Wii Controller Mountain

Today on my way to work I saw a whole mountain of Wii controllers (“wiimotes”). No joke, there were a huge stack of boxes (about 15×15 ft wide and around 6 ft tall) on the sidewalk all marked “Nintendo Wii Controllers” and a bunch of dudes looking like they had just moved a few hundred boxes full of controllers sitting on the ledge. Not a whole lot else to say about that, but it was pretty cool.

the Avengers movie will probably suck…

…unless Jon Favreau directs it. For serious.

I grew up with Marvel comics and I love them. On one hand I really want the Avengers to be a good movie, but… I just don’t seeing it adding up that way.

I watched Watchmen over the weekend and I can’t say I was particularly impressed. I loved how it looked, and the first 15 or 20 minutes were fantastic. The rest of the movie… I just don’t know what to say. Sure, my hopes were high, but this was not just underwhelming, it was boring. I enjoyed most of the action (the death of the Comedian and the prison break especially), but the movie seemed kind of like the Emperor’s New Clothes: Despite the shot-for-shot word-for-word translation of the text, there just wasn’t anything there underneath.

Director Zack Snyder had his work cut out for him, that’s for sure. I just wish he’d lived a little and taken some chances. That being said, I’m totally stoked for the 3+ hour long super-long cut with Tales of the Black Freighter on it and all that extra stuff. Why? Because I think it’s all that extra stuff that makes a movie interesting.

And that’s my main problem with a lot of the big budget superhero franchises. They just weight themselves down with plot twists, set pieces, and additional villains until they quit floating and sink like character-less, plot overloaded stones. X-Men did it with X3, Spiderman 3 was a huge mess, and who can forget (no matter how hard you try) the steaming piles of shit that were the last few Batman movies before Christopher Nolan went back to square one? And, I don’t think the Dark Knight is innocent of villain escalation either. Hell, I’ll go right out and say it: The Dark Knight would have been better if it had just dealt with the Joker and left Two Face for the next installment of the series. Afterall, aren’t the Joker scenes the ones that we keep going back to? The bank robbery. The Joker applauding Gordon’s promotion. The interrogation. Heath Ledger’s performance was amazing, of course, and they are a great deal of why those scenes are so memorable, but it’s also because of the comic book history that’s there. Two Face was great, but couldn’t we save something for the next movie? Two Face (not Harvey Dent) had maybe 45 minutes of screen time… Then he up and died. One of Batman’s greatest enemies gone in half an hour. It felt like a footnote. For my money, Hellboy II was the best superhero movie of the last year.

The studios don’t seem to realize that they don’t have to do everything at once. The comics have been around for decades, and they haven’t been successful because each one tops the number of enemies of the last, but because the X-Men, Batman, Hellboy, and all of the other great superheroes have built relationships with their readers over time. While it may have been the blades springing out of Wolverine’s hands that made me pick up the comic, it’s the cigar-chewing, bad-ass rebelliousness of the character that kept bringing me back.

So I’m glad to see that Jon Favreau will most likely helm the Avengers movie, because he gets it. He came right out and said just as much here. The Avengers has something like 10 major characters and they’ll probably be fighting a whole other team of villains and probably an army with robots as well. That promises some excellent action, but please–just make it about the people, er, super people.

Bask in the Awesomeness of IMAX!

I just got back from seeing Watchmen in IMAX. First off, let me say that I will watch anything in IMAX. I could literally watch paint dry in IMAX. Why? Because it would be incredible. You would be able to see every little detail of the paint dry. You would see how the paint seeps into wood and all the little air bubbles popping out of the paint like a mini tar pit. It would be great. Last summer I watched Speed Racer in IMAX. Unbelievable. I’m probably the only person who loves the shit out of the Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer, but I think it’s fantastic.

Anyway, IMAX is the best way to watch any movie, because the process turns the film into something else. It’s almost like a combination of a microscope and telescope. It brings everything far away closer and it brings the close things right in front of your nose. It pairs the epic scale with the minute detail, and I think there’s real beauty in that process. People talk about blu-ray and high-def and say that they can pause the movie and see the pores on Nic Cage’s face and where the makeup is caked on too thick–but only on IMAX are those pores turned into 2 ft. wide craters. Final word: I will watch anything in IMAX. So needless to say, I have no regrets coming out of IMAX Watchmen. Had I seen it at my local AMC, however, I might think otherwise. IMAX 3-D? Don’t get me started on 3-D IMAX, or I’ll be gabbering away until the sun comes up.