as simple a concept as Robot Dinosaur (car-robots are actually quite easy to fuck-up: just look at the Go-Bots) ...and it doesn't look like they fucked this up. I mean, I'm sure his robot mode looks just as bad as all the other live-action Transformers, but this looks about like it should look.


Assuming that this isn't just crappy merch-art that couldn't be assed to keep to scale, by far the most interesting thing about this is that Grimlock appears to be about 2 1/2 to 3 times larger than a real T-Rex, which Prime (going by the previous films) would be either at eye-level with or a bit taller when it's hunched-over like that. All the Autobots are supposed to be getting major design-overhauls for this one, which is supposed to be a break from the story and human characters from the first three (no one has seen a good image yet, but the chatter has been more solid-looking bots with fewer moving-bits and exposed parts and they've said Prime is blue now) but Prime was confirmed to still be a truck and even if not it's hard to believe they'd be shrinking him down to near human size. The simpler answer is likely that Michael Bay is exactly the filmmaker who would look at dinosaurs and say "No, no - we need to make them BIGGER!"

Against my better judgement, I'm holding out a certain amount of hope for this one. I really do regret the immature cheap shots I took at Bay (absolutely as a person and, to a lesser extent, as a filmmaker) back when Escape to The Movies was still finding it's voice; and "PAIN & GAIN" was a potent reminder that whatever you think of his aesthetic predilections he really is something when he wants to be. The previous three Transformers movies all failed at least in part because of the tug of war between the Amblin-wannabe Sam story he was stuck with and the stuff that actually seemed to interest him - maybe (maybe!) now that that's over with (Mark Whalberg is the new human lead) this will finally "work," even if it still won't likely be the Transformers movie some are still hoping for.

Escape to The Movies: THOR - THE DARK WORLD

Good, maybe moves a little too fast.

ALSO: So long to Blockbuster.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Thor: The Dark World

Here's The American MISS UNIVERSE Contestant Dressed As OPTIMUS PRIME

The Miss Universe Pageant held it's preliminary National Costume Show a few days back, a pre-pageant publicity event where the contestants show off early builds of their outfits for the "National Costume" portion of the event - aka "dress up as the Sexy Halloween Costume interpretation of your country's national identity." You can imagine how this is supposed to go: Miss Sweden as a Viking, Miss Denmark as The Little Mermaid, etc.

Well, pictured at your right: Miss USA Erin Brady in her national costume interpretation of... Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots faction of The Transformers. Which were, of course, were Japanese toys - but that's really the least silly thing about this, isn't it?

The pageant itself will be held on Saturday, so there's presumably some time for them to possibly get her into something else... but I kind of hope they don't. This is us, America. Might as well just wear it.

Here's Another ROBOCOP Trailer

Well, this still looks like shit. Nice to know some things are constant.



At least we've now got some kind of new-ish story to work with: In this version, OCP makes it's money selling drones to every country but the United States; which apparently has either a law or at least a big cultural apprehension toward the use of robotic security within its borders ("Robophobia" waka waka waka fuck you.) and Robocop is a way around that: Ostensibly an augmented-human with bonus "second lease on life for a cripple" sob-story that's actually little more than a corpse being remote-controlled by OCP and tricked into thinking it's making its own decisions. But then he remembers to be human in time to get in elaborate (and PG-13 friendly!) CGI battles with other robots - i.e. exactly the sort of stuff the original movie devoted two entire sequences to making fun of.

Amusingly, the idea that near-future America is still considered a really important consumer market to "crack" immediately makes this a more optimistic movie than Verhoeven's film. This will be out next year, so everybody remember to get just as psyched as you did for "The Thing" and "Total Recall," both of which I'm sure we all have on fondly-displayed Blu-Ray and watch at minimum once or twice a week.

MARVEL'S DEFENDERS To Netflix

Where are all the black people, differently-abled and (other) women in the Marvel Universe? Netflix, as it turns out. Today's big news: The ubiquitous streaming service will follow-up it's year of turning the TV drama game upside-down with the breakout mega-success of "House of Cards" and "Orange is The New Black" by getting into the superhero game with Marvel/Disney.

The plan is produce four seperate series (each with a 13-episode initial run) based on Luke Cage (black guy, really strong) Iron Fist (white guy, does kung-fu) Jessica Jones (former superhero, now a private detective) and Daredevil (blind, also a defense attorney); and a team-up "miniseries event" that will bring the four together as THE DEFENDERS (the name is borrowed from a hodgepodge 70s/80s Marvel group that randomly tossed together Doctor Strange, The Hulk, Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer for no particularly sensible reason.) The rational for all this is almost certainly to be that these are all regular/"street-level" heroes who

So, basically it's "The B-List Avengers" as a streaming content-dump. But it's also a canny move that makes the Marvel brand immediately part of the huge story that is the rise of the Netflix model as a viable platform for serial television - they're now the streaming action-show brand. The characters are all well chosen, since none of them generally have the kind of adventures (on their own) that would befit a singular big blockbuster but might work better handling 13 smaller-scale scenarios an hour at a time.

Presumably they'll rope one or two of The Avengers into a walk-on for the publicity at some point (Devin at BAD thinks it's plausible that Jones might debut as her superhero self "Jewel" on "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D" first, which makes a lot of sense) but I wonder if this might start to work like a franchise farm-system; where if (for example) Luke Cage is the breakout hit we'll see him called up to the majors for "Avengers 2" (or 3)?

Sounds interesting, at least. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to light a candle for whatever unfortunate mid-level guy at Warner Bros/DC is currently dodging office equipment thrown by a boss bellowing "WHY DIDN'T YOU THINK OF THIS???"

The Big Picture: BAGGAGE

Let's talk about criticism.

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Baggage

Tyler Perry Has Made a Christmas Movie With Larry The Cable Guy

"And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon upon him, his name was Death, and Hell followed with him." -- Revelations 6:8

Post by Tyler Perry.

In all seriousness, though - this is sort of interesting in the way that some of Perry's projects are once you stop regarding them as films and start regarding them as "found art;" or some kind of anthropological discovery. Drafting Larry The Cable Guy into this (the story: Madea tags along with a friend to surprise-visit her daughter at Christmas, where they're surprised to find said daughter has a white boyfriend with wacky redneck relatives) sound ridiculous for approximately 30 seconds, then it makes perfect sense.

Also, this (teaming with Dan Whitney aka Larry) seems to be the first time I've seen Perry acknowledge or actively court the unexpected crossover-appeal his movies have had with some more conservative white/rural audiences that typically wouldn't have "black films" on their radar. And his presence will be (literal) Christmas Present to white hipster movie-geeks who're "ironic fans" of Tyler Perry movies but might sometimes worry that they might unwittingly slip from "clever urbanite snarking at bad movies" to "clueless white person who doesn't get some idiom of black culture OMG I'M TURNING INTO MY PARENTS AND I MOVED ALL THE WAY TO WILLIAMSBURG TO PREVENT THAT NOOOOOO!"

This will be out December 13th, with another round of "HOW DID THIS HAPPEN!!??" reports on it's "unexpectedly" large boxoffice take from industry news sites who still haven't grasped that there are indeed large economically-significant audiences outside their immediate readership to follow on Monday the 16th.

Escape to The Movies: ENDER'S GAME

Not so good.

Also, Let's Watch The WINTER SOLDIER Trailer.

The Escapist : Escape to the Movies : Ender's Game

LEGO MOVIE Trailer 2

Happy Halloween! Good news, THE LEGO MOVIE still looks like the best thing ever:

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAzzz...

Well... it's still early yet, right?

I'm not sure what feels more low-rent/half-assed about this first DOFP trailer: Using both the "Sunshine" AND "The Thin Red Line" scores - the most overused trailer-music lifts outside of "Crimson Tide" and "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story" - or having Wolverine spell out why it's stupid to send Wolverine on this mission (quantum-leaping back into his 1970s self to help the cast of "First Class" fight Tyrion Lannister's army of Transformers and presumably retcon "X3" and "Origins" further out of existence) for no other reason than "he's the popular one."

Hey - remember that part in "The Avengers" where everyone else just hung back and did nothing the whole time so the camera could focus on Iron Man because he's the money-shot? Oh, right... they didn't do that.



I'm sure it'll be just fine, but there's no shaking the sense that "First Class" was probably as good as this series was going to get while still moored to the first two Bryan Singer entries. With apologies to Singer... the guy was never cut-out to make blockbusters like this, and he probably wouldn't be doing them at all if the first "X-Men" hadn't been so surprisingly-not-shit-for-a-pre-"Spider-Man"-superhero-movie. Maybe he'll pull this one off, and better him than Ratner again, but still...

Big Picture: SCHLOCKTOBER - HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS

Happy Halloween!

The Escapist : The Big Picture : Schlocktober 2013: The Horror of the Bloodmonsters