See Cap and Thor Fight......Guys?

This whole post is SPOILERY,  so proceed with caution!

So, with Avengers currently shooting bigass action sequences on the streets of Cleveland (doubling for New York) some youtube clips were bound to make the rounds. I never thought they would be this cool, though. We've got footage from the filming of a fight sequence featuring Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans). They're mostly fighting guys with mo-capture suits on, and the scuttlebutt around the interwebs is that the villains are going to be (POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW) the Skrulls.



And finally here's the God O' Thunder smiting a Chevy:



So that's all pretty cool. If you're a lifelong Marvel Zombie, you've got to be jazzed to see those two characters kicking ass together.

"Drive" Trailer Looks Badass

Below you'll find the trailer for Drive, a new low-budget thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for criminals. And yes, while this looks a lot like every other movie about a monastic, disciplined and honorable crook who gets in over his head, it's been a while since I've seen a really good version of that particular story. This one could be it. The cast looks great, and holy shit, is that Albert Brooks? Awesome.

It's A Bird, It's A Plane...

...yeah, you know who it is. Warner Bros. released their first official shot of Henry Cavill as the Man of Tomorrow in Zack Snyder's upcoming Superman: The Man of Steel. Take a gander below:

That's pretty awesome, actually. The detailing on the suit is a little busy, and is it me or does the cape seem absurdly long? Anyway, I like the look of Cavill. He gives Supes a sense of intensity and power that the more earnest portrayals have always missed. I'm still a little guarded, mostly due to how Snyder's movies seem to be heading on a downward slide. Dawn of the Dead was great, 300 was good but a little flawed, Watchmen was faithful but lifeless and Sucker Punch was mindblowingly awful. Haven't seen the one he did about owls, but assume there will be scenes that start off in slo mo and then ramp up to regualr speed. But Christopher Nolan and David Goyer are overseeing the film, so they could curtail some of Snyder's weaknesses and play up his strengths. Who knows, but this shot certainly has piqued my interest based on its atmosphere alone.

On a side note, recently watched all of the original Christopher Reeve movies. Beyond nostalgia, I was amazed at how well the first two films hold up, especially Richard Donner's cut of Superman II, which is head and shoulders above Richard Lester's more campy version. Also astonished that I found Superman IV to be vastly superior to Superman III. Yeah, IV had like a dollar ninety-five as a budget, and it looked like it.  But III seemed completely uninterested in telling a Superman story, and way more interested in making a Richard Pryor comedy. And by trying to do both, it winds up being neither. It's painfully unfunny. Pryor isn't even as funny as Ned Beatty was in the first two Superman films. The only bright spot is Reeve's continuing brilliance in the title role, and an almost unbelievably luminous Annette O'Toole. That's it. Everything else is godawful.

On the other hand, its cloying naivete aside, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, is at least trying to tell a Superman story. Gene Hackman is back, and though his wit is a shadow of his former excellence, bad Gene Hackman is still fun to watch. Margot Kidder is more involved, which is good even if she somehow looks ten years older than anyone else in the film aside from Jackie Cooper. Mariel Hemingway is quite good, and the much ridiculed Nuclear Man is actually a good physical foe. With a little more care (which new producer Cannon Films was unable to provide given their meager funds) the script and film could have been tooled into something actually enjoyable. As it is, it's a goofy little B-movie, and far easier to sit through than Superman III.

So, let's hope The Man of Steel is more Superman I & II than III or IV.

Apparently, A Mixed-Race Spider-Man Will Destroy the World.

Spider-Man is perhaps my favourite super-hero ever. It's for a lot of reasons, but mainly it's because he is the best example of the everyman super-hero. I'm currently in the midst of a big reading project where I'm reading every single Spider-Man appearance in chronological order. So far, I've read about two decades worth of Spider-Man stories.

These days, Spidey exists in two separate iterations published by Marvel. The first is the mainstream Spidey, the one who has existed since 1962 and stars in Amazing Spider-Man, Avengers, and a couple other books. But over a decade ago, Marvel created a separate line of comics from their long-established line, called Ultimate Marvel. The original idea was that Ultimate Marvel would feature characters from their starting points, in contemporary times and without any established continuity, allowing creators to take them in brand new directions.

The first Ultimate series was Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Brian Michael Bendis. And, well over a hundred issues later, Bendis is still writing it today. I read the series when it first started, but around the 100 issue mark, I stopped reading it. I had always really enjoyed what Bendis and his collaborators were doing with the book, and I'm still not sure why I didn't keep up with it. I can say that Bendis did do some really exciting things, tweaking the story of Peter Parker and his classic arcs without losing sight of his core qualities that give him resonance.

Just recently he made waves with a story arc where Peter Parker actually died. That's right, they killed off Peter Parker. As in, no more Spidey. Now first off, I am not naive enough to believe he'll stay dead forever. He'll be back, that's for sure, it's only a question of when. That decision made enough waves, but what came out in the last couple of days really sent some people on the interwebs into insanity.

The new Ultimate Spider-Man will be a half-Latino, half-African American kid named Miles Morales. And the comic world cracked in half with some of the most racist bullshit spouted on message boards across the world. Here's a selection from Bleeding Cool of some of the most hateful:

Teaser Poster for "The Dark Knight Rises" Hits Webs

Can the the teaser trailer be far behind? Will it be attached, as many think, to the new Harry Potter flick? If it is, I think it'll be like that first teaser for The Dark Knight, maybe some dialogue of a very, very brief snippet of footage. Why? Well, they're still actually shooting, so how much could they have to show? Anyway, the teaser is good, it's definitely visually arresting. I'm not sure it's supposed to be foreboding or uplifting, though. Take a look:

So, is the motif supposed to communicate the sense of the hero rising to lift up the city from darkness into the light of day? Or is it communicating destruction? I lean towards the former, given that this is the end of the trilogy and the culmination of what Nolan has been trying to do with the franchise. Gets me jazzed though.

Less Than Meets The Eye

In the past, I have railed against the Transformers movie franchise. I freely admit that I have hated each and every installment. Before any fans accuse me of being an elitist snob with pretentious film tastes, I have to say nothing can be further from the truth. I like big summer tent pole extravaganzas. I like films that aspire to be a great time at the movies, nothing more. And I've liked Michael Bay films. I don't think that he's the end of films as we know it. I don't think he signifies all that's wrong with American films in and of himself. I liked Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon. They were all solid action blockbusters; not deep by any means, but they delivered on the promise of some thrills and explosions and fun. I even thought The Island, while bad, was kind of trashy fun with a neat concept at its core.

But the Transformers franchise is the Anti-Christ, and it must be stopped. Seriously. It's not because these films are thinly disguised toy commercials. And it's not because these films are basically about giant robots fighting each other. I love the idea of giant robots fighting each other. I loved it in the 1980s, when I couldn't get enough Transformers. I love it now. And I have to admit that, by and large, the franchise of films does deliver on the promise of giant robots fighting each other. No, there are different reasons why I believe the movies are actually bad for you.

I've posted before on how much I loathe this franchise. And I held off watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for about as long as I could. I saw it about six months ago. And it didn't let me down at all. It was just as big a mess as I thought it was going to be. Casually racist, blindingly misogynistic, and totally incoherent. Not all of that was Bay's fault; the script was god-awful. But the little touches that were undoubtedly his were among the most aggravating. That awful Stepin Fecthit pair of Autobots may not have been his idea, but the tiny transformer that humps Megan Fox's leg probably was. Worst of all, his visual style and quick cuts made the action scenes so cluttered that any clear picture of what was going on was almost impossible. The screen simply became filled with metal crashing into metal, with bad guys and good guys indistinguishable from each other.

I don't care if you're voiced by Nimoy, you still suck.

With the third film, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I honestly wiped the slate clean. The trailer was really strong, and it looked as if he was really going to pull out all the stops, and so I went in with an open mind. And it was an improvement, notably in the way it handled the action. The battles were no longer an indecipherable mess, but were clearly and efficiently directed, with Bay's skilled deftness with such set pieces seemingly back to the level of his earlier films. The major final battle in a decimated and war-torn Chicago is really a sight to see. Every single cent spent on visual and practical effects are up there on the screen, showing you things that you can honestly say are thrilling and bold.

The story is also better, or at least, almost coherent. Certainly it makes more sense than any of the previous films. There's a great little prologue involving the Moon Missions of the 1960s, and Shia LaBoeuf gets an interesting character arc at the beginning of the film; how does a guy who's saved the planet twicedeal with being seen by pretty much everyone around him as slacker doofus and not explode from frustration? It allowed for some interesting scenes for him to play. And LaBoeuf really does act his heart out.

But, that's where the good things end. There's still the same rampant misogyny, which is really getting tiring. Bay infamously fired Megan Fox after she made a few disparaging remarks about the guy, and replaced her with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a model who is not an improvement in any way. In fact, I thought she was a robot herself due to her complete inability to express any emotion whatsoever. I thought he might have corrected his treatment of women in films by hiring the astounding Frances McDormand, but she provides nothing aside from a slight obstacle, and her government agent character is not only set up as a jerk, but she also needs to get her butt saved by John Turturro's embarrassing caricature. Bay also manages to sneak a joke in about the Japanese and how those crazy people make strange machines like photocopiers! Awesome.

Remember how much you loved this guy? Yeah, he's nowhere near this movie.

The story completely sabotages its own hero, transforming Optuimus Prime from the wise noble warrior of the first two films into a merciless engine of destruction in this film's final act. There's also (and SPOILER WARNING here until the new paragraph) a part of the story where Prime and the autobots pretend to be dead until after Chicago is razed and thousands are dead because "your leaders had to learn" some sort of lesson about....well...giving in to giant robots, I guess. Well, thanks for letting thousands of people die, Optimus Prick, hadn't you sworn to protect us in the last two movies? Awesome object lesson, big guy. Where'd you learn that from, George Bluth?

In the final analysis, this film suffers from the same problems that both the earlier installments suffered from, namely laziness and a lack of heart. The effects and the action set pieces are not treated this way, but the story and the characters most certainly are. People don't behave consistently, and caricatures are placed right next to so-called actual characters that we're supposed to care about. The action, as well done as it is, is also pretty intense for a film series that is designed to appeal to 11 year old boys. More than one good guy coldly tells various bad guys, "I'm going to kill you". I'm not saying that PG action films can't be that intense, but they have to earn that level, and Transformers doesn't. It's a toy commercial, and its tone is so all over the place that when it does go to the dark place, it feels woefully inappropriate rather than an earned escalation.

Again, I feel this is different than other bad movies, say like Green Lantern. Green Lantern understands its audience, and tried to make a film for them, they just made mistakes that led to a bad film. Transformers: Dark of the Moon thinks its a great film, and makes choices that seems to say, "They're going to come see it, so we don't have to care that much about story or the characters, we can just throw anything we want in there as long as it ends with a giant robot battle." That's crass, and the epitome of soulless marketing.

It has made a huge amount of money, so I'm guessing Transformers will be back. Here's hoping Bay has had enough and feels the need to move on, because a fresh mind may still be able to give us the gooey robot centre, without wrapping it up in all that soullessness.

Explosions! Shooting! Punches! DeNiro! Facial Hair!

Wow, okay, the trailer for Killer Elite has come out. Now, from what I can decipher from this trailer, Jason Statham is a Killer, being hunted by a mustachioed Clive Owen (also a Killer). To up the ante into "aw no, you di-in-n't" territory, Owen kindaps Robert DeNiro (Statham's father figure. Oh yeah, also a Killer).

There are so much balls in this trailer that women may become pregnant simply by watching it. The only way this film could be more manly is if someone opens a closet during the film and the corpses of Lee Marvin and Steve McQueen fall out, shooting rocket launchers. Check out the manliness below:



The best part is when they show Statham, tied to a chair, leaping out a third story window in slow-mo, and then flash the title card, "Based on a True Story". That actually had me laughing out loud.

Still, it does look like it would be a good time at the movies. It's just so over the top insane that it might be a blast to watch. Also, it makes me sad for Clive Owen. Remember when he was a big-time Oscar nominated super-star? Closer? Children of Men? The many thought was perfect for James Bond? Someone should introduce him to the concept of saying no to things like Shoot Em Up. Then maybe he wouldn't have to do movies where he's second fiddle to our generation's Jean Claude Van Damme and forced to grow a hideous perv 'stache.