Untitled

Thursday, March 6, 2014

March Marvel Madness: DAREDEVIL

Released by 20th Century Fox in 2003, Daredevil stars Ben Affleck as Matthew Murdock, who, as a kid, was blinded by radioactive materials. Even though he lost his sight, his other senses were enhanced to superhuman levels. After his boxer dad was murdered by gangsters, young Matt dedicates his life to fighting for justice, growing up to be a defense attorney in New York City's Hell's Kitchen by day. By night, though, he's a crimefighter known as Daredevil, The Man Without Fear. Matt, a devout Catholic, is unsure of his dual role, and occasionally expresses his conflict during weekly confession. He finds hope in a woman named Elektra (Jennifer Garner), but her and her father are targets of the Kingpin of crime (the late Michael Clarke Duncan) and his crazed assassin-for-hire, Bullseye (Colin Farrell). Soon, both Matt and his alter-ego are caught in the crossfire.

Now, if I had any good sense, I would fall in line with the rest of fandom and proclaim that "Daredevil sucks" or "Ben Affleck ruined Daredevil" or "Fuck Affleck" with no elaboration, just blind compliance. However, I am a man not know for having good sense. So, I say Daredevil is not that bad.

I'll admit, I was not impressed with the film upon its initial release, either. The CGI effects were cartoony, the wire work was obvious, the costumes looked like they were made for a 90s comic book movie. I didn't care what was going on in the film. Everybody was doing things only for the sake of looking cool while doing them. Jennifer Garner was completely miscast as Elektra. I didn't think Affleck was a problem, though. In fact, I thought he was alright. Still, unlike contemporaries such as X-Men, Fox didn't cast the best actors for the roles; they recruited stars. It was the 90s Batman way of casting a superhero picture. To me, Daredevil was living in a time-warp, so it got the Obershaw DUD stamp.

Five years went by. I had known about a "director's cut" of Daredevil on DVD for awhile. I read that it was the original version before Fox demanded it be cut down to get a PG-13 rating, and from what I heard it was a harder,darker, much better movie. I finally took a chance on it, and I was sucker-punched by the difference! Wouldn't you know, there's an actual movie here! OMG, characters! Plot! The superhero stuff were parts of the attraction, not the attraction itself. This version felt more in tune with Frank Miller's famous run in the comics. Unlike the theatrical cut, it was a film I could invest in. I mean, there were aspects of the 2003 version I disliked still present (i.e. Jennifer Garner as Elektra), but I was too busy enjoying the things I did like to care. As far as I was concerned, the Director's Cut of Daredevil was Daredevil.

Since then, the theatrical version didn't exist for me. However, I knew when I started this project that I was going to have to go back to the 2003 cut. We're looking at theatrically-released films, so it makes sense to look at these films as they were first exhibited. Looking at it now, the theatrical cut of Daredevil is still nowhere near Spider-Man quality, but it's not a complete loss. While the editing feels awkward and some of the sequences are brought down by goofy effects, and Jennifer Garner is still in it, Ben Affleck is the heart of the movie, and Matt Murdock's arc is what made it worthwhile this time around. I greatly prefer the Director's Cut, but Daredevil 2003 can still exist for me, too. I'll throw that one on if I'm short on time or attention span.

- JDO

Daredevil (Theatrical Cut)
2 1/2 out of 5 Cap shields

Daredevil (Director's Cut)
3 1/2 out of 5 Cap shields

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

March Marvel Madness: SPIDER-MAN

Tobey Maguire stars as Peter Parker, a nerdy high school student raised by his aunt and uncle, who is bitten by a radioactive spider during a class field trip and acquires the proportionate speed, strength, and agility of the arachnid. With his newfound powers, the shy, gifted Peter becomes a costumed attraction until a selfish gesture leads to personal tragedy. That's when Parker decides to use his powers to fight crime and become your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Also in Peter's life are the girl of his dreams, Mary Jane (played by Kirsten Dunst), his best friend, Harry (James Franco), and Harry's father, Norman Osbourne (Willem Defoe), a wealthy scientist who's self-experimentation transforms him into Spidey's arch enemy, The Green Goblin.

I had been waiting for a Spider-Man film ever since I was a kid. Spidey and The Hulk were the first two Marvel superheroes that made big impacts on me, and through my kid years I always thought a movie about either one of those characters would be mind-blowing. So, when Batman came out and Hollywood went comic book crazy, I figured Ol' Webhead was a shoe-in for the big screen big time. To use kid logic: It would be like Superman, only it's Spider-Man! It's only a matter of time, thought I. So I waited. And waited. And waited. Then, there was that Spider-Man animated series on Fox, which was awesome, but I still waited. And I waited some more. Fast forward through one false start by James Cameron followed by nearly 10 years of litigation, it's May of 2002, I'm finishing university, and a Spider-Man movie- courtesy of Columbia Pictures- is finally coming out. Expectations high? D'uh.

As it turned out, Spider-Man was- wait for it- amazing! It was everything I hoped a Spider-Man motion picture would be. The origin felt like it was ripped from Amazing Fantasy #15. It was colorful, full of energy and optimism, the latter sorely needed in the wake of September 11th, 2001. Tobey Maguire perfectly captured the duality of the nerdy, awkward good guy that is Peter Parker and the heroic, wise-cracking Spidey.

I was confident Spider-Man was going to rule. Bringing the wall-crawler to life was one of my favorite directors: Sam Raimi. Ever since Crimewave, I was drawn to his style; it was wild. It had a zany sensibility that seemed a perfect fit for a comic book movie. Darkman was all the proof I needed, but the fact he was a Spider-Man fan since childhood didn't hurt, either. The one and only gripe I had about Spider-Man at the time, though: it didn't feel like a Sam Raimi film to me. All those wacky shots that were trademarks of Rami movies were noticeably absent. It looked very pro. Very Hollywood. To me, it looked as if Raimi was toning himself down for the studios and for the sake of the kids coming to see the picture. That was the thing that bugged me the most about the film. What? What about Green Goblin's costume? That was awful, right? Nope, didn't bother me. Really. Sorry? Not really.

It had been a long time since I watched this Spider-Man. Years even. I wondered if it still had that same hold on me as it did almost a dozen years ago. Much to my shock, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man has aged beautifully. Its good-hearted charm hasn't diminished into camp or corny. It's timeless, actually. It's easy to see now how the brightness and fun of Spider-Man contrasts against the darker, more serious Blade and X-Men films. In addition, it has a more satisfying balance of character and action, making it- wait for it- superior to X-Men. Oh, and that complaint I had in 2002 about Spider-Man not looking like a Sam Raimi movie? Turns out I wasn't paying enough attention. Raimi didn't tone down for the studio or for the kiddies. He fashioned his style to create a live comic book.

That's what Spider-Man the movie is: a living, breathing version of the comic book. It's what every superhero film since Superman the Movie should strive to be. It doesn't simply try to duplicate the medium (mostly for laughs) or feel there's a need to transcend it. That is why, after 12 years, Spider-Man still succeeds at being- wait for it- spectacular entertainment.

Spider-Man
5 out of 5 Cap Shields

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

March Marvel Madness: BLADE II

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

Monday, March 3, 2014

March Marvel Madness: X-MEN

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

Sunday, March 2, 2014

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.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

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