More Marvel Movie News....

A couple odd rumours have popped up recently surrounding two Marvel movie properties, both of which could stir up some controversy.

Michael B. Jordan
 

First, the rumour going around is that Michael B. Jordan is up for the role of Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot being directed by Josh Trank for Fox. The FF is still, like Spider-Man and the X-Men, a licensed property, meaning Marvel Studios is not making the film.

Jordan is an up and coming actor in Hollywood. He made his mark in the final few seasons of Friday Night Lights and the first couple seasons of Parenthood, before appearing in Trank's film Chronicle, which was a big hit. As a huge Friday Night Lights and Parenthood fan, I can tell you he is the real deal. I could easily see him becoming a movie star.

But, he's African-American, and here's where the controversy might spring from. Personally, I think you get the right guy for the part, who cares what ethnicity he is.

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" Set Photos Emerge!

A whole bunch of set photos have been popping up all over the place lately for Marvel's Captain America sequel, and they are pretty cool.

First, over at Spinoff Online, they released some shots of Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in action. The cool thing is that it seems to indicate both that Natasha will have a larger role than what was originally supposed to be a cameo, and that Cap will be sporting a variation of the Steve Rogers Super Soldier outfit he wore for a while a few years ago.

While I think it's a cool suit, I also think it's not the one I want to see Cap in all the time for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yeah, the Stars and Stripes are a little hokey, but it's part of what makes Cap such an iconic character. As Coulson so memorably put it in The Avengers, we could use a little old-fashioned.

Back in the Saddle

Bravestarr's relationship with his bionic horse is oddly homoerotic.

Did everyone enjoy that little break?

Obviously, you probably thought that The Nerd Report was dead and buried.  But like a zombie, or Madonna, or that hobo you hit with your car late that night and could have sworn was dead, some things won't stay buried.

You may be asking what kept the Nerdlinger from posting for almost two years, and the answer is too complicated to get into here. Let's just say it involves Bath Salts, a Mexican prison, and Burt Reynolds.

In all seriousness, it's been a busy couple of years. I can't say that I deliberately took a step away from the blog with anything resembling forethought. I simply ran out of time in my day due to many  factors, including a heavier work load at my job, Mrs. Nerdlinger's second pregnancy and the birth of our second spawn, etc. At a certain point, I decided that it was better to stop posting than to only post once a month. Things have calmed considerably since then. So, many apologies, and I hope you'll come back and continue to read the blog.

The important thing is that I'm back in the saddle again, ready to continue posting about all things nerd related. We've got a hell of a summer coming up, with Iron Man 3 about to open, followed by nerd heaven movies like Man of Steel, The Wolverine, Star Trek Into Darkness and Pacific Rim. It's Doctor Who's 50th anniversary this year, so you know I'll have lots to say about that. And there's always tons of comic news, TV news, and assorted geekiness just begging for my brand of half-baked commentary and pithy observations.

Let the hilarity ensue! Hope you all will come along for the ride with me!

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: