It’s kind of a bad time for my writing. All my go-to articles have been running dry. Jeph Loeb stopped writing Ultimate Marvel comics, so no more of that. I’ve finished writing about Venom. I don’t have too many wrestling PPV shows to rank and review. Just as bad, Marvel has stopped releasing novelizations of their movies. I can no longer know the story of movies in the Avengers Saga a month or so before they’re released. Because of that, I can’t do any informative lists that show all the scenes that were taken out of the original version of the screenplay.
Or can I? While yes, it appears that there isn’t any novelization for Captain America: The First Avenger, that doesn’t mean I’m empty handed. I called in some favors and got to see the extended original cut of the movie. Oh, man. You won’t believe some of the stuff they got rid of! Mostly because it’s all lies.
An entire hour was cut. Removed scenes include:
– A scene where pre-experiment Steve Rogers gets sand kicked in his face at the beach. He meant to gamble a stamp and send a couple bucks to Charles Atlas to make him a man, but got distracted by news of Pearl Harbor.
– When playing hangman with Bucky, he had only one turn left and only the first letter revealed. After biting on his pencil for a moment, he asked if that letter stood for France. Lucky guess.
– When talking with Erskine, the two of them had a long, hearty laugh about how Disney had released a cartoon where Donald Duck was a Nazi. Steve kept insisting, “This is a thing that actually exists! Look it up! Donald is saluting Hitler and everything!” He later had this same conversation with Colonel Phillips, Peggy and even Red Skull. I’m not sure exactly why Marvel would remove this reference.
– When Red Skull steals the first Cosmic Cube and shatters it on the ground for being a forgery, he then curses a blue streak and realizes that he just busted up the real thing after all. Much of his villain plot is based on him trying to find glue and tape, which was scarce in Nazi Germany.
– Much like Arnim Zola was introduced via his face reflected off a monitor, the character of Helmut Zemo was there too. He was introduced by putting his hands behind his back and his shoeless feet on the table while the shot lingered on his purple socks.
It was pretty much the only comics movie I was really looking forward to this year (unless I forgot about something, but I doubt it), so I caught X-Men First Class while I was on vacation last weekend. Overall? I dug it. It’s not the best-written or best-directed Marvel flick, but it has a strong visual style all its own, and it being set in the non-swingin’ sixties apparently counts for a lot for me. I’d rank it as being better–for whatever better means, I guess “more enjoyable” at this specific point in time–than the other X-Men and Spider-Man flicks. Better than Iron Man, even. It’s less cute, and there’s no Robert Downey charmingly stumbling his way into your heart.
Anyway, I have Opinions:
-Michael Fassbender as Magneto as Simon Wiesenthal was a good look. Magneto in the comics is… I don’t want to say soft, but he’s very comic book. He’s simplified, boiled down into that superhero/supervillain dichotomy. In X-Men First Class, he’s much more human, and even more relatable.
-I hadn’t realized how much I liked the character, the idea, of Magneto before this, but yeah: I like him a lot. There are two key lines that were blown in the trailer that I think are significant. I’m copy/pasting from Wikipedia, since I saw this days ago and already forgot, but:
Professor Charles Xavier: We have it in us to be the better man.
Erik Lehnsherr: We ALREADY are.
and
Professor Charles Xavier: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: Killing will not bring you peace.
Erik Lehnsherr: Peace was never an option.
-My Magneto is probably similar to Morrison’s–he’s a mad old terrorist, but he’s not entirely wrong, either. He’s extremely powerful as a symbol, which I already knew and enjoyed, but X-Men First Class added a human component that I enjoy. The conflict in the comics comes from the fact that Magneto becomes what he despises (a Nazi) out of a desire to protect his race. Goofy comic book plotting.
-What I like about Magneto, what those lines unlocked, is that 1) he’s lost and he knows it and 2) some people deserve to die. It’s part of why crime fiction, and more specifically, Frank Miller’s The Big Fat Kill, are so appealing/interesting to me. Morality through immorality/amorality. Who puts the bullet in the head of him that deserves it?
-Magneto is convinced of his race’s superiority (and he’s technically correct), but he’s also come to accept that he is broken. He’s a martyr in his own mind, and the one person willing to do what must be done in order to protect his kin. His life doesn’t matter, so long as he spends it for his people.
-Peace isn’t an option because his peace was stolen decades ago.
-Fassbender, man. SO manly. I’d watch a sequel that was him terrorizing his way through the ’60s and ’70s. Magneto the Jackal.
-I liked James McAvoy as Xavier, too. He wasn’t as revelatory as Fassbender, but his callous, arrogant Xavier worked. The little touches, like the way he used groovy while hitting on coeds or how he didn’t really get the mutant struggle, were great, too.
-Rose Byrne as Moira, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique were all pretty okay. Good enough that I would watch them in sequels, but not standouts.
-January Jones was terrible.
-The major cameo was as great as everyone else has said, and the Cerebro sequence was pretty cool, too.
-Kevin Bacon was great. It’s like he saw Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost, one of my most favorite roles ever, and was like, “Yo, I can top that. Sebastian Shaw? Son, I got this. Watch.” Fassbender > Bacon > McAvoy > everybody else > January Jones.
-I like Zoe Kravitz. I thought she did a fine enough job with a poisoned chalice. And I mean, her mom is Lisa Bonet and her dad is Lenny Kravitz, and she looks it. Instantly made my top ten dead or alive list.
-The list changes constantly, but right now we’re looking at Rosario Dawson, Anna Karina, Scarlett Johansson, Aubrey Plaza, Rashida Jones, Salma Hayek, Josephine Baker, Aki Hoshino, Lucille Ball, Sade, and Erykah Badu. That’s eleven. Vivica Fox or Lisa Bonet might rotate onto the list soon, too.
-But yeah, let’s talk about what I didn’t like.
-It sucked to be black in the sixties, and that goes double if you’re a mutant, apparently. Edi Gathegi as Darwin died in one of the dumbest scenes in any movie anywhere and Kravitz turned evil because dot dot dot.
-Darwin basically served two purposes in the movie. He was there so that when someone said “slavery” when talking about mutant rights, the camera could focus on his face. He was there to die to give Shaw some cheap heat.
-Here’s a scene, paraphrased fairly faithfully:
Shaw: What’s your power?
Darwin: Evolving to survive anything.
Shaw: Survive this. *puts a fireball in Darwin’s mouth*
*Darwin dies slowly over the next minute while making a sad face*
*white people are sad*
*every black person in the audience leans over to the nearest black person like “niggas always gotta die first”*
:negativeman:
-Get outta here. Really? It wasn’t even a shin hadouken. That was a medium punch joint at best. It looked like a gadouken.
-Darwin was wasted, but that’s symptomatic of the larger problems with X-Men First Class.
-He was an extra character. The movie is too full, and pretty much just Beast, Magneto, Mystique, and Xavier get a chance to shine. Banshee gets something like seven whole lines, doesn’t he?
-So, because the cast is so full, everyone’s motivations are… thin. Angel is okay with being ogled as a stripper, but hates how the humans look at her wings. That makes a kind of sense–she’s in control in one area and not in the other. But apparently she hates the latter so much that she signs up with a genocidal mutant after less than a month of even knowing that other mutants existed, deserting her mutant friends with not a second thought.
-Oh, and right before she does that, an off-screen human is like “Take the mutants, they’re hiding in here! Just don’t kill me!” just in case you don’t get that no one likes them. Racism! (Eyerolls!)
-Nobody beyond the main characters have much of a reason to do anything until Darwin bites it.
-“Hey, do this.” “Sure, okay.”
-“Boy, being a mutant sure is cool.” “Yep, sure is. :)”
-“Man, humans sure do hate us.” “Yeah, they do :(”
-But really, the worst part is that both black mutants die or turn evil in the same scene. What part of the game is that? You make a movie out of a series that borrowed heavily from the civil rights struggle and then cut out all the negroes?
-I’m not saying I want balance, one good and one evil. I think that’s dumb, to be perfectly honest. But at least let me believe that black mutants have actual reasons to do things or have powers that aren’t lame. “I can survive anything. Oh wait, no, I’m dying!” is crap!
-It’s doubly crap because of the pro-mutant slogan that pops up a few times in the movie. Say it loud: “Mutant… and proud.”
-The pregnant pause is part of the slogan.
-It’s like the moral of the movie is “Black, er, blue is beautiful!”
-I can totally buy evil black mutants. It makes sense, it’s feasible, blah blah blah. But I didn’t buy it here because the writing team barely even tried to sell it. They just threw it out there.
-Boring. They got to do better next time.
-The Nazis got what they deserve, though, so that’s okay.
-On the flipside… there’s a bit where a Nazi quarter (did they call them quarters? it’s worth 25 Nazi Cents I assume and has a swastika on it) turns into the X-Men First Class logo. That’s probably not the best message to be sending at the beginning of your big fat civil rights metaphor. I don’t know whether that’s because Nazis barely count as people or because it sets up a really terrible unintentional comparison.
-“Mutants?! More like Nazis, am I right, fellas?”
-Next time: tighter script, better colored mutants (I’d settle for a real gully version of Bishop or uh… actually Frenzy would be kinda dope, as long as they go real raw with her), and more Fassbender. Fewer sad white people, fewer characters with no motivation, fewer scenes with January Jones stinking up the spot.
-“Magneto was right.”
-Oh yeah, better music in the new one, too. This one was forgettable. X-Men’s got to be a sexy franchise, and the ’60s were a great time for music. Throw some period joints on that fire.
I’m sure you have figured this out by now, but I’m a man who loves a good cheesy movie. That’s the reason why the 70’s and 80’s are so great. Give me a choice between watching the English Patient and the Warriors and I’ll choose the latter every time. I think a great cheese movie is a lot like an expensive comic. You can’t force it. It just happens. Nobody knew that Action Comics #1 would be such a big deal years later, but it is. You can TRY to make your new movie as cliché and silly as possible (hello, Shoot ‘Em Up), but most of the time you’re going to just get another forced product like insisting Doomsday killing Superman is going to be a major collector’s issue. Got my sloppy metaphor out of the way, so let’s continue.
I guess there are just some movies that are too weird to exist and when you get wind of them, you can’t rest until you sit down and watch it. Like the day I discovered that there’s a Japanese monster movie about a 50-foot-tall Frankenstein’s monster fighting a giant lizard. Or a movie about a samurai Buddy Holly walking through the desert and fighting Death so he could one day become the king of Lost Vegas. Or whatever the hell Santa Claus Meets the Ice Cream Bunny was about. I’m compelled to watch them.
Several years ago, I came across a clip on YouTube of one hell of a grindhouse movie trailer. It was a movie from the early 1980’s called Kill Squad.
I feel like the guy from the Maxell commercial when I see that. They really just tried to convince us that a throwing star blew up a car via different footage cut together! They don’t even try to give you any semblance of a plot. They just show you that it’s nothing but ridiculous fighting and the world’s greatest tagline. I’m in!
Unfortunately, Kill Squad is so obscure that it isn’t even on DVD. Believe me, I’ve spent the last few years checking up on that again and again to find no progress. Then fortune struck. I was showing that trailer to someone the other day and I saw a shocking link on the sidebar: “Kill Squad 1/8“.
SOMEONE HAD UPLOADED THE ENTIRE MOVIE ONTO YOUTUBE! IT’S A VERY LATE CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!
I sat through the movie and came out a better man. It isn’t a good movie by any means, but the world is a better place for the fact that it exists. Also, the trailer was right. There is a loooooooot of fighting. In fact, I’m going to keep a running tally.
The movie is directed by Patrick G. Donahue and stars a bunch of guys who don’t appear in any other movie. B-movie mainstay Cameron Mitchell is also credited as the villainous Dutch. There’s a really hilarious and interesting notable actor in the movie, but I don’t want to make this review too top-heavy. I’ll go back to it down the line.
I had seen the movie Thor recently and I enjoyed the hell out of it (Iron Man > Thor > Incredible Hulk > Iron Man 2). For longtime readers of this site, you usually know what that leads to. Ever since Spider-Man 3, I’ve had a tendency to pick up the novelizations of Marvel movie properties before the movies come out. When I see the movie, I then go home and write up all the stuff that was in the book, yet never made the on-screen transition. These always lead to interesting differences between early versions of the draft and later ones. Like how Iron Man 2 was going to be a total piece of shit rather than just being simply the lowest rung of the Avengers Saga movies.
Here’s the problem, though. The Thor and Captain America movies don’t have novelizations and won’t be getting any. Oh, sure, there’s the junior novel, but those things are always too cleaned up and they overly abridge chunks of the story. I guess I’ll just have to kiss my bread and butter goodbye.
But then, I figured, what’s stopping me? Sure, I haven’t read the original script for Thor. Sure, I don’t know how earlier drafts of the story went. But YOU don’t know that!
…shit, wait. You do. Pretend those above three paragraphs never happened. I want to tell you about all the scenes from Thor that never came to be. The ones that were left on the cutting room floor, for better or for worse. Let’s go.
– In the opening scene, when Jane and friends are driving through the desert, they briefly spurn a hitchhiker and drive past him. Bruce Banner puts his hands back into his pockets and continues down the road, accompanied by sad piano music.
– The real reason those frost giants snuck into Asgard isn’t because of any magic or trickery, but because Heimdall was too distracted from doing that thing where you point your index fingers at each other and cross your eyes and see a little floating hotdog finger in-between.
-See that last comment in there? Dude that’s like “Sounds like someone didn’t do all their homework before pretending to be an expert.”? He asks me if I read Albuquerque’s Superman/Batman work when I call out both his covers right there. Why would you want to be that guy? The “Oh, sorry, let me correct you” guy?
that nothing glorious can happen anymore
consumed: I felt like talking about movies, I guess.
-I saw two movies this weekend: 13 Assassins and Sucker Punch.
-The worst thing about Sucker Punch isn’t that it’s sexist or misogynist. It’s that it’s awful. It’s inept on almost every level, save for Jena Malone, the stop snitching scene, and… well, that’s probably it. Even the colors sucked.
-How inept is it? Around an hour and forty-five in, Snyder realizes that he has fifteen minutes left and pop pop pop three people drop just like that. Push that story along, baby! On top of that, there’s a huge plot hole in that segment. The girls have to get something. They don’t. They use it anyway to save the day. Really? Who edited this? Who wrote it? There’s a big twist at the end surrounding the least sympathetic character. The music selection is so unbelievably -~POIGNANT~- and -~MEANINGFUL~- that I wanted to leave (no joke) about thirty seconds in, or whenever it was that the line “Some of them want to abuse you” from “Sweet Dreams” synced up to somebody’s abusive father leering at the camera.
-Somebody should revoke Snyder’s music licensing permission. The music wasn’t bad, exactly, but I felt like I was watching a thirteen year old make an anime music video out of his wet dreams. The metaphor isn’t even that deep, man. And the ending is awful.
-I went with some friends because a) it was cheap and b) I hadn’t seen some of them in a while and it seemed like a nice way to kill a Sunday matinee. We laughed, and hard, at the snitching scene. It was absurd, yet another moment of “Really? REALLY?” stacked on top of a million others. This guy next to us was like “Ha ha, real FUCKING funny” in that tone of voice where people go on to lecture you about something you don’t care about. I wonder how it feels to be that guy.
-It’s the new Takashi Miike, and the story of 13 samurai (well, twelve and another guy) out to kill a dude who is basically Japanese Caligula. He’s the half-brother of the shogun, corrupt, almost cartoonishly evil, and has embraced his nobility to the point that other people aren’t even human.
-He’s played wonderfully by Goro Inagaki, with the perfect amount of distance and just… what, callousness? He isn’t evil, he just doesn’t care. There’s a hole in him somewhere.
-This flick is the most grown mannest, whiskey drinkingest, cigar smokingest, record playingest, old school Caddy drivingest movie I’ve seen in a long time. Honor, sacrifice, horror, and all that stuff Garth Ennis loves is in here, and it’s great.
-There’s a scene with a quadruple amputee (CG, I assume) that was incredibly haunting and led to a tremendous payoff toward the end.
-The last 45 minutes or so of the flick is one running battle, 13 versus 200, and the prize is one man’s head. The pacing of the scene, of the fights, and the moments between the fights is dead-on. It flies by, and by the end of it, you’re not ready for it to be over.
-I liked how the big battle began with what was essentially asymmetrical warfare and exploiting home field advantage. The men are all a little different, and the way they approach living their lives and bushido was all very interesting. One guy’s reaction to his first kill was great, while another scene set in a long alley with several swords was a really well done action scene.
-“Kill any of them that get past me.” I got chills. He was so real.
-I think what I liked most about 13 Assassins was how straightforward it was. No gimmicks, no stupid slomo, and no really masturbatory shots. There are a few comedic bits to break up the tension (much needed), but they don’t break the movie. Even the violence was subdued. Other than a couple of scenes, most of the blood is shed off-screen, and there’s one spot of nudity that doesn’t come off sexual at all. Due to that, the way that the blood eventually covers their swords is striking. It’s straight up chambara, no magic tricks.
-Oh no, I lied–there’s one gigantic gout of blood, but there was a really good reason for it.
-And something impossible happens in the epilogue, but I think I figured it out and I’m okay with it.
-Toward the end of the movie, and you can see this in the trailer, a man wipes the blood off his sword with his sleeve. That scene is fantastic, and didn’t go down like I expected.
-I’m trying to think of my favorite scene, but all of it was enjoyable. I watched it while eating a porterhouse steak and shrimp tortelloni alfredo, drinking cream soda from a bottle, and sitting in the dark. Great experience.
-It’s ten bucks to rent off Amazon (or iTunes, if you’d rather see it in HD). I waffled a bit–ten bucks is a lot to spend for a rental. Then I realized that I’d just spent six whole dollars on Sucker Punch and went ahead and copped it. I got my money’s worth. I’ll buy it on Blu-ray when that drops, too. I’m a fan, borderline stan.
-There’s a remake of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira coming, directed by the Hughes brothers and set in a Neo-Manhattan, after the Japanese swooped in on an economically vulnerable America and bought up the place, last I heard. The script’s probably changed since. A lot has been made about them casting white actors in the lead roles.
-I think they have a point, but at the same time: Yojimbo vs Fistful of Dollars.
-The situation isn’t exactly comparable, but I can’t imagine we’ll possibly get an American Akira with some white dude going by “Kaneda.” That’s stupid to anyone with half a brain. But my point, rendered as best I can while writing on the fly before I leave for work: I don’t think a not-Japanese Akira is a bad thing, in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with remakes that put a film into a new context.
–Yojimbo vs Fistful is a good example of that. Both are classics, and I can’t tell which one I love more. Probably Yojimbo, because I watched it more recently.
-I think the biggest problem with a white Akira is the setting. Akira is fueled by a lot of things: the cost of power, science gone wild, nuclear fears, a certain type of street gang, and probably half a dozen more specifically ’80s, and probably Japanese, fears.
-It’s 2011. We don’t care about half that stuff any more. It’s like rappers still rhyming about pushing crack. It’s old. We have new fears, new things that will tilt the world off its axis and send us spinning off into space. The Akira remake needs to reflect that, and I’m not talking about Kenyan Manchurian Candidate Islamofascists hiding behind couches.
-If you’re gonna remake something, remake it. Don’t just try to translate it. That’s boring. Let Me In was pretty cool, and my understanding is that it took some liberties with the source material. If you’re going to adapt something to a new context, use the original as a base and then work within the confines of that context. Direct remakes are boring.
-If they do the work, I think an American Akira could be great. But honestly? The only faith I have in that movie lies with the Hughes. I don’t even know if I think it’ll ever actually get made.
-No way can they top the books, anyway. I wrote about it here and here. I own a couple color guides from it, too:
-So, y’know, as a huge fan of Akira, and a dude who is probably about to irresponsibly drop some dough on the colorized Japanese editions of volumes 2-5–maybe the Akira remake won’t be that baaaaahahahahahahahaha
we’ve run the gamut of our filth
David: I quit trying to save comics when I realized that comics wouldn’t save me Esther:Action Comics 899 Gavin:Green Lantern Emerald Warriors 8, Incorruptible 16, 5 Ronin 5, Avengers 11, Captain America 616, Deadpool Team-Up 883, Incredible Hulks 625, Punisher In The Blood 5, Secret Avengers 11
-We saw Green Hornet!
-You’ll never guess what we thought.
-This is late because I forgot to put it up yesterday.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!
Every year, my best friend Sean and I have a habit of giving each other horrible Christmas gifts. From memory, he’s gotten me a “three wolf moon” t-shirt, Suburban Commando, Jingle All the Way and the Country Bear Jamboree. With the movies, it means that I have to watch them and he has to be there to endure it next to me to make sure. Well, the joke’s on him that one time because I genuinely enjoyed Suburban Commando!
Sean gave me an early Christmas gift recently and the other night we had the privilege of watching WWE Films’ Knucklehead, starring the Big Show.
Do you want your movie poster with or without toppings?
WWE Films have released a lot of wrestler-starred movies over the years, usually in the form of cheesy action movies with the likes of Steve Austin, John Cena and for some reason Ted Dibiase Jr. They also did a horror movie with Kane and a serious family drama with Cena. When I heard about Knucklehead, I was initially interested. Big Show has always made me laugh and the idea of putting him in a comedy as a big doofus only seemed natural. I was totally onboard. Then I saw the trailer.
Wow. Okay, um, so you know that saying about how a movie trailer is the studio trying to dress up the movie to make it look like how they wish it was? That’s what we have here. As far as I can tell, this is as entertaining as you can possibly make the movie look with the hour and a half of footage at your disposal. Yes, the best selling point they had in their repertoire was, “Big Show takes a monster shit on a bus.” Personally, I might have played up that the climax of the movie is Big Show vs. Terry Tate, Office Linebacker, but I don’t know if that million dollar idea carries over to other potential viewers.
I’m going to go full spoilers on this baby, so consider yourself warned. Not that it matters, since if you’re reading this, you’ve either seen it already and want an echo chamber on how bad it is or you’re morbidly curious on how terrible it can possibly be.
Dirty Pair is about as ’80s as it gets, like Lily C.A.T., Demon City Shinjuku, and poorly thought out gratuitous shower scenes. Right Stuf is releasing the DVDs of the tv show as Dirty Pair: The Original TV Series, Pt. 1 DVD Collection. I’ve seen the OVAs and Dirty Pair Flash, but not the tv show, so I’m a little tempted. I should do a thing on the anime I watched as a kid, shouldn’t I?
Adam Warren had a great run on the DP comics, but good luck finding them.
A week ago, a guy calling himself thatasianguy started a Photoshop thread at Something Awful called “Wrong Movie, Wrong Subtitles!” The concept is that a still from a movie has subtitles from another movie, causing hilarity to ensue. I was drawn to the concept, since it was a fun exercise in creativity to take part in. I came up with a lot of different concepts and enough of it worked.
Yesterday, Something Awful used the threat for one of their Comedy Goldmine articles (titled Mixed-Up Movie Titles 2) and wouldn’t you know it, they used seven of my images. Not only that, but they used them as bookends for the entire set. I’d say that kicks ass. Definitely check out the link at least for 2xSlick and his Pee-Wee/Terminator mash-up.
That said, I thought it would be a good waste of a post to showcase all the images I made, including the many that didn’t make the cut. Apologies for the overly obscure ones. Especially the Kevin Nash image from Longest Yard.
Not entirely sure how I feel about it–the best parts of All-Star Superman were the parts that could only be done as a comic and would get stripped out of the running time of an 80 (or whatever) minute film. The death of Pa Kent and the tenth issue, which is essentially Flex Mentallo told in 22 pages (superheroes are here to save us, both literally and figuratively, and we created them to do so), seem like they wouldn’t translate very well, or even at all. Regardless, I’ll probably watch it. The people involved are pretty talented, and the trailer’s a-okay.
You can get All-Star Superman in two paperback volumes for about twenty bucks total (volume 1 and volume 2) or pre-order the oversized Absolute All Star Superman for… sixty-eight bucks. Absolutes are nice, but rough to read and reread. Choose wisely.
(when it comes back in stock).
, though.
was pretty cool, and my understanding is that it took some liberties with the source material. If you’re going to adapt something to a new context, use the original as a base and then work within the confines of that context. Direct remakes are boring.
, anyway. I wrote about it 
. I’ve seen the OVAs and Dirty Pair Flash, but not the tv show, so I’m a little tempted. I should do a thing on the anime I watched as a kid, shouldn’t I?
and 
) or pre-order the oversized 
for… sixty-eight bucks. Absolutes are nice, but rough to read and reread. Choose wisely.