-MAN, Sunday night TV is BORING these days. Even my usual fallback, the Game Show TV channel, shows nothing but poker games on Sunday night. I’ve been forced to watch that MERLIN miniseries on NBC. Not that it’s bad or anything, but it just does not attract my interest much, despite a good premise (Merlin in his young years). Neither the acting nor the stories nor the SFX impress me. It’s (almost) as bad as the “Original Movies” in Sci Fi, I mean “Sy FY”. Also it plays it loose with the legend (Merlin raised Arthur, they didn’t meet as teens). But, still better than nothing.
-Speaking of “Sy Fy”, they apparently completed the run of Gurren Lagann and are now airing Mobile Suit Gundam instead. Except, WTF? This isn’t the Gundam I remember from the 80’s! Is it a recreation? Well the first episodes sucked in my opinion. I guess I’m going to watch Rave Master instead. Yes, seriously.
On the other hand, AMERICA’S GOT TALENT (also on NBC, Tuesdays and Wednesdays) delivers as usual every year… in both the wonderful and awful categories. Seriously, I can’t believe they still air it when the contestants suck. I’m convinced that they pay at least some of them to make idiots of themselves onstage. I mean, how can anybody be stupid enough to think making noises with their hands is going to be worth a million dollars!? It’s especially frustrating in AGT because they will give the losers more screentime than some of the other acts. (Yeah, I know, some people just love to see others embarrass themselves in public. I just don’t.) Fortunately, the GOOD acts make up for it. They’re always fun, and sometimes even touching, like the Latino lady recovering from cancer who sang opera. Other highlights so far this year include the Afro-American kids whose mother was in a coma, the (pretty good) stage magicians, and the dude who sang “Old Man River” and cried with emotion. If you can stand the really awful acts (they tend to happen only in the early episodes, thank goodness) I recommend it.
-Just saw ICE AGE III, with my nephew (my real one, not my friend’s kids) his fiancee and his cousins (been a long time since we went out together as a family. It was nice. ) and it made me laugh more than I expected, maybe more than the two previous ones. On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly as touching. IA I and II had strong emotional cores (especially the first, with the human baby) but despite every character having a personal subplot they all felt secondary to all the Dinosaur Land stuff. I also don’t know if the Steve Irwin parody character (the Mongoose) was appropriate (but damn if he wasn’t funny!) And what do you know… a Tyrannosaur as a good guy, for once! It was fun, but I doubt any future Ice Age movies (if there are any) will be this good, if they keep downplaying the story for the gimmicks.
-Also at the movies, saw trailers for a lot of movies I didn’t even know were coming this year… like the CGI one about the guy who makes it RAIN FOOD… or (another CGI) one about aliens (who act just like modern humans) being “invaded” by… an astronaut? I need to look them up and see if they’re worth watching. (Though the alien “dog” (as in ALIENS!) was hilarious.)
-Also: WTF? There are POWER ARMORS in GI JOE The Movie??? Oh, come on! This is SO blatantly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of IRON MAN and TRANSFORMERS… And, WHAT THE HELL IS A WAYANS BROTHER DOING IN THIS MOVIE???
Personally, there’s not a lot worth watching on TV anymore. About half my channels are flooded with reality crap that I don’t care for. Granted, a few shows stand out among the trash at least.
As for the Gundam show, I think they’re showing Gundam 00 season 2. It’s really pretty damn good, though if you haven’t seen the 1st season, it gets kinda confusing a little bit. I just finishing watching subs of it about a month back.
America’s Got Talent is fun to watch, but I’m still pissed about last year when the black dudes with the violins got screwed out of winning. They got beat by a damn opera singer! Come on! They should really ban singing from that show…don’t we have enough as it is? It just bothers me that singers usually beat out cooler stuff.
Just saw the pilot of Warehouse 13, the latest [STRIKE]Sci Fi[/STRIKE] Sy Fy channel series. Basically, it’s X-Files meets The Librarian, with two federal agents (male and female) ending up recruited by some secret government people to find dangerous mystical artifacts and bring them to the titular warehouse, a several-miles-long subterranean building stocked to the brim with weird things like Evil Wish-Granting Tea Kettles. No, I did not just make that up.
As expected for a SCi- Sy Fy production, this is no big deal. Even the Librarian movies were more fun. The main characters are so obviously based on Mulder and Scully it isn’t even funny (though the one with mental problems seems to be the woman, as she’s tormented by the death of her partner (and ex-lover?) in what may be a haunting or just her imagination.) The other regular character is a scruffy nerd who runs the warehouse- by HIMSELF, apparently, and yet seems to have only access to primitive computers and vehicles (believe it not, his having to run miles across the warehouse to get some important intel to the endangered agents is actually (supposed to be) a climatic moment in the pilot!) Why would such a site not have more staff or better tech? Unless is is supposed to imply they are so secret that they don’t even get much of a budget. It would be a nice touch, if it didn’t feel like Sy Fy is just limiting the production budget. The only other meaningful character is a black woman (who may be MUCH older than she looks) who seems to be the boss or at least their main contact. I disliked her hardass act immediately, especially when she asked, “Do I look like a joke?” (with that hat she was wearing? YES!)
Anyway, the first episode had Lucretia Borgia- or an artifact with her personality- as the menace. (FYI, Lucretia was one of the most infamous members of the Borgias, a powerful medieval Italian family, who were both patrons of the arts and also accused of political manipulation, murder and perversions.) That might have been more interesting, but we hardly find out much about her, rather we watch the warehouse agents stumble around for clues for the two-hour pilot. I’ll however give them points for some of the dialog; the acting, while not amazing, at least seems natural. But this show hardly has the pizazz or FX of “Files” or even “Librarian”. I doubt I’ll follow it regularly.
-On the movie front: It’s official, they are making the Green Lantern movie, and it will star Ryan Reynolds (“Deadpool” in the Wolverine movie) as Hal Jordan, the first human Green Lantern. No info yet if any of the other human Lanterns will appear.
If handled well, this could be huge. Think Superman meets Star Wars! Though they’re going to have to power down the rings a bit, and they might redesign the GL uniform a bit as well. We’ll see.
They’ll definately redesign the costume. Based on recent movies, costumes are all capeless, except for Batman where it serves a functional purpose. Superman is the only one who seems to et away with it though.
More Movie News! Natalie Portman (you know, Princess Amidala?) will costar in Marvel’s upcoming THOR movie, as Jane Foster, the god’s human love interest. This puts to rest the fears that the movie would take place only in the past and not feature any modern-day characters (which would have made it a generic Thor movie, not a Marvel Universe one, in my opinion.) Portman is the only “Big Name” associated with the movie so far (unless you count director Kenneth Braga) and I suspect she was picked precisely because of that, because in the comics Foster was pretty much the damsel in distress and nothing else (they even wrote her off and replaced her with Lady Sif! (Thor’s wife in the original mythos.) They’ll probably boost the part just for her.
“Thor” is part of Marvel’s plans to set up an AVENGERS movie by first making big-budget movies out of the Hulk (check) Iron Man (check) Thor and Captain America (both coming soon!) Hey DC, step up the movie production or Marvel will steal your thunder!
And another TV Movie Review! Saw the first part of METEOR, NBC’s first disaster miniseries of the summer (the other being The Storm, coming right after this one.) As you can guess, it’s about a giant meteor (actually an asteroid) heading towards Earth after being hit by a comet (didn’t I see that in ANOTHER meteor movie too?) At least this time they show a lot of the smaller debris hitting Earth first. The US government prepares to nuke the thing into smaller chunks, but it turns out their data is wrong, and the only person with the correct calculations is the female assistant of a so-conveniently-killed-by-an-accident scientist, who is trapped in Mexico and desperately trying to reach them in time. Meanwhile the rest of the movie follows different people as they are affected by the bombardments: a farmer and his wife (a doctor), a small-town sheriff trying to keep down the panic, a yuppie couple on a road trip, and- an insane corrupt cop out to find and kill the family of the cop who outed him? I think the movie tries to make us care for all the characters and their plights, but a) there’s too many of them to keep easy track of and b) most of the things that happen to them (at least in part one) aren’t that interesting. To be honest I only cared about the female scientist, who has the kind of luck that only turns up in movies like this (she goes to the Mexican police for help only to find the station taken over by crooks; at least she beats the crap out of a would-be rapist). The killer cop actually pisses me off, as he just goes around killing people along his way for no reason while the other one tries to catch him (what does that have to do with the meteors? Unless a big one falls on them next episode.) The mini has its moments and the FX aren’t that bad (though I find the “switch to other characters by looking at them from space” quickly tiresome) but in general this is flawed even for a TV movie. Oh, there’s quite a few recognizable faces in there, including Christopher “Jumping Gigawatts!” Lloyd as the old scientist. It’s kinda sad because they don’t have much to work with here, but without them it would be even less cool. There’s also a BIG plot hole in that nobody detected the damn thing until it was 48 hours away from Earth! (I guess showing months of preparations would have been boring. ) Will the big meteor actually hit Earth? We’ll find out next episode (on Sunday Night, NBC.)
Filming for the GI Joe movie started before Iron Man was released. It’s hard to say that the power armors are a blatant cash in attempt on Iron Man given the whole chronology.
I cannot beleive that natalie portman is going to be in Thor. At least she plays a human, I was worried that she was going to BE lady sif. And that would have pissed me off cuz either her or her clone was in the movie “king arthur” playing a character too close to sif for me to sit and watch this shit.I cannot beleive they are going to have the Donald Blake story line. I figured it was great when they got rid of that idea. I remember the first issue that had Beta Ray Bill he got hit in the head with a frisbee and was like “what is this? some new form of attack?” what kind of shit is that? even The Mighty Thor plays some extreme bee now and then. fuck Donald Blake is this gimp with a walking stick, hits the stick on the ground and becomes Thor. This is a stupid idea, unless they oh I don’t know have him learn his lesson by the end of the film and get rid of donald blake completely. Love it.
Also, Wilfredo, check out the villains section on wikipedia, I just had to check a fact real quick. Thor is one of my all time favorite marvel heroes. My least favorite being the Fantastic Four. But Thor seems to have the coolest collection of Villains I have ever seen. Even Batman only has about 3 or 4 major villains they could use in a batman movie, I mean I don’t think there is a way they could make a poison ivy movie, or even a full on scarecrow movie, certainly not the mad hatter. And Spiderman has even less than that. what they did with sandman was amazing. did they entirely waste venom? absolutely. spiderman has GreenGoblin, Venom, and Doc Ock isn’t that great of a villain, he’s like “freeze ray!” classic villainy that doesn’t need to exist in this day and age, he stopped being serious in the 80s some time. and if they made a new spiderman film it would have to be rated r to do it right, because the only way to do it would to have carnage and you need an r rating cuz people need to be sliced and diced. and also they need to hurry cuz Jake Busey is getting too old to play him.
but anyway, my long term goal is to get you to realize I am just as big of a comic book dork as you are, so don’t talk down to me, and change your avatar its so smug it makes me angry, we had this conversation. also, check out the villains section. I could watch each one be in the movies. except it doesn’t have my favorite, Beta Ray Bill, which later became an ally, which is my favorite thing in movies and comics, where the bad guy becomes good.
Charle: Since they are going to be using this Thor for the Avengers movie, they probably will want him to keep his human form at the end. However since Portman is playing Foster, I’m pretty sure they will have her discover Blake is Thor, at least.
And hey, there’s room for more than one humongous comics nerd in here!
And my Avatar isn’t smug, he’s checking out some Hot Chick off panel. :hahaha;
) and it made me laugh more than I expected, maybe more than the two previous ones. On the other hand, it wasn’t nearly as touching. IA I and II had strong emotional cores (especially the first, with the human baby) but despite every character having a personal subplot they all felt secondary to all the Dinosaur Land stuff. I also don’t know if the Steve Irwin parody character (the Mongoose) was appropriate (but damn if he wasn’t funny!) And what do you know… a Tyrannosaur as a good guy, for once! It was fun, but I doubt any future Ice Age movies (if there are any) will be this good, if they keep downplaying the story for the gimmicks.