Iron Man 2 - will it suck?

Is it me? I have a sinking feeling about Iron Man 2. It might just be my eternal negativity about everything, but I don’t know. I haven’t really been impressed by any of the stills that I’ve seen. I haven’t been able to take a look at any footage before Studio execs strike them down. And until I see footage, I can’t shake this feeling that it looks stupid. Now, you might be reading this in the far-flung future, having already seen Iron Man 2, and saying “What are you, a moron? I just saw the movie and it was freakin’ awesome!”. But you have to realize that I’m writing this on October 27, 2009. At this point, this is what I have to work with:



First of all, why Whiplash as the main villain. I know he’s a classic Iron Man villain, but of all the classic villains they chose Whiplash? Whiplash, seriously. You’re trying to follow up the success of the first Iron man movie with a spectacular sequel, and you come up with Whiplash. Why not Mandarin? Why not Titanium Man? Or even the effin’ Melter for eff sakes.What is Whiplash’s power? Well . . . he has whips. Really?? How the hell is he supposed to fight Iron Man??? Can you imagine how lame that would look?




And what is up with the leather strap fetish gear Mickey Rourke is sporting in those silly stills? People are fond of saying that Whiplash goes through various phases of “armour” (if you can call it that) and this is an early phase. Okay, but if it looks that dumb, why even show it!? I didn’t think it was possible, but they actually made a costume that’s even sillier than the comic one. And don’t tell me he fights Iron man at a NASCAR rally. When will Americans learn that nobody cares about NASCAR? Even Americans don’t care. It’s just Americans living in the Southern states that seem to be obsessed with this crap, but anyone south of Texas, North of Iowa and East or West of the lower 48 States doesn’t care!! I like how they try to shoe-horn in NASCAR guys every-so-often into TV commercials and movies. You’ve probably seen it. Some smiling dude walks into frame and everyone goes gaga. I’m usually left thoroughly confused “Who the hell is that guy??”. I remember one scene in the Herbie reboot with Lindsay Lohan where these three guys go up to Herbie and start muttering lines like “I’ll tell you what, that’s a sweet ride.” “Yup, sure is.” “Yup, I’ll tell you what.”. I had no idea what was going on. I was like “are these guys stars?? This scene looks like it was made just to have them yap about “I’ll tell you what” but I can’t place the faces. Am I supposed to know who these fart-heads are?”. Later, I realized that they were NASCAR “stars”. Are you effin’ kidding me?? I predict that there will be a scene in Iron Man 2 where NASCAR “superstars” walk up to the Iron Man armour:

NASCAR “superstar” #1: I’ll tell you what, that’s some sweet armour.

NASCAR “superstar” #2: Sure is, I’ll tell you what.

NASCAR “superstar #1: Oooooweeeeh, some sweet design, I’ll tell you what.

NASCAR “superstar #2: Yup.

NASCAR “superstar #1: Yup.

NASCAR “superstar #2: I’ll tell you what.



Who in the hell are you guys??

It’ll be the single most embarrassing moment for Marvel in it’s decades-spanning history. But enough of this NASCAR bashing. The NASCAR scene reminds me of a typical comic-movie formula, where the hero gets defeated by the villain (or narrowly escapes an attack from a villain), then licks his or her wounds and comes back more pumped up and improved to defeat the villain in the final act. Okay, but we have a problem. Our villain is Whiplash, who has almost nothing covering his leathered up torso, and we have frickin’ Iron Man!!! Are you seriously going to show Whiplash give Iron Man a run for his money? And we’ve heard rumours that War Machine is in this movie. Okay, cool. I would like to see a live-action War Machine. But does that mean that lame-looking Whiplash is such a formidable foe that Iron Man has to actually team up with War Machine and Whiplash needs not one, but two Iron Men to defeat him?? Are you kidding me??? And let’s say that Whiplash is not the only villain. We know that Black Widow is in this. But now does that mean that Iron Man has trouble fighting some skinny chick and a dude with leather straps and bandolas??


Even Crimson Dynamo would be awsome

You see what I mean? This isn’t shaping up well in my mind. Why couldn’t they go with Mandarin or Ultron or someone as the villain? And it's not like they can save them for a sequel. What sequel? Last I heard, it's straight on to the Avengers movie. And I don't want to see Mandarin fighting the Avengers, I want Madarin to fight Iron Man in an Iron Man movie! Hopefully it’ll all work out, but Paramount and Marvel Studios have to understand that by not showing us footage of how these Iron Man 2 characters will work, and releasing out-of-context stills, you’re making Iron Man 2 look wholly stupid. We’ll see come next year.

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-Deceptisean

Harry Potter and the Ridiculously Lucrative Franchise

Okay, today I braved hundreds and hundreds of kids (okay...that's an overstatement...it only FELT like I braved hundreds and hundreds of kids) in order to bring this review to you. You're welcome. It's Harry Potter. You know, the kid in the glasses who has made billions of dollars, both on print and the big screen. That's right. People make fun of you growing up, calling your four-eyes and what not, and then someone writes a series of books about a four-eyes, and now that four-eyes is popular beyond belief. As a person whose worn glasses all my life, I'm proud of that fact. So for all the people who called me four-eyes growing up, all I have to say is you've probably paid over hundred dollars combined to find out the further adventures of that particular four-eyed kid, so how smart are you? Oh yeah, and eff you.

Anyhow, my childhood demons aside, this franchise has been amazingly good, I mean 6 movies in and not a bad one in the lot. They've gotten all the principal actors back (except for Richard Harris, and he would have been back, but unfortunately is deceased), and they've all been British actors, non of this American-pretending-to-be-British b.s. You know what this means. J.K Rowling might have written the books, but the Mafia is producing the films. This is unheard of! I seriously think Rowling sold her soul to the devil. There's no other explanation.

Well, people are calling this one one of the best of the franchise? Do I agree? No. I see that there's a lot more drama (and romantic entanglements) in this one than the others, the magic is about the same, the action is a little bit less. The best? This one still has plotholes, and for those who don't like spoilers, stop reading. Harry doesn't try and find out who the Half-Blood Prince is? I mean seriously, you're reading a spell book written by someone calling himself the "Half-Blood Prince", and you're not remotely interested in the author of said book? Then there's the relationship between Harry and Ginny...where exactly did that come from? Don't give me this horse manure either, about how she had a crush on him in the 2nd film, or how the camera took pains to catch her looks to him in the 5th film; let's face it, Ginny's been pretty much wallpaper since the 2nd film. Now she's Harry's main squeeze. Huh?

That being said, there isn't a lot to complain about. The actors are all back and if you liked them in the 1st film, well, you'll probably like them in this one as well. This movie is just building up to the climatic showdown we're all waiting to happen on the screen in the Deathly Hallows. Even with the (somewhat surprising) absence of Lord Voldemort in this film, we still have his Death Eaters running around, causing havoc, and he is very much still in charge. Hopefully, now that we've gotten rid of who-has-feelings-for-who in this film, we can get on with the good stuff, and get this conflict settled once and for all. Anyone expecting anything more than a setup for the final film(s), be warned. That's all this movie is.

I bid thee a fond goodnight

- Stephenstein

Rating 4 out of 5 stars.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen comic adaptation review

I haven’t seen Transformers 2 yet. No real rush. I hated the first one and all the stupidity I keep hearing about with TF2 like the sambo-bots, Devastator’s testicles, Bumblebee crying and still not able to speak, not being able to differentiate Megatron from the other Decepticons, sex jokes, pot jokes, etc. really soured me on wanting to see it. I’m a big Transformers fan – and when I say fan, I don’t mean that I saw the first Michael Bay movie and ran around proclaiming I was a fan, like James Thoo on Joblo.com. I mean I’ve known the TF franchise and all its moving parts since I was 5 or 6 and Transformers first appeared in North America. Now, I’m not a pig about it. I know that because there have been different incarnations of Transformers and different generations to experience them at different times, there will be those out there who have their favourite. Some people are fonder of the Beast Wars era than G1 or what came after. Some probably liked the one-off Robots in Disguise series. And there are young ‘uns who will worship Armada, Energeon and Cybertron (the so called Unicron Trilogy) when they’re older. And – Lord help us all – when kids today grow up, there will be a fan base for these trashy, non-sensical, disrespectful Michael Bay Transformer movies.

I picked up the comic adaptation for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen because I was curious to see this sequel with all the jokes, the noise, and most of the action distilled out. Let’s just look at this thing from a story perspective.

Overall, in comic form, Transformers 2 isn’t half-bad. The plot holes and logic leaps aren’t as gaping as G.I. Joe. The story is generally what you know: Thousands of years ago the Primes stole energy from suns of uninhabited solar-systems to supply Cybertron with power to run their planet. One Prime (the Fallen) wanted to steal energy from a particularly juicy sun (Earth’s sun) and the other Primes refused because our planet was inhabited. So, the Fallen kills all the Primes save for one. That Prime hides the Matrix so the Fallen can’t power his sun destroying machine and seals it in a tomb contructed of parts from the other Pimes and seals it with his “own life essence”. Anyhoo, there is a young Prime who is constructed around this time who turns out to be Optimus and doesn’t know his connection to the matrix and sun destroying machine. In current times, the Decepticons are still hanging around Earth, the U.S. government blames it on the Autobot presence, but really the Decepticons are looking for Megatron. They find him and somehow Megatron is able to communicate directly with The Fallen, like the Fallen is the Emperor to Megatron’s Darth Vader. Optimus is defeated by Megatron, Megatron is looking for the Matrix of Leadership in order to power a sun-destroying machine that is covered by the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids), Sam finds the Matrix first, radios the two military guys from the first movie to drop off the dead husk of Optimus at the Pyramids so he can use the Matrix to revive him, he does and Optimus goes toe to toe with the Fallen.

As a story, all the fundamentals are sound here. This adaptation seems to come from a script stage before all the jokey ad-libbing and animation flourishes like Devestator’s testicals and Skids and Mudflaps’ jive-talking attitude were thrown in. Gone are the pot jokes and stuff. The only stupid thing I didn’t like was Bumblebee blowing up the Witwickeys’ house in the beginning because a couple of household appliances came to life via the All-Spark shard that Sam has (not only does Bumblebee not speak, but he is apparently a dumbass too). Skids and Mudflap add absolutely nothing to the story, only appearing alongside Bumblebee throughout. This might explain why the filmmakers felt the need to beef up their appearance in the movie, so you knew they were there, by adding all the “cap in yo’ ass” language – for the “kiddies”. Megatron gets a lot of speaking lines in this adaptation, along with Optimus. Optimus is shown to be a hero that everyone from human to Autobot respects and leans on in a crisis, which I like. As for Megatron, he and Starscream bicker in one scene (after Megs is revived), then Starscream fights alongside Megatron for the rest of the movie. There is one scene I liked in the adaptation where Megatron takes over all of Earth’s communications and appears on every TV at once demanding that Earth hand over Sam in 24 hours or the Decepticons will rampage through Earth. This reminded me of General Zod in Superman II when he calls out Superman on TV. Is this in the movie? If so, that's frickin’ cool! Just Megatron threatening Earth on the world’s TVs is cool. All other characters get short shrifted. Soundwave speaks alot in this adaptation, but he's still a stupid satelite, so he just hovers over Earth telling the Decepticons where to find everything. What a waste of a popular character. Ironhide and Ratchet are back and do nothing. Arcee disappears after the first scene. Bumblebee still doesn’t speak. Another thing that struck me was how serious the Agent Simmons character was (John Tuturro) in this adaptation. He still works at a pizzeria like in the movie, but gone are references that he lives with his “mummy” and he’s the one that actually kills Devastator (this probably happens in the movie too – as I’ve said I still haven’t seen it) but he’s actually useful in this comic. The two army guys from part 1 are pointless except for carting Optimus’ lifeless body to Egypt.

After reading this adaptation, I couldn’t help think that Transformers 2 could have been awesome had they went in the direction of this comic (which represents some sort of early script stage) and just beefed up the robot characters more, like give Ratchet and Ironhide more history with Optimus and more importance in the Autobots’ operations. And give the Decepticons more screen time to actually speak and develop personalities, like maybe teasing human “fleshlings” for sadistic fun, or have some Deceps join with Starscream while others are more loyal to Megatron. As it is, Devastator appears at the very end and the Constructicons never appear before that scene. And Fallen hovers somewhere for the entire movie and shows up at the end when the Matrix is finally taken from Sam. It’s stuff like that that makes me shake my head. There was certainly room to add more depth to the robots if they cut most of the useless human stuff (do we need a five-minute pot-gag?). If they concentrated less on the stupid human characters like Sam, skanky Mekaela, Alice the useless Pretender Transformer who fails, Leon or whatever Sam’s friend is called, Agent Simmons, etc. and more on the Transformers whom this movie is named after, this could have been much better. And stop with the stupid jokes already. This adaptation doesn’t have any of that stuff and it’s fine!

Anyhow, this adaptation is okay. It still didn’t make me want to see the movie anytime soon. It also makes me wonder how much longer this current run of Transformers movies lasts with the already flimsy foundation they’ve built for it. As I said, the movie seems like it could have been much better had they concentrated more on fleshing out story and characters. I’ll still watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen eventually, plugging my nose and holding my breath.

2.5/5

Deceptisean