This’ll actually be our second Watchmen contest… here goes!

This one is easy. The kind folks at M80 want to give away a copy of Watchmen on Blu-ray. At some point over the past year, probably after I bought a PS3, BR became my favorite way to watch movies. Tons of special features, top notch quality, all that fun stuff that nitpickers love. I assume the Watchmen Blu-ray will be similar.

If you want it, here’s what you’ve gotta do. Leave a comment here with your first name (your actual first name, not your fake first name for the internet) and your favorite Watchmen character. You don’t have to justify it, you just have to name it. I’m going to go through the comments on Friday and randomly pick out a winner. I’ll email you for your address, you’ll send that to me, and then you’ll get a Watchmen Blu-ray in the mail.

A couple notes– US residents only, please! Also, please make sure you own a Blu-ray player. And if you don’t put a valid email address in the comments… I’ll have to pick someone else. So don’t put nospam@nospam.com. We’re not (ever) gonna spam you.

Our Wolverine contest from last week is up, and I’ll be emailing the winners tonight. Watch your mailboxes, and look for a post later this week on the best ones.

As many of you are aware, the latest Entertainment Weekly features shots and info of Iron Man 2. A lot of the stuff is already known, though it did give us some very nice Black Widow pics. The one thing I find interesting about this whole deal is Mickey Rourke’s role.

Rourke is set to play Whiplash. In actuality, the information we know about him shifts him closer to being the Crimson Dynamo. They even use the name of Ivan Vanko – the first Crimson Dynamo – rather than Mark Scarlotti. So why name him “Whiplash”? For one, there’s the whip-based gimmick in his arsenal they’ve been hyping. Second, I think it’s more of a realism thing.

I’m telling you right now that “Crimson Dynamo” is one of the finest names to ever come out of comics. It’s such a cool collaboration between two cool words. Thing is, someone who looks like Mickey Rourke would never call themselves that on purpose. It doesn’t fit him. It’s too… theatrical, I guess is the word I’m thinking of. It brings too much color and hype for a Russian criminal who fashions his own costume to escape prison and then acts like a terrorist. “Crimson Dynamo” goes well with the propaganda aspect of the character, which is likely missing in this incarnation.

It’s the very idea that they’re going with the identity of Ivan Vanko that adds to my optimism. Ivan Vanko is one of the most overlooked comic characters, especially from the early days of Marvel. I would barely even remember him if it wasn’t for the recent Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin miniseries reminding me that he was around for just a little while.

Vanko created the Crimson Dynamo armor to make himself the Russian answer to Iron Man. He had pride and a sense of style based on his robotic identity, which annoyed his Soviet superiors, but they sent him against Iron Man nonetheless. Iron Man dealt with Vanko in one of the first major “Tony Stark is a total dick moments”.

During a fight, Iron Man played a fake recording he made of Vanko’s superiors planning to have him killed the moment he would return to Russia, whether or not he had succeeded in defeating Iron Man. This fake recording horrified Vanko and he defected to America. He started working as a major scientist at Stark Industries.

Even though we discovered that Vanko’s boss really was going to kill him off after all, that was an extremely fucked up thing for Stark to do.

Vanko remained loyal to Stark, but only lasted until the next year. A Russian spy Boris, alongside the comic book newcomer Black Widow, broke into Stark Industries and stole the Crimson Dynamo armor. Vanko sacrificed himself for Stark and destroyed this second Crimson Dynamo at the cost of his own life.

Since then, the Crimson Dynamo has become almost a running gag, as there are a near dozen men to have taken the mantle. But while I don’t know them all too well, I’m sure few show the potential of Ivan Vanko, a man who was certainly cut down before he could make a bigger impact in Marvel history.

Not saying I want the guy brought back from the dead, but a flashback miniseries or even a What If issue in light of the movie would be ideal. If you think about it, if Ivan had survived, he probably would have taken the second-stringer role that made Jim Rhodes into War Machine.

If they adapt anything from Vanko’s short history for the movie, it can only be positive. Just replace his Russian benefactors with Justin Hammer and we’ve got something.

Newsarama has DC’s advance solicits for September up, and there’s a couple of interesting bits.

THE WEB #1
Written by Angela Robinson; co-feature written by John Rozum
Art by Roger Robinson & Hilary Barta;co-feature art by Tom Derenick & Bill Sienkiewicz
Cover by Stanley “Artgerm” Lau
Variant sketch cover by JG Jones
Spinning out of August’s “Red Circle” event from superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski comes the new ongoing adventures of the selfish rich-boy hero the Web, and the mysterious-undying Hangman. Writer/director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S.) and artist Roger Robinson (BATMAN: GOTHAM KNIGHTS) spin the tales of The Web, a man who has only recently come to understand the burden of true heroism. He’s fighting crime on his own terms, and for his first mission he’s hunting down the men responsible for killing his brother!

TEEN TITANS #75
Written by Felicia D. Henderson; co-feature written by Sean McKeever
Art by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson; co-feature art by Yildiray Cinar & Júlio Ferreira
Cover by Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson
Variant cover by Andy Clarke
Come celebrate our gala 75th issue with an all-star cast of Titans past and present! Joining this issue for the extravaganza is new ongoing writer Felicia D. Henderson, a co-executive producer on TV’s hit show Fringe! Don’t miss this start to a fresh new take on DC’s premier teen team!

No, the interesting bit is not the annoyingly vague sell copy. “Our hero has a mission! Our team has a fresh new take, which is unlike the other new takes we’ve had over the past four years! Fringe! Comics!”

Felicia D Henderson and Angela Robinson are both black women. Felicia Henderson, in particular, gets a whole gang of goodwill from me just because she wrote for Fresh Prince, Family Matters, and, to a lesser extent, Moesha.

My question is– is this the first time Marvel or DC have employed two black female writers? Is it the first time they’ve employed one? Comics historians, do your duty.

(The rest of the solicits are snoozles.)

Lone Wolf and Cub volume 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Artist: Goseki Kojima
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 1569715041
319 pages

All told, it took me about an hour to read Lone Wolf & Cub volume 3: The Flute of the Fallen Tiger. I was surprised when I realized it, but there are a lot of wordless pages in this volume. Koike backs off the scripting some and lets Kojima really work his storytelling and show off some solid swordfighting. It works out for the better, as this volume moves along much faster than the previous one, due in part to the variety of stories inside.

The Flute of the Fallen Tiger keeps up the 60 page story. This time, we get five stories, chapters fifteen through nineteen. In order, we’ve got “The Flute of the Fallen Tiger,” “Half Mat, One Mat, a Fistful of Rice,” “The White Path Between the Rivers,” “The Virgin and the Whore,” and “Close Quarters.” “Half Mat” is definitely my favorite of the five, though “Flute” is a great story, as well.

“Flute” is a story I recognize, since it is essentially the ending of Shogun AssassinShogun Assassin. I was surprised at how faithful the movie was to the book, since my understanding was that it was a hatchet job. I’ve uploaded the relevant portion of the film and the ending of the chapter for comparison’s sake. The sequence from the film is one of my favorite martial arts flick quotes, so it was definitely cool to see it in action.

The jewel of the book, for my money, is “Half Mat, One Mat, a Fistful of Rice.” The title is a reference to a philosophy that a character espouses during the story. He says that when you sit, you take up half a tatami mat. When you sleep, you take up a full mat. Finally, your stomach holds a mere fistful of rice. That, in essence, is what life means. Everything else is artifice, simply words that actually mean nothing.
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The Black SuperHero Blog has a post up on “Superhero,” a short film about a young boy who finds an amnesiac dressed as a superhero. Here’s the summary from National Film and Video Foundation South Africa:

A white amnesiac finds himself stranded in the middle of an arid landscape dressed as a superhero. He’s assisted and spurred on by a young black boy who wholeheartedly believes that he is a superhero. But as the man’s memory returns he discovers that he’s been anything but a hero.

It’s a short film, and I’m definitely interested in seeing more of it. Hopefully it’ll get an online release or something soon.

This came out a couple weeks ago, and I actually saw it when I saw Terminator Salvation, but here’s a link to the trailer for The Surrogates, an adaptation of the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, courtesy of Top Shelf Productions. If you don’t want to click (lazy!), you can press play on the video below. I can’t decide if this trailer or the trailer for the movie that had Mike Tyson singing (what was that called?) was the best part of Terminator: Salvation (ka-zing!).

Saw it.  Liked it.  Was rather surprised at that.

At first I thought the style would knock me out of the picture.  I was wrong.  There were some sequences, especially at the beginning of the film, that made me roll my eyes when they started but turned out to be strangely affecting.

Also, I think that my earlier concern that the overall darkening tone of comic book movies would take the edge off of this one was incorrect.  Obviously, this would be more of a shock if it were compared to the early Superman movies instead of The Dark Knight.  But Watchmen isn’t so much about shocking us as it is showing us these wacky people with certain power levels and certain senses of responsibility, and never quite the right balance between the two.

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First off, check out the animated short Saturday Morning Watchmen if you haven’t already. Yes, yes, it’s Newgrounds. I don’t care. It’s quality. Check it out.

The new Watchmen movie is about to be released. I got my midnight IMAX tickets ready. Good or bad, it’s probably realistically the best we would ever get. Lord knows they’ve been trying to make it into a movie for years. It started back in the 80’s with a ridiculous script by Sam Hamm, the guy who gave us the Michael Keaton Batman movie. I haven’t read the whole thing, but I have read enough. The ending in the screenplay puts you in a facepalm frenzy by having Dr. Manhattan save the world by going back in time and negating his own origin. This causes the present to be undone so that Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and Rorschach end up in the real world.

That sounds painful. The movie had remained in limbo for years after. There seemed to be some movement in the mid-00’s, with David “Solid Snake” Hayter’s screenplay. Darren Aronofsky was set to direct. Alan Moore, though disagreeing with the concept of a Watchmen movie, still said that Hayter’s vision was the best and most faithful version he had read. Things were moving forward a bit, even with a Watchmen movie teaser site up for a little while. Then it just went away and the whole thing was scrapped for a couple years until being greenlit with another creative team and another screenplay.

But what of the David Hayter script? Was it any good? I’ve actually read it. A few years back, back when the wheels were still in motion, I got my hands on the script and read through it. Totally legit. I had written a list of all the differences between the book and Hayter’s stuff. With the movie coming out, I figured I’d just dust it off and repost it for you guys.

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“You killed my—“
“Yes, yes, I killed your father. What is it with you women? I killed my father and you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

— Chun-Li and M. Bison from the Street Fighter animated series.

Years ago, I went and saw Street Fighter: The Movie in theaters. It was, as we all know, a bad movie. It’s infamous for being a bad movie. I hated it. As time went on, I learned to forgive it and even enjoy it for its ridiculousness. More than that, I understood the movie.

At least, I understood why it came to be. Street Fighter II was all the rage and a movie was a natural follow up. With so many characters to choose from, the best they could do was create a GI Joe setting where the then-most popular character in the US leads his fellow good guys against the main villain and his cronies. It was there to sell action figures. It was stupid, but I understand why it was.

Last night I watched Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Most fighting games have the habit of having a crappy first attempt and a beautiful second attempt. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, the Marvel games and so on. By all means, it should be the same with the movies, considering what a turkey the first movie was. They HAD to improve. The studio pressure was lessened this time. We didn’t need Guile and his kung-fu commandos taking on M. Bison’s armies. They were free to tell a more fitting story. They were allowed to do better! They WOULD do better!

Right?

The real question isn’t whether or not Legend of Chun-Li is worse than the first Street Fighter movie. Because it really is. It really, really is. The real question is whether Legend of Chun-Li is worse than the Happening. I honestly can’t figure out a good answer for that right now. It’s that close. It’s definitely worse than Mortal Kombat: Annihilation if that means anything to you.

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Maybe it’s the result of being in a huge room and watching the movie with hundreds of other people, but the battle scenes in this movie make you want to stand up and cheer.  That is, when they don’t make you want to turn your head away and wince.  Director Lauren Montgomery said that the first cut of this movie earned an R rating, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit.  I cut my teeth on the kid-friendly Batman: The Animated Series, and am therefore not accustomed to see that many bodies on the ground in a kid’s animated movie.  Still, the violence is done with style, giving the battles energy and weight, rather than just gore for the sake of gore.

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