March Marvel Madness: BLADE II

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to March Marvel Madness! Every day this month, I'll be looking back on a theatrically-released movie based on the characters of Marvel Comics. It's all to commemorate the April 4th release of the next Marvel cinematic adventure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Today, the daywalker returns in Marvel's first sequel...

Wesley Snipes reprises his role as Blade, the half human/half-vampire hero who is now in Prague tracking down his old pal, Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). After resucing his old buddy and introducing him to his new helper, Scud (played by the only reason people put up with The Walking Dead nowadays, Norman Reedus), Blade is offered a truce by a wealthy vamp, Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann), and his daughter, Nyssa (Leonor Varela). Apparently, there is a creature far worse than vampires, and Blade is asked to join a team of badass bloodsuckers put together by Damaskinos- the great Ron Pearlman plays their leader- in exterminating this common enemy.

Honestly, folks, there's really not much to say about Blade II. It's a minor step-up from the first film, I know that. Like its predecessor, though, Blade II is a simple (minded?) action/horror thrill ride. The thing that gives this movie that slight edge over the original is a new director. And who is that, you ask? None other than Mexico's greatest export (sorry, Alberto Del Rio!), Guillermo del Toro. What?! Well, with a legendary visionary like del Toro at the helm, Blade II is every bit as imaginary as Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, right?. Sorry, kids, but Blade II is as much del Toro's movie as Mimic was. There are only touches of trademark del Toro in Blade II; the old world location, the dark, dank design, the practical monster effects. del Toro feels more like a hired gun on this movie. David Goyer's script is too focused on extended fight scenes for del Toro to spread his (fairy or demon?) wings.

It's a shame my memory of Blade II is more vivid than the movie itself. I was hoping for a Guillermo del Toro take on a Marvel hero, but I simply got an action film you catch late at night on FX. It only happens to be directed by him.

Blade II
3 out of 5 Cap shields

March Marvel Madness: X-MEN

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to March Marvel Madness! Every day this month, I'll be looking back on a theatrically-released movie based on the characters of Marvel Comics. It's all to commemorate the April 4th release of the next Marvel cinematic adventure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Today, evolution leaps forward.

From 20th Century Fox comes X-Men, based on the long-running, extremely popular series created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and brought to legendary status by writer Chris Claremont.  The film takes place in "the not too distant future", where humanity is split between two factions: humans and mutants (humans with extraordinary abilities). Teenage runaway mutant Rogue (Anna Paquin) and hard-ass loner Wolverine (Hugh Jackman in his first film role) take refuge at a school run by Professor Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart), who also leads a team called the X-Men, dedicated to keeping the peace between mutants and the rest of humanity. A mutant terrorist, Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), wants freedom from persecution "by any means necessary", and has devised a plot to achieve that using one of the X-Men. It's up to Xavier's group to find out which one in order to foil Magneto's plan.

I loved X-Men when it came out in 2000, and it still makes me happy every time I see it. Bryan Singer did the impossible: adapt a comic with- at the time- 37 years of complex history behind it. He got down to the nitty gritty of what this mythology is about. The ensemble cast was something brand new for superhero movies back then. It wasn't made up of stars; they were (for the most part) the best actors for the roles. They inhabited these characters. The X-Men movie honors the comic mythos while forging its own path.

The path still has a few bumps. X-Men has an imbalance of character and story- which unfortunately became the model for future first installments of comic book film series. A lot of time is spent on establishing that when things get going it feels over before it's begun. The late Michael Kamen's score is hit-and-miss. And then there's Halle Berry as Storm. She's the weak link in an otherwise tight ensemble. Her performance- not to mention her accent- is lazy, and she delivers the worst line ever in superhero movies.

At least these are real criticisms of the movie. In recent months, I've come across articles like this, which pretty much shows how fucking spoiled fans have become. Reading shit like, "Personally, I've given up all hope of seeing Wolverine in his costume..." makes me believe the moral of X-Men doesn't mean a damn thing to these clowns. They're shallow. All they want is Wolverine slicing people down and a Rogue with huge knockers.

I continue to appreciate the efforts to bring the X-Men comic book to the big screen, and I remain all-smiles with the results. No cry-baby fanboy nit-picking is going to change that.

The age of the superhero movie has officially begun.

- JDO

X-Men
4 out of 5 Cap shields

Movie Tally for February 2014

Blow Out
Knocked Up
This is 40
Phantom of the Paradise
Carrie (1976)
Child's Play 3
Westworld
Big Ass Spider! (or Biggest Spider! to those who only shop at Wal-Mart)
My Bloody Valentine (1981)
Pumpkinhead
Howard the Duck
We Are What We Are (2010)
We Are What We Are (2013)
Blade
X-Men
Child's Play 2
Seed of Chucky
The Raid: Redemption
The Witches of Eastwick
The Witches (1966)

Unlike last month, February turned out to be a mix of new watches and revisits. What's truly of note this month is that two in particular fall into both categories: Blow Out and Phantom of the Paradise. Funny that both of them are de Palma flicks. These two- and Dressed to Kill- were movies my mom kept mentioning throughout the years, as if I had seen them when I was really young. My folks were pretty cool when it came to movies, if that wasn't obvious before. Still, I had very little memory of watching any of them. Dressed to Kill I saw at the end of last year, and I fell in love with it. I'm glad I waited this long to revisit that one and Blow Out after spending a bit of time watching/studying Hitchcock. I know I would've really liked them had I watched them, say, my teen years, but that big dumb grin on my face marveling at all the Hitchcockian would not be there. Phantom of the Paradise? Definitely one Teen Josh would have trouble shutting up about. Why I never saw it that much earlier continues to be beyond me. Scream Factory is releasing Phantom of the Paradise on Blu-Ray later this year, and I can't wait. That film and I still have a lot of catching up to do.

Other things I took away in February:

• I like the remake of We Are What We Are more than I do than the Mexican version. The original's great, but the American version took the initial idea and went into more intimate, and in turn, darker places. I was more drawn to that.
• Not as mind-blowing as some made it out to be, but The Raid was still a damn good action movie. A highlight of the genre, for sure.
• This is 40 was long, not really funny, and pointless. Three years away, I'm determined to make my 40 the opposite of this movie.
• Up until attending last Saturday's midnight screening of Child's Play 2 at the New Bev, I was completely oblivious to the fact that there's this big gay following for the franchise. Not just for Bride and Seed of Chucky, the whole series! Considering I wasn't aware my youngest brother was gay until he came out 9 years, it's shameful I can still be so boneheaded about such things.

- JDO

March Marvel Madness: BLADE

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to March Marvel Madness! Every day this month, I'll be looking back on a theatrically-released movie based on the characters of Marvel Comics. It's all to commemorate the April 4th release of the next Marvel film adventure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.


Twelve years after the disaster of Howard the Duck came another attempt at making a major motion picture based on the works of the Marvel Comics Group. Leave it to the house that Freddy Krueger built to do something right.

Produced by New Line Cinema in 1998, Blade stars Wesley Snipes as the title character, a half-human/half vampire warrior committed to wiping out the undead, with the help of his friend and mentor, Whistler (played by Kris Kristofferson). Blade has his sights set on Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), an impetuous bloodsucker who wants to eliminate the vampire establishment so he can rule the human world himself. At the same time, Blade must protect a doctor (N'Bushe Wright) who was bitten by vampires and may also hold the key to curing his increasing thirst for human blood.

Blade is such a cool movie. That's what I thought when I first saw it. I didn't know much about the character (created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan) at that point, but I dug the fact that it was an honest-to-goodness monster movie- which weren't many of in the post-Scream 90's- with a little martial arts thrown in. It was like Big Trouble in Little China for the Total Request Live crowd. Looking at it now, it's surprising to see that Blade still has plenty of bite. It's well-put-together for an empty-headed shoot-em-up. Director Stephen Norrington's visual style is solid. There's plenty of action, a lot of blood, and even some trusty ol' jump scares. Screenwriter David Goyer (who is a comic book fan) treated the character of Blade with respect, and Wesley Snipes's portrayal is iconic.

This movie is sooooo cool, it's easy now to see how influential it was. Blade was the beginning of the action/horror hybrid. It's not the first time those two genres have been mixed (Aliens did a damn good job of it a dozen years before), but Blade was the film that made it a thing. For better or for worse, because of Blade we got Resident Evil, the Underworld series, House of the Dead, I, Frankenstein... Hey, I did say for better or for worse, right?

This movie is so, so cool. Maybe too cool for it's own good, because Blade is pretty dated. There's the MTV-style editing, the late-90s electronica music, and some early CGI that hasn't aged too well. Plus, Stephen Dorff's Deacon Frost, with his mussed hair, cigarette-smoking, and hip charm, is just another one of those Tarantino-esque bad guys that seemed to be in every movie back then.

Those aren't really serious gripes about the film, I must admit. You can't really knock a movie for being dated on a superficial level. I'm just having too much fun reflecting on a motion picture from a point in my youth where I was well aware of the times I was living in. Today, Blade continues to hold up as a pretty good genre cross-breed that puts all its imitators to shame and remains immortal alongside modern Marvel cinema.

- JDO

Blade
3 1/2 out of 5 Cap shields.

March Marvel Madness: HOWARD THE DUCK

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to March Marvel Madness! Every day this month, I'll be looking back on a theatrically-released movie based on the characters of Marvel Comics. It's all to commemorate the April 4th release of the next Marvel film adventure, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

So, how are we kicking this off? What was the first feature based on a Marvel comic? The movie that would open the flood gate of Marvel characters on the big screen? The film that would becoming the standard by which all future Marvel movies would be judged?  That turned out to be...

Produced by Lucasfilm and released by Universal Pictures in the summer of 1986, Howard the Duck begins on a planet populated by little people in bad duck costumes. Here, working stiff Howard (Eight actors are "billed" in the part) is all of a sudden beamed out of his apartment, into space, and lands in an alley here on Earth, specifically Cleve-Land. Despite being chased around by the natives, the pint-sized, loud-mouthed fowl rescues would-be rock star Beverly (Lea Thompson) from a couple of punk weirdos, and the two become unlikely friends. However, what begins as your typical fish-out-of-water comedy unexpectedly turns into a bizarro sci-fi romp involving giant lasers, Dark Overlords of the Universe, and Cajun sushi diners.

Now, despite being 86'd at the box office in '86 and becoming the butt of every lame duck joke in pop culture, this really isn't "the worst movie ever made". Gasp? C'mon, I've seen much, much worse than this. So have you. I dig the weirdness of the concept. Despite the limitations of the suit, Howard is a character worth rooting for, and the over-the-top performance of eventual baddie, Jeffrey Jones, is a hoot. I think the humor still works. In the way rubber chickens are funny. Or fake dog shit. You know you shouldn't be laughing, because it's dumb, but you do anyways. Plus, I also admire the random tonal shift from fish-out-of-water comedy to outlandish outer space monster movie, unintentional as it may be.

Still, Howard the Duck fails, because it is a piss-poor adaptation. I blame that solely on arrogance. The arrogance of George Lucas, co-writer Gloria Katz, and co-writer/director William Hyuck to take this satirical comic book, with its 70s stoner fantasy sensibility, and tame it into the next Star Wars for the ultra-conservative 1980s. Forget Lea Thompson's big hair and the goofy Thomas Dolby tunes; Howard the Duck is a product of its day, for it was made by people who had no understanding of- nor cared about- the source material. So, no, I don't think Howard the Duck is "the worst movie ever made". It is, rather, an embarrassment to comic book movies as we know them today.

- JDO

Howard the Duck
A very generous 2 out of 5 Captain America Shields

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY trailer has finally landed!

Okay, everyone can let loose with your uncontrollable fanboy gushing, because this was so worth the wait. It's been a long while since I've seen a trailer with such a pitch-perfect blend of action and humor. And I mean real humor, not that shit posing as funny, like in trailers for That Awkward Moment and About Last Night.

This coming attraction actually feels like a very strong indicator of what the film will be. That's why Guardians of the Galaxy has officially become my most anticipated film of 2014.

The movie opens August 1st.

- JDO

Movie Tally for January 2014

     Well, it's a new year, and I thought I would give this a shot. I've seen a few friends and acquaintances tally the movies they have watched each month, and a part of me was curious about my own movie-watching habits. I say mine, but I really mean me and Jenn's, because we're both fans, and we try diligently to watch everything together. Here, in order of viewing, is the list of films we have seen in the first month of 2014.

Grabbers
To Catch a Thief
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Little Witches
Blackfish
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Sightseers
Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
Ernest Scared Stupid
The Battery
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Before Midnight
Frankenweenie (2012)
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
Stoker
Prince Avalanche
Starcrash
Blue Jasmine
Blacula
Don Jon

     The best part about this month is the fact that, with the exception of Ernest Scared Stupid, all these movies are first time viewings. We didn't go into this month with that intention, or the goal of being so eclectic. It just happened that way.

- JDO