Even superheroes make mistakes...
Iron Man 2. I still want to see it, in spite of some of the mixed reviews that are coming out about it (though the geekier sites I read seem to love it a ton). From what I've seen, Robert Downy Jr. is still able to deliver Tony Stark's personality, so that's (hopefully) not at issue. The action scenes look good, the villain is played by a competent actor, and there's Samuel L. Jackson who usually raises the watchability of whatever he's in. So while IM2 may be as good as the previous film, superhero movies are prone to mistakes, as we've seen in the past:
Mistake the first: Too many villains. "Spider-Man 3" did this, as did "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin." Two hours just isn't enough time to flesh out a decent bad guy unless they're reprising a role from a previous film. Either you wind up not caring about any of them as threats, or one gets a decent amount of development and the other is about as interesting as a faceless hireling, but perhaps with a more interesting choice of outfit. For some reason, Batman's Two-Face seems to be destined for this second banana status.
Mistake the second: Abandoning the source material. This isn't a plea for movies to follow existing comic arcs to the letter, as that's pretty much impossible. What I'm talking about is losing the themes of characters that have been established, ways that they tick that makes them appealing. Rather than making the Phoenix in X-Men 3 a cosmic entity gone awry, they kind of made Jean Gray a more powerful version of herself with homicidal tendencies. In the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom went from being a rival of Reed Richards to... I'm not quite sure what they were shooting for, actually, but it didn't make me want to see more of him.
Mistake the third: Retelling the origin when you don't need to. If a comic has been adapted on TV and in films before and has a fan base that includes kids who believe the titular hero is real long beyond the time they think Santa Claus might not be, you don't need to retell the origin. Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man no longer ever need to have their origins retold. And even if a movie is about a more obscure hero, having a few lines from the person in spandex to another character explaining the high points can be enough.
Mistake the fourth: Not having someone for the hero to fight. See "Superman Returns" and Ang Lee's version of "The Hulk." Just like having too many villains can mess things up, not having one that the hero can go toe-to-toe with makes for a dull film, usually. I was hoping that "The Matrix: Revolutions," though disappointing, was giving me a taste of what a Superman film might contain. When Neo and Smith started hitting each other hard enough to send shockwaves over the city, I was thinking it'd be awesome if that were Superman and Darkseid.
Mistake the fifth: Starting serious and trending goofy. The Batman franchise did this, though it can be argued that giving the first movie to Tim Burton probably meant we'd hit "goofy" sooner rather than later. But there's a big difference between Burton's gothic-weird style and what appeared to be an attempt by later directors to capture the camp of the 1960's TV show. Similarly, the Superman films from Richard Donner gave us nuclear weapons and General Zod, but in later installments we ended up with Richard Pryor's computer and a solar-nuclear clone.
I almost wanted to include "killing off the villain," as I would really like to see the Joker survive at least one Batman film. If nothing else, how are we supposed to ever have a movie based in Arkham Asylum? I'd almost say that I'd leave the better stories to the animated films, but DC Comics is canceling a ton of them. They do say there might be more "Batman Beyond." I would demand the original voice actors, but even without them, I'd still preorder the DvD.
Turning to TV, I was ready to just chalk this week's "Fringe" up to a bit of theme-week gimmickry, but I have to give them props for including singing corpses in the script. I'm also grateful they kept the "musical" part of it quite small, indeed. I do have to question the need for the episode, however. I mean, unless you were introducing your ten-year-old to "Fringe" and wanted a recap using a "Willy Wonka" vibe, it really didn't add much to the series. On "Supernatural," I'd say congrats to Matt Frewer for getting the role of "Pestilence." It helps bring him back towards the "geeky cool" side of things after he horrified me with stuff like "Lawnmower Man 2" and this thing from the 1990's.
And before we go to the linkdump, a few notes about the new Jonah Hex film: 1. Thank you for including a hint of the supernatural, but 2. dual horse-mounted gatling guns? I don't know any GM that would allow that in their campaign. And as it went on, I almost expected to see a giant robot spider. Though I will give DC loads of goodwill and leeway since they appear to be developing Starman for the silver screen...
- If my kid becomes a ketchup addict like many of his peers, I'll have to see if his mother will let me sneak this thing onto the bottle. At least it's not from "Twilight."
- To remind you just how fast even your oldest computer is, here's an ad from the era of wide ties and butterfly collars about the IBM 5100 portable computer.
- Just when you think there's no new uses for photographic materials, here's some laptopograms. They're photo film exposed to laptop monitor screens, then developed in a darkroom.
- Planet Noevo is a game reminiscent of many current zombie shooters: Defend and upgrade your ship while beasties come out of the ground to snack on you.
- An interesting art exhibition featuring the vulnerable side of superheroes.
- In a similar vein, a new photoblog has started up called Growing Up Heroes, featuring photos of kids in hero-related garb. It's just getting started, but it looks like it's got potential.
- If Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman don't do an amazing job adapting The Dark Tower, then they have forgotten the face of their fathers.
- And this is apparently being hailed as one of the best flash games, ever: Super Mario Crossover lets you play the original side-scroller but with a choice of characters from other popular 8-bit games, abilities and all!