Updated Marvel Movie Summary
The clear preference from last week (based on four votes!) was for me to talk about movies, so I will do so. I'll start by updating my Marvel Movie summary based on the three Marvel films I saw in 2012. This included two new films, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, and one older film, The Punisher, that I caught on Netflix while visiting friends in Philadelphia this summer.
Would Watch Again Without Hesitation
The Avengers - The consensus seems to be that it's the finest Marvel movie of all time, and in the running for best comic book movie of all time. I can't argue with any of that. I have never seen any comic book movie successfully juggle that many characters without at least a few of them feeling utterly superfluous, but somehow it felt like every single member of the team, plus Nick Fury and Loki, all got exactly the right amount of screen time and useful things to do with that screen time. They were all true to character. It's sort of ridiculous how many things went right in this movie. I halfway expect the sequel to be a disaster just because there's no way they can do it that well twice in row, can they?
Would Watch Again
The Amazing Spider-Man - I personally liked the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man a lot more than the Toby Maguire version. It seemed truer to the original character. Gwen Stacey was a lot less helpless than Mary Jane, and they get serious bonus points for showing a fight in the high school just like Ultimate Spider-Man. However, the Lizard was not much of a villain and the details of the origin story were better done by Sam Raimi the first time around. It's definitely not as good as Spider-Man 2, but it is probably better than Spider-Man.
Would Watch Again if I Was Drinking
The Punisher - Ok, so I saw this on Netflix Streaming on a respectably large television. I really love the character of The Punisher and I really, really love the storyline that was used as the loose basis for this movie, but it was just so poorly done. They get bonus points for showing The Punisher attack his enemies with subtle mind games, but everywhere else it seemed like they were trying to play it as a standard action movie with some vague semblance of reality - The Russian ends up just being a really strong guy, for instance. This was a huge mistake. The original comic book storyline had gangsters being killed in Central Park Zoo by polar bears, piranhas and pythons. Why not go all in? At least it wouldn't have been boring, which this version certainly was for large portions of the film. This would have been rated lower if Frank Castle wasn't one of my personal favorites. There's certainly no reason for you to see it.
It looks like there are three more Marvel films coming out in 2013, all sequels. Iron Man 3 is based on the Extremis plotline, which is one of the best ever, so hopefully that works out better than Iron Man 2 did. I'm not sure if The Wolverine is supposed to happen after X3 or between his origins film and X1, but either way it's based on another good storyline and should be fun. I'm not terribly excited about the Thor sequel, but I'm sure I'll end up seeing it anyway.
Would Watch Again Without Hesitation
The Avengers - The consensus seems to be that it's the finest Marvel movie of all time, and in the running for best comic book movie of all time. I can't argue with any of that. I have never seen any comic book movie successfully juggle that many characters without at least a few of them feeling utterly superfluous, but somehow it felt like every single member of the team, plus Nick Fury and Loki, all got exactly the right amount of screen time and useful things to do with that screen time. They were all true to character. It's sort of ridiculous how many things went right in this movie. I halfway expect the sequel to be a disaster just because there's no way they can do it that well twice in row, can they?
Would Watch Again
The Amazing Spider-Man - I personally liked the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man a lot more than the Toby Maguire version. It seemed truer to the original character. Gwen Stacey was a lot less helpless than Mary Jane, and they get serious bonus points for showing a fight in the high school just like Ultimate Spider-Man. However, the Lizard was not much of a villain and the details of the origin story were better done by Sam Raimi the first time around. It's definitely not as good as Spider-Man 2, but it is probably better than Spider-Man.
Would Watch Again if I Was Drinking
The Punisher - Ok, so I saw this on Netflix Streaming on a respectably large television. I really love the character of The Punisher and I really, really love the storyline that was used as the loose basis for this movie, but it was just so poorly done. They get bonus points for showing The Punisher attack his enemies with subtle mind games, but everywhere else it seemed like they were trying to play it as a standard action movie with some vague semblance of reality - The Russian ends up just being a really strong guy, for instance. This was a huge mistake. The original comic book storyline had gangsters being killed in Central Park Zoo by polar bears, piranhas and pythons. Why not go all in? At least it wouldn't have been boring, which this version certainly was for large portions of the film. This would have been rated lower if Frank Castle wasn't one of my personal favorites. There's certainly no reason for you to see it.
It looks like there are three more Marvel films coming out in 2013, all sequels. Iron Man 3 is based on the Extremis plotline, which is one of the best ever, so hopefully that works out better than Iron Man 2 did. I'm not sure if The Wolverine is supposed to happen after X3 or between his origins film and X1, but either way it's based on another good storyline and should be fun. I'm not terribly excited about the Thor sequel, but I'm sure I'll end up seeing it anyway.