Cheddarfrenzy
John Carter who was also in the Carpenters.
Ah, yes. Carter McCarpenter of the clan McCarpenter.
John Carter who was also in the Carpenters.
Ah, yes. Carter McCarpenter of the clan McCarpenter.
The second Maguire one is great fun, largely due to Alfred Molina chewing up every bit of scenery he can find. It has no need for origin stuff and has a pretty straight narrative with a single understandable villain. Like X Men 2, it just delivers a proper superhero story without any nonsense and is therefore the best of the lot I think.
Watched this last night. Everything with Alfred Molina in it is terrific, he's a superb villain brilliantly realised and the loud thumping noise whenever he is approaching is a particularly great touch.
Everything else is rubbish: Peter Parker spends the movie mooning after MJ, MJ spends the movie mooning after Peter Parker, Harry glowers in the background and gets a load of setup for the next movie, and it all feels like a box-ticking exercise of Things You Need In A Spider-Man Story rather than doing anything actually interesting or unexpected. It's a full half an hour before Otto Octavius even appears, and the whole thing just goes completely limp every time he's off-screen.
Very much looking forward to the third one now to see just how bad it can possibly be.
I remember thinking the McGuire films were shit back in the day, I can't imagine they have aged well.
New MCU Spidey is looking fantastic.
Certainly looks a lot better than the 144p version with incomplete VFX I saw on Tiktok the other day!
I am looking forward to the day when they let Spider-Man carry his own movie instead of always having a more established mentor overshadowing him.
Yeah, this looks good. Here's hoping they don't sneak in the other spiders-men.
On a rewatch, I noticed Dr. Strange's excellent mug.
Here's hoping they don't sneak in the other spiders-men.
The trailer openly and repeatedly references the multiverse, features one of Tobey Maguire's villains on-screen, and has a strong hit towards at least one other with that very recognisable Willem Dafoe cackle; it's been confirmed that Jamie Foxx is reprising his role from the Andrew Garfield movies.
If they've filmed scenes with Maguire and Garfield, I'll be pretty impressed that they managed to keep it under wraps somehow, but not surprised in the least – or even particularly disappointed, except that they've gone for more Peters Parker rather than branching out in the way that Spider-Verse did.
it's been confirmed that Jamie Foxx is reprising his role from the Andrew Garfield movies.
He's playing the same guy, but I'm not sure it's the same version - for one thing, Foxx claimed her isn't blue in this one - so whether that's Garfield's Electro, or Maguire's Doc Ock/Green Goblin is still a bit of a question mark for me. On balance, even if we're getting their villains, I think I'd prefer to keep the other Parkers out of the mix, but I guess we'll see.
Maguire's Doc Ock
Molina has said in interviews that it is – and that his appearance here is tied into the character's "death" in Spider-Man 2 somehow. They've also digitally de-aged him to look like he did in Raimi's film, so the odds of it being an entirely unrelated character à la the Quicksilver fake-out in Wandavision seem a little longer than they would otherwise.
Ah - I haven't seen (or sought out) much discussion of the thing, though I do remember seeing that he'd let slip more than Feige was pleased with.
What If…?* #3: better than 2, but not great. Where was Tim Roth?
Our meandering, eventual MCU rewatch hit Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 this evening. I hadn't seen it since the cinema, and didn't have it fondest memories (hence not having seen it since the cinema); it hangs together better than I remember, though I still think a couple of the early scenes could have done with a bit more attention.
It generally feels like it's trying a bit too hard to recapture the spirit of the first one, and undermines itself a lot by making basically every character a goofball - in the first move, the Guardians were all various shades of goof, but the villains and the Nova Corps, at least, were mostly played straight, which gave the heroes a bit of a foil. There's none of that here, so everyone is dumb, overly emotional, a relentless cynic, an unapologetic asshole, or (in most cases) all of the above, which means a lot of the gags - or character interactions at all - feel kinda mean-spirited. I know, thematically, that it's a movie about broken people and found family, and all, but fundamentally so was the first one, and it did it better.
Also, I like Mr. Blue Sky as much as the next guy, but the sound mix on the opening sequence is atrocious.
Thor Ragnarok next, looking forward to that.
Spider-Man 3 then - not quite as bad as I was expecting, the action sequences are far and away the best in this trilogy and Venom in particular is a very effective villain.
But it is about an hour too long, has more endings than Return of the King, has an utterly excruciating 30 minutes in the middle where Peter Parker becomes a complete moron, and is bogged down by endless, endless 'Peter and MJ' scenes which - given that I've come to intensely dislike both Maguire and Dunst and they have absolutely zero chemistry anyway - is a bit of a problem.
Furthermore it's a great big contractual obligation of a movie that has absolutely nothing to say and is really just spinning the wheels for just about everybody. I can see why they just decided to start over with a completely new cast. At this stage I'm thinking that whatever comes next, it can hardly be worse.
Have you not seen Amazing Spider-Man 2, then?
I haven’t seen either of the Amazing Spider-Men, they are up next.
I wasn't sure about What If…? initially but after four episodes it's really settled into something unique and interesting. This week's episode is outstanding.
Yeah, the first three were good fun, while (understandably, considering the runtime) perhaps feeling a little undercooked, or disposable, but the fourth was genuinely great.
What If #4
Spoiler - click to showApparently even the most powerful sorcerer in the universe cannot unfridge a girlfriend.
What If…? 4 was a mess. Broke my suspension of disbelief almost immediately, and I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did.
If there wasn't a lingering sense that some of this stuff might be Important Later™, I might just give up on the show entirely.
I watched a bit of the third What If (as by the description it seemed the one I'd understand the most) expecting it to be shit, but it seemed quite good. Will probably give them a crack from the start. It seems like all the voice talent is the original actors? Which is quite impressive, even if a bit of it feels a bit stilted and phoned in.
Most but not all of the actors return. There's a really good Chris Evans impersonator in episode 1 but I thought whoever was doing Scarlet Johansson was really poor.
None of them are as bad as Benicio del Toro, who turns up to reprise his role as The Collector and then does a completely different voice for no reason at all.
It's also Chadwick Boseman's last work before he died. There are a few lines at the end of the most recent episode that hit pretty hard, with that in mind.
Oh, OK, I assumed it was the real ones not trying very hard. Widow seemed OK to me, but I'll go from Ep 1 and see how I get on.
Hawkeye trailer:
That looks pretty decent. I'm glad they're not going for the same self-serious tone as Falcon and the Winter Soldier, at least.
What If…? #6 was the most coherent of the bunch since episode 1.
Black Widow is available now on Disney+ for everyone. Gonna watch that this weekend.
Black Widow is available now on Disney+ for everyone. Gonna watch that this weekend.
Yep, solid mid-tier MCU, lots of decent action sequences and David Harbour looking like he's having a great time, felt more Bond than Marvel in a lot of places. Overall a bit forgettable but then its status in the timeline (post-Civil War, pre-Endgame) makes that a bit inevitable.
The end-credits sequence threw me a bit.
Spoiler - click to showAn explicit tie-in to Falcon & The Winter Soldier, wasn't expecting that at all.
Not just that - it also seems to be setting up Spoiler - click to show(at least part of) Hawkeye, too.
Black Widow is very generic-film-that-happens-to-have-people-you-know-in-it. It was fine, but they do feel a bit like how the controls in games have slowly become consistent across pretty much all titles in the same genre. Go and watch a Marvel film and you know back trigger is shoot and X is reload sort of thing. Which is interesting - a lot of their success comes from the comfort factor I suppose. And having watched the terrible Gemini Man, which was FRESH NOVEL IP and finding it a generic slog fest through the same beats as a 1000 other movies with none of the wit and verve of a Marvel title I guess I'm happy to know I can select an Avengersy type film to watch and know I'll get a baseline of enjoyment and basic competence.
"That's my secret, Cap… I'm always basically competent."
At least good and also connected to 20 characters you already know, is a good pitch.
Black Widow was exactly that. It would have been better if it had been released in sequence though.
The last couple of episodes of What If…? were surprisingly excellent.
Spoiler - click to showI really wasn't expecting them to tie everything together in the way that they did. Really nicely done.
I hope Hayley Atwell gets the chance to do a live action version of Captain Carter at some point.
I thought it was alright too. The cast, who were generally good/likeable*, largely made up for the mild plot contrivances and annoyances, like the whole pheromone thing, the many instances where people were only mildly winded by things that really should've killed them, and what they did to Taskmaster**.
Spoiler - click to showOnly slightly related, and almost completely irrelevant, but I found Olga Kurylenko playing her really distracting - besides the fact she barely had to say/do anything, the daughter must've been 15 years younger than Romanoff (as she looks about six when she's "killed" by her), so why cast someone who if anything in real life must be older?
*Ray Winstone getting cast in anything where his accent isn't 'Ray Winstone' will never cease to baffle me.
**It's basically what happened to Deadpool in Wolverine Origins all over again, only even less people realise or care.
Don't worry, now that they have a multiverse they can do Taskmaster properly someday.
Don't worry, now that they have a multiverse they can do Taskmaster properly someday.
Or a 'What If…?' episode, which would probably work better.
The one solo Taskmaster comic I read he, among other things, went to a village in Argentina where everybody was a clone of Hitler, complete with silly moustache, regardless of their age or gender.
It was very silly, and I really enjoyed it, so the "serious" version in Black Widow was a bit of a shame.
A full trailer for Matt Reeves' The Batman dropped last night, and it… kinda rules?
It's a shame that they apparently feel the need to do the whole "we're not so different, you and I"/"who are you under the mask?" schtick again, but if that's the only complaint I have…
Now that it's out on Disney+, we finally watched Shang-Chi. It's fine. Sticks to the formula, and suffers for some very bad CGI/compositing work and an underwhelming final fight, but the cast do a decent job.
We watched it last night and we all really liked it. The first hour in particular is excellent, the bus scene is up there with Marvel’s best, Katy is a top tier comedy sidekick and it all just worked. The final fight is very much twenty minutes of CGI kicking the crap out of itself (and it’s disappointing how hard it is to follow exactly what’s going on there, given how clear and well-staged all the regular fights were) but it didn’t really detract from what was a very fun couple of hours.
The first hour is much stronger than the second, for sure.
At this point, surely someone at Marvel realises that their cookie-cutter final acts are starting to bore people. But then, people keep going to see the movies*, so I guess they don't want to look that gift horse in the mouth.
*Adjusted for pandemic impact, natch.
It just felt like a double cop-out for Shang-Chi, because the actual denouement of the story was the confrontation with his dad; it didn't still need a big CGI kaiju battle as well, except That's How These Things Always End.
Add me to the list of people who thought it got weaker as it went along; the cast was all good, the "down-to-earth" fights were all really good, and it all really appealed to me as someone who grew up watching a lot of stuff from HK and the region ("it's Tony Leung!"), but for all the fresh and exciting different lick of paint, we have seem much of this before, and the CGI really is wildly variable.
In fact, besides all the slightly shoddy action work (and all the good stuff, which there was also a lot of, to be fair), there was actually a scene of the main cast just all sitting around a table where I thought it looked like Wengwu wasn't actually there, because his face looked like it was lit slightly differently to everybody else, and I suddenly wondered if he'd actually been digitally de-aged or something.
I enjoyed Shang Chi last night. It was utterly devoid of any surprises and every story beat was the most obvious one but it was all well done and looked great so who cares. It was predictable in a satisfying way. It was also a new story for the MCU and looks like they have integrated it well enough so that's good.
Yeah we watched it too. I quite enjoyed a lot of it - the Hero style fights were pretty, the early characterisation was good in a very typical marvel way, Benedict Wong is always good value, the mandarin was fun again (even though it became a different film whenever he was on screen). The bit where they come out of the maze into the valley reminded me of landing on Pulse in Ffxiii or coming out if the city in Xenoblade… But it lost it a bit in the last 40 mins or so. A decent evening's entertainment nonetheless, which I guess is exactly what they were going for, so job done.
spiderman's pretty good
Cinema was pretty quiet at 11 am on a Friday.
Eternals. What the fuck. It’s an absolute turd of a movie.
Eternals is on Disney plus now, we've just watched it.. The CGI was pretty ropy in places, some of the acting was appalling (especially from Sprite and Ikaris, but honestly, nobody was great) , and a lot of the "comedy" was so flat it was like looking at a relief map of Norfolk. It did have some relatively interesting quandaries for the main characters though, some good (if overdue) firsts for marvel (gay relationships! disabled people! It's almost like real life!) and some lovely cinematography when they dropped the cg. Plus I liked the mythology and Kit Harington was surprisingly winning in a small role.
Looking at the pros and cons in black and white like this, I'm not quite sure why I enjoyed it, but I did. It somehow added up to more than the sum of its parts. I think it would have been better as a TV series actually, given the number of characters and amount of new mythology introduced. Would have given it more time to build on the pros and taken the emphasis off the cons.
Filed under: slightly better than expected.
I could have written Cheddar's post myself. Enjoyed it despite the dodgy bits, might have been better as a TV series. I think even if it wasn't spectacular on its own, it's a good set-up for further stories.
It's just so dull and humourless and slow. The performances are wooden. The two lead actors have absolutely zero chemistry. All the dialogue is exposition. The plotline is stupid. And the whole thing is really fucking dark for some reason.
Can you imagine these dullards showing up in the next Avengers team-up? You'd want to skip their scenes.
Ooo Raimi, didn't know he was doing it. Looks like a slightly more interesting spin on the formula, but then I thought that about the first Strange and that ended up way more cookie-cutter than I wanted it to be. Still, I loved Wandavision so it'll be nice to see how they follow that up. I guess I should finish watching Loki at some point too…?