Jingus

That's no surprise whatsoever to anyone who's a fan of Deadwood (for several different reasons, ranging from the ironic to the tragically obvious).

I'm not gonna count anime movies, because that opens up a HUGE side category which is easily large enough to be its own separate thing. Just listing live-action adaptations, I'd rank 'em something like this: 1. Cemetery Man 2. Sin City 3. Oldboy (2003) 4. The Crow 5. Road to Perdition 6. Blade 2 7. A History of Violence 8. Punisher: War Zone 9. Deadpool 10. Constantine Finally, add 1982's Conan the Barbarian on there as an asterisk, if you can count it (the character first appeared in pulp novels, but he was in a whole shitload of comics over the years).

I'm trying to think of others, and there just aren't many besides the Turtles and Harley in contention. Most of 'em are Gritty 90s relics which didn't have permanent staying power, like Venom, Cable, Doomsday, Bane, The Crow, Spawn, Tank Girl, Morpheus and/or Death. More recently, I guess Hellboy, Jessica Jones, and Scott Pilgrim might count. And of course there's the various indy characters who've grown in popularity over the years: Rick Grimes, Jesse Custer, pick-your-favorite-Watchmen-character, guys like that. But at this point, the Turtles/Deadpool/Harley trinity is heavily dominant over everyone else in terms of last-three-decades popularity.

Come to think of it, Torgue's various rants do sound kinda like a recitation of old DEAN~! Workrate Reports as performed by Jesse Ventura. "IS IT JUST ME, OR DOES IT SEEM LIKE HE'S GONNA BETRAY THE F#@% OUT OF YOU?!"

Having just finally seen the movie myself: while I liked it a lot, it did already do some "piss on the comics" lost-in-adaptation meddling with the source material. Copycat, Angel Dust, and Negasonic were all HEAVILY modified from their comic-book versions, to the point where they might as well have been completely new characters with completely different names.

Whiplash: yes, and for two specific reasons. #1: JK Simmons really deserved that Oscar. He is on motherfucking fire in this movie, giving a titanic career-best performance which outshines and overshadows everything else in the entire film. #2: this is an incredibly rare thing, a movie about genius which actually focuses on how much fucking work it is to be a genius. The majority of the film is devoted to the backbreaking grind of rehearsal, showing the performers practicing their parts again and again and again until it feels like we could play the fuckin' piece. Most movies never do that, they show all the inspiration and none of the perspiration; at best, learning how to do something might get its own minute-long montage. Whiplash is the polar opposite of that, showing us how the protagonist even spends most of his spare time just watching videos of famous drummers at work. And it's a good thing that the movie has those two key winning qualities, because it's got a bunch of various flaws to counterbalance them. Simply put, no matter how brilliantly Simmons enacted the material, I did not believe the character of the teacher as he was written in the script. He's impossible. He's a cartoon. He does things which would never, ever be okay in real life. In the 21st century, you canNOT get away with slapping the shit out of your students in the middle of a crowded classroom with a ton of witnesses, period. Football coaches aren't allowed to do that shit to the athletes, let alone music teachers to their artistes. And really, when a member of your band shows up literally covered in their own blood from head to toe, would you let them walk out on stage and try to perform? It doesn't help that I kinda hated the main character and largely didn't give a shit if he succeeded in his quest to become a great drummer or not. In the music scenes, he's a cipher with no personality; and in the non-music scenes, he's a total dick to everyone else he ever meets. His treatment of his family and his girlfriend was so awful that it made me want to see the kid get smacked around some more. (And how the hell was he old enough to rent a car?) And the last act made NO sense at all: Now, the movie is admittedly pretty stylish; the music is great (I guess, I don't really know enough about it) and I dunno if the editing and sound mixing totally deserved their Oscars, but they were above-average at the very least. But still, in terms of "stylish portrayal of a genius performer losing their mind", this is maybe a 6 out of 10 on the Darren Aronofsky Scale. Black Swan did basically all the same shit as Whiplash and also managed to be a fuckin' creepy horror film at the same time. ...but I still woulda voted this for Best Picture over the goddamn Birdman. EDIT: and oh yeah, who stole that one sheet music folder?

The last movie made more money (including adjusted for inflation) than all the other Turtles movies except for the first one in 1990. $500 million in worldwide theatricals may not exactly be Avatar Money, but it's still a fairly respectable sum. And they certainly made a shit-ton of cash on merchandising. The difference between the Toitles and Deadpool is that 'Pool doesn't have his own globally-saturated multimedia franchise. TMNT is on its sixth theatrical movie, and at least four or five different TV shows; Deadpool only had his botched appearance in Wolverine Origins and a couple of brief cameos in cartoons about other heroes. The turtles have had literally dozens of different video games; Wade's had one. If you want to consume some TMNT programming, you have your pick of seriously about five hundred episodes of television; with Deadpool, you've mostly got fan-made Youtube videos. I don't know how different the demand is for these two products, but the supply is clearly lopsided as hell. Of course a well-made, heavily-advertised new movie that finally gets the character right is gonna make a big fat stack of dolla dolla bills yo.

Or, the success of this one causes the studio to be all paranoid about fucking up their new cash cow, and they demand a lot more control over the sequel. See the examples of Spider-man 3, X-men 3, and Avengers: Age of Ultron.

And once it opened the floodgates, the resulting tridimensional deluge was truly Biblical in proportion. Ya know how goddamn many 3D movies we've gotten in the current trend? BoxOfficeMojo has My Bloody Valentine listed way down at 141st place on their sales chart, right above an Imax documentary about the Hubble telescope, and right below Ghost Rider 2.

Having just watched this: yep, I'mma vote one Saoirse Ronan film. What a marvelous, precious little experience The Grand Budapest Hotel is. It's like a dollhouse made of faberge eggs, inside a snowglobe. I think I prefer my Wes Anderson films rather the same way I do my Coen Brothers joints: the more stylized and further detached from reality, the better. It's the sort of movie which can end with "and then all these good people died horrible pointless premature deaths" and not feel nihilistic, but also set up the goofiest shootout this side of a Marx Bros movie (the one in the hotel at the end) and it does so in a manner which feels completely logical and justified. A perfect cast of actors whom are all posed and worked like puppets, to great effect; and oh lordy, but is this one of the most visually beautiful experiences I've seen in a while.

But... they're still doing the documentary format. A little bit less than they were, but even in the recent episodes they're still having the characters talk directly into the camera and everything.

I didn't even know they were back from the break, so I just now caught up with the last two episodes. Honestly, I don't see much difference. The biggest change instigated by the network cluelessly meddling with the show seems to be that it's now an ongoing subplot in the storyline that the network is cluelessly meddling with the show. And, agreed that Uncle Deadly is the breakout star of this show. I'd never even heard of him before, he's a pretty obscure character; he was only in a tiny handful of original The Muppet Show episodes, his only appearances in the movies were mostly background cameos, and he never showed up on Muppet Babies or Sesame Street or any of the other side projects. But he absolutely kills it on the show, giving us a much-needed foil for Piggy who can actually manage her and put up with her shit.

Hanna: ...I dunno? Probably not. What a schizoid movie. It's got plenty of great highlights, when it's being a character study of a particularly fucked-up young woman, and doing that Luc Besson thing where it's poking around inside the head of someone who's been made into a living weapon. That shit is great, just watching Hanna being the basketcase that she is and having no idea how to deal with the everyday world, and the actors (aside from a lot of silly accents) are all on point. Too bad the boilerplate spy-chasing thriller stuff is so rehashed, and they didn't even bother to finish microwaving it before splatting the mess onto a plate in front of us and expecting us to eat it. The fight scenes are all shot in that Christopher Nolan style where it seems like the camera angles and editing are actively trying to prevent you from getting a good look at the action, and the chases seem laughably implausible; the final climactic showdown is especially misjudged, handled in such a goofy manner that it almost seems to be asking for us to snicker at it. And Hanna's secret origin seem like it belongs in a completely different movie, it's practically some scifi bullshit from a Van Damme flick from the 90s. This needed to be a lot more Hit Girl: Psychologically Realistic Edition and a lot less Jason Bourne: Universal Soldier.

For good reason, because it's not Michael Bay. It's a completely different director. His name is Jonathan Liebesman, and he's usually a WORSE director than Michael Bay. This is the guy who made such spectacularly terrible movies as Darkness Falls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Battle: Los Angeles, and Wrath of the Titans. The last Turtles movie is the BEST thing he's ever directed, by a huge margin. And they decided to can him for the sequel and have a different guy doing the upcoming film. ...and while I wouldn't defend it as a "good" movie, I still say the 2014 film was the best theatrically-released Turtles film since The Secret of the Ooze. Which is, I know, the lowest of hurdles to overcome. But let's all look back at TMNT 3 and know that it coulda been worse.

...and I realize that I'm posting my reviews in the wrong thread. Again. But so did Caley this time, so I ain't gonna bother to move these.

Either I'm getting old, or Takeshi Kitano is. Either way, his film Outrage just didn't entertain me nearly as much as his yakuza thrillers of the 90s did back in the day. This one feels particularly joyless and grumpy, kinda like Goodfellas with most of the comedic and character-building scenes cut out. The characters are uniformly a bunch of shallow violent idiots, and not FUN shallow violent idiots, but the sort of egotistical hair-trigger mooks who go around looking for so many fights that it's a true miracle that they've managed to live this long. The movie throws a huge ensemble of random gangsters at us, never tells us practically anything about most of their personalities, and then we spend sixty minutes watching them punching each other followed by an additional thirty minutes of them shooting each other. Towards the end, it turns into such a repetitive marathon of executions that it almost feels like Kitano's darkest joke ever, although I sadly get the feeling that it was all meant quite seriously. Hell, Takeshi himself is barely even in the movie, he basically plays a supporting role and fades into the background more often than not. The only time the film ever springs to life is in the scenes involving a hapless diplomat who is increasingly baffled by the yakuza's insane behavior as they draft him further and further into their schemes; so, naturally, this poor fucker only gets three scenes and then the movie literally forgets about him, he just never shows up again. Thumbs way down; I expect better from Kitano than this hackish nonsense. It's the least personal, least stylish, most perfunctory and anonymous piece of filmmaking that he's ever produced. It doesn't even make sense on a level of simple narrative logic; what was the end goal of the boss's big conspiracy, to kill every single one of his own employees? How the hell was that supposed to help anyone? I'm told there's a sequel (which seems fucking unlikely considering how this movie ends) but if it's anything like this one, I'mma stay far away from it. This ain't no Sonatine, not by a long shot.

Further down the path of "disappointing genre mashups of the old west": y hello thar, Cowboys & Aliens! Honestly, I had expectations for this movie. Yeah, practically nobody seems to have liked it, but they were kinda vague on explaining exactly why. And many of the same people said many similar things about Jon Favreau's previous directorial effort, Iron Man 2, which is still a movie I enjoy very much. Furthermore, consider the deep roster of acting talent in this film, and their even deeper level of quality in projects rather like this one: Paul Dano, Walton Goggins, and Keith Carradine all have completely separate yet completely awesome track records of starring in fucking awesome movies set in the 19th century. I mean, fer fucksakes, those three guys can claim everything from McCabe & Mrs. Miller to There Will Be Blood to Tarantino's recent Chef Boyardee (not-quite-"spaghetti") westerns. But MAN did the filmmakers drop the ball like a hundred times in a row on this one. Cowboys & Aliens is agonizingly pedestrian, a movie which seems bah-gawd determined to obsessively give us the exact same shit we've seen in a thousand other movies. (If nobody else has called this Wild Wild War of the Worlds, then I'd like to know why not.) The characters are constructed out of the thinnest of all possible cardboard, the action scenes are dull and listless, the special effects look fake and the aliens are the same old slime-n-claws cliche we've seen for almost the past forty years straight, and the overall plot is so goddamned predictable and generic that I actually started to get angry at the giant committee of writers who'd managed to polish this concept into a handful of smooth gravel with none of those pesky rough edges that might offend anyone ever. Sheeyit, they even managed to rip one particular subplot from Battlefield Earth of all fuckin' places, to what should be the everlasting shame of everyone involved. And jesus CHRIST am I SO TIRED of "the outnumbered heroes throw a bomb into the one weak spot of the enemies' giant fortress and then immediately win the entire war" being the ending to every single fucking scifi/action flick that ever gets made anymore.

Good, there's still several I wanna see too (and I'm done with it now, but I picked the WORST time to get hooked into a Breaking Bad supermarathon). The Warrior's Way: no. The filmmaker (a film school teacher who'd never made a movie before or since) basically wanted this to be "Zack Snyder's Shanghai Noon", but instead came up with something that looks more like the bastard child of Wild Wild West and Ninja Assassin, directed by Chris Columbus while trying to pretend he's Jean-Pierre Jeunet. There's nothing wrong with the basic plot of "an Asian swordsman (country unspecified, but the film's made by Koreans) defies his warrior clan by refusing to murder an infant princess from a rival clan, and he takes the baby and escapes to a wacky town full of colorful misfits in the American Old West". Well, nothing wrong with it besides being a grab-bag of different cliches being superglued together; but still, the real problem isn't the material, it's the execution. The rookie director is terrible at shooting fight scenes, relying way too hard on CGI and slow motion; but he's even worse with the actors. Despite having a perfectly serviceable cast, everyone is turning in some of the absolute worst line readings you've ever heard in your life. Okay, I wasn't exactly expecting anything great from Tony Cox, who has been uniformly shitty in every movie I ever had the misfortune to watch him in; but Geoffrey fuckin' Rush is made to look equally clownish and talentless, which is just pathetic if not outright rage-inducing. I mean, if you thought Rush was half-assing it in the Pirates sequels, watch THIS shit and see just how good those films look in comparison. The only person who comes out of the whole thing looking good is poor Danny Huston (despite spending half the movie wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask), who manages to have a fun interpretation on his terribly generic villain, as is per usual by "Danny Huston is the villain in a shitty action movie" standards.

Oh, it was ALSO a horrifying vomitorium of brutality so nihilistic that even the film's various characters repeatedly admitted out loud that they had no idea how to do anything in life except for murdering each other; but it was so goofy and over the top, with the violence often stylized in such a Troma-like fashion, that I'd argue "fun" was to be had at least part of the time.

That mustache: better or worse than the one he had in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? And yeah, yeesh, didn't we get a LOT of really terrible serial-killer thrillers in the 90s? The were basically just giallo films with less style and more characters sitting around in wealthy houses while reciting endless psychobabble. Silence of the Lambs had SO many lousy, lousy copycats which just went on forever and ever; so much so that they actually spawned serial killer SUBGENRES, like all the Basic Instinct clones and all the Se7en wannabes. Even straight-up slasher flicks got in on the act, with Scream and its horde of knockoffs all pretending like they had to have some kind of psychological depth behind the killer's identity and went through the motions of being an actual who-dunnit mystery. We got so many of those damn movies that a show like Dexter actually feels plausible; because for all the serial killers Dexter keeps coincidentally bumping into, we've seen even more of 'em in various movies for over a decade. And, poor Rutger Hauer. He shouldn't have been stuck in Dolph Lundgren's career like that. There's not many actors who are legitimately as greatly talented as this guy is, who have been kept in such a terrible direct-to-video ghetto for so damn long. In between The Hitcher and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, did he make a single film which was actually, genuinely GOOD? And I don't mean in a "hey, Surviving the Game is pretty fun if you're totally drunk while watching it late at night" or even a "I'm the one guy who say Mr. Stitch and I remember it being decent" kind of way. I don't demand that everything the man does must be a masterpiece on the level of Blade Runner, but it'd be nice if even half of his output was anywhere near as fun as Hobo with a Shotgun was. Even poor bastards like Lance Henriksen had an infinitely better overall decade in the 90s than Hauer did.

I just watched Death Promise (with Rifftrax, since those fine gentlemen recently addressed this one) and holy shit, guys, seriously. There's a genuine sense of anger from the riffers at the shoddiness of the whole project, at the sheer lack of creative effort that the filmmakers put into anything. It's like Rudy Ray Moore was handed a script of River City Ransom: The Motion Picture but then he tried to direct it all like his hazy memories of drunkenly watching The Street Fighter a couple years back. The boardroom fight scene is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever witnessed, it's the "Tommy Wiseau buys flowers and greets a doggy" of kung-fu battles: And even that's immediately topped by the single funniest non-Enter-the-Ninja shuriken kill of all time, at about 15:15 on the following playback: It's well worth watching, if you're a fan of fucking terrible beat-em-ups that strangely pretend to be blaxploitation flicks (despite the majority-white cast). The full movie's here, sadly unRiffed, you gotta buy that part separate:

I think Wanda in the movies has indeed gotten the "Steve Reeves as Superman" treatment, she's WAY less all-powerful than in the comics. The Stark/Rhodes/Vision combo should be able to take out the entirety of Team Cap even without Widow and T'Challa's help.

The complete and accurate answer to this question will always be not enough times.

Last Man on Earth is by far the most faithful of the various adaptations in terms of its fidelity to Richard Matheson's brilliant original novel. That's what the original book was like: no wacky adventures in the big city, just this lone hermit who stubbornly refused to move out of his own house in the suburbs when the apocalypse came calling.

"that fucking ending" is really the only way to react to the rage-inducing finish of The Descent 2. SO motherfucking terrible. And really, the whole movie is pretty rubbishy, filled with impossible contrivances and lots of direct contradictions to the first film's established canon. It's not often that you find a sequel which both metaphorically AND LITERALLY shits all over the original movie. And yeah, why hasn't Neil Marshall ever done anything nearly as great as The Descent? I mean, Dog Soldiers was pretty good, but it's nowhere near the same level; and I thought Centurion and especially Doomsday were awfully disappointing. Really, his second-best directorial achievement is probably the "Blackwater" episode on Game of Thrones.