Jingus

The idea that they have no circulation or blood pressure is flatly contradicted by the Tarantino-sized geyser of blood which erupted from that one ninja who got his throat slit. Not to mention the fact that they explicitly told us that Daredevil DID hear that guy's heartbeat immediately beforehand.

After finishing the much-hyped episode 8: fuckin' meh, man. This is not a great show. The FIRST season was absolutely great, but this contrived horseshit is so far below the bar they've already set for themselves. A general thing I can say without spoiling is that the Punisher and Elektra storylines literally feel like they're happening in different universes. They're totally different genres. It's trying to mix Kung Fu with The Wire, and the contrast between the tones is just way too deep. I can't imagine Natchios and Castle even having a conversation with each other, any more than I could imagine Vic Mackey talking to Buffy Summers. Specific gripes: I'll get back to the show at some point, but for now I'mma go back to my marathon of Oz which was interrupted by Daredevil's release. Because a twenty-year-old nihilistic soap opera about assrape has felt a lot fresher and more interesting than DDs2.

There's a bunch of more recent storylines they could try. The obvious one would be where Matt gets his identity doxxed, and then just flatly refuses to admit he's really Daredevil and tries to cover the whole thing up.

With the tickets, I was just wondering "wait, what the hell are those?" because we didn't get a good look at them and I didn't understand what they were supposed to signify. With the other bit at the carousel... if that happened, then I guess I walked away from the screen for a minute, because I've got no memory of that whatsoever. Mea culpa.

fuckin' limited quote-box numbers: I could buy that... if they made any attempt to show Castle as being some disconnected-from-reality kind of psychopath. But they don't, at all. In most situations he's shown to be in complete physical control of everything at all times. The implied message doesn't seem to be "Castle doesn't realize how reckless he is", it seems to be "Karen really wasn't in any danger". Which is bullshit. If he's such a good shot, why did he fire at Grotto at least half a dozen times at the hospital and never hit him once, and in fact the missed shots sometimes came closer to hitting Karen than Grotto? Also, any number of his shots could've punched right through the walls and killed someone on the other side. And with most superhero shows, I wouldn't care all that much. Except that on this show, in the first season, they took extra-special care to make everything as realistic and procedural as they could possibly do about a superpowered blind guy in a devil costume. The second season seems much less grounded, they're just making up more shit as they're going along. Sometimes it feels less like the first season of Daredevil and more like some of the shit which eventually got me to stop watching Agents of SHIELD. That's true, it did. The whole Frank/Matt dialogue on the roof was interesting enough that, for the only time in my entire life, I was actually going "okay, what this product needs is less Rosario Dawson and Deborah Ann Woll, let's get back to the sausagefest with two macho guys growling at each other". (Although, even here, they fucked something up: the final Sophie's Choice bit with the gun was taken directly from the comics... but in the comics, Castle wasn't dumb enough to give Murdock a working gun that would actually fire.) And that awesome fight scene in the hallway and on the stairs was exactly what the season had been lacking in its first couple of episodes, Daredevil just wrecking everybody's shit with reckless blunt-instruments-everywhere abandon. That was GREAT; more of that, please.

Sorry for the shitload of spoiler tags in my rebuttal (I left out the ones I didn't have any great follow-up argument for):

Actually, I don't know how much of a compliment it is to take a filmmaker who's best known for his writing, and then to most highly praise the one film where he didn't write the script. But to me, everything in MAAN just synergized in a practically seamless manner; it's a movie that feels like it turned out much better than it should have. This easily could've ended up like, oh, like that shitty Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet. But instead, ya know what it reminded me of? Clerks. Both Whedon and Kevin Smith are much better known for their writing skills than their directorial wizardry (Joss is of course much better at it than Kevin, but work with me here), but in both cases their relatively anonymous stylistic preferences behind the camera synced up perfectly with the material they were filming. And also it helps that the cast did maybe the best job I've ever seen at speaking the Elizabethan verse in a manner which comes across as natural and easy to understand, without going out of their way to over-emphasize each line to make beyond-damn-sure that the audience gets it (looking at you, Romeo+Juliet!). And also, the slapstick was goddamned hilarious. How often do you ever say THAT about any modern movie ever? But the physical comedy here was executed brilliantly, especially in the scene where Benedict is outside and trying to spy on his friends while they're talking about him. Alexis Denisof was doing some genuinely Chaplin-level shit out there. No it wasn't, for several different reasons: 1.Since when is Magento THAT powerful? Before that, he'd never been able to lift anything that was even close to being that huge. 2.If he is that powerful, why doesn't he just drop the bridge on the prison and get the job done that way, instead of relying on his army of useless rookies, most of whom don't even show any superpowers during the fight? 3.If he is that powerful, why hasn't he used that level of power before? The entirety of the Statue Of Liberty is made out of metal, he could've just caused all the walls to collapse, the fight would've been over before it began. 4.Suspension bridges aren't really solid. If you rip one up as much as he did, it would've fallen apart apart like wet toilet paper, and he clearly wasn't concentrating the whole time to hold the entire thing together. 5.Most importantly, why didn't they have Jean Grey move the bridge instead? Magneto goes out of his way to recruit and mindfuck the most powerful mutant on the entire planet, and then does NOTHING with her. What's the point of her being there? She doesn't intersect with the rest of the plot to ever DO anything, she's off in her own little cul-de-sac of a subplot for the entire movie. "Magneto needs her power to accomplish something he can't do himself" would have entirely solved that problem, but they ignored the opportunity and in doing so created an even bigger plot hole. Didn't make much sense that he'd drag the whole team there, but it did at least try to give Hawkeye some depth to his character, which he needed much more than everyone else on the team. After all, besides his five-second cameo in Thor, he never appeared in any of the standalone films and desperately needed SOME kind of extra storyline. Overall poorly-done, sure. A wasted opportunity especially with Quicksilver, Days of Future Past did his character MUCH better. Although, Wanda's robot-vaporizing scream of rage was a pretty awesome little moment, and I thought her monologue about "for two days, we waited for Tony Stark to kill us" was one of the better speeches in the movie. Terrible. Worst part of the whole movie. No disagreement here, it should never have even been considered on paper, and in execution it didn't work at all. I liked it. Okay, his Skynet "protect humanity by destroying it" motivation was lame, but I thought Spader managed to put in an Andy Serkis-level performance through the CGI, he knocked it out of that park with his mo-cap and dialogue. That was the first evil robot villain I've seen in a long time whose personality actually felt unique and interesting. It was generic and forgettable, but that's the worst I'd say about it. And in a post-Man-of-Steel-world, I thought it was hilarious how much time they devoted to showing the Avengers going out of their way to save all the civilians; but hey, it makes them look like better heroes. And I did find Hawkeye's little jokes during this part to be genuinely amusing.

I hope the show gets better, because that second episode was just an embarrassingly large drop-off in quality from the first season. I'll keep watching because it's fuckin' Daredevil and I know what greatness this show is capable of. But geez that was a lot of nonsense to put up with, especially comparing that embarrassingly phony big climax at the end to the gorgeously realistic masterpiece of a claustrophobic donnybrook which ended the second episode of the last season.

Much Ado About Nothing is not only the very best movie Joss Whedon has ever made (by a HUGE margin), it's also for my money the best nontraditional Shakespeare adaptation ever made, with Kurosawa's Ran being the only other one that even comes close. It is a completely fucking brilliant work of cinema, perfect in almost every way ("almost" being that, like every modern version of Much Ado, it's got little idea of how to make the entire Claudio/Hero subplot not come off as the most disgustingly misogynistic thing ever, which is Shakespeare's fault in the first place). It's easily one of my favorite films of all time, period. Aw HELL no. X-Men 3 was garbage. Garbage script arc, garbage dialogue, garbage character derailment, garbage performances from most of the actors (I've never seen Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen putting so little effort into any other film), and totally garbage fight scenes. Its combination of arbitrary retcons and shock-for-shock's-sake deaths for several main characters were actively insulting to the entire franchise; there's a good reason why the entire last scene of Days of Future Past was entirely devoted to the theme of "don't worry, THAT fucking movie never happened". In comparison, Age of Ultron was just mediocre and repetitive and not-as-good-as-the-last-one, with a few genuinely really entertaining sequences which I mentioned above (and I'd argue X-Men 3 had precisely zero really entertaining sequences, aside from the throwaway joke when they capture Multiple Man (but even THAT was illogical when you think about it; how'd Magneto convince him to willingly go back to prison?).

Isn't it kinda obvious that he's drawn to look exactly like a horribly mutated version of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone? And count me in the group that says "some VB is better than no VB; but god-damn, guys, can't we have a FEW more episodes per... decade?!"

I personally thought it was the weakest entry in MCU:P2 and probably the worst movie that Joss Whedon has ever directed, but I still wouldn't say it's "bad". Not in a world where things like Frank Miller's The Spirit still regrettably exist. Heck, we've even got much worse examples of "lame followups which take great iconic characters played by the original actors and proceed to shit all over them", like X-Men 3 or Superman 4. It's hard to get terribly mad at Age of Ultron when it at leasts manages to give us a bunch of really fun individual moments: the party at Avengers HQ, the Hulk/Iron Man brawl, pretty much every dialogue scene with Ultron. Those were good enough to keep me from actively disliking the movie as a whole.

Having finished the first episode, and without spoiling anything specific: geez, this version of the Punisher just doesn't give a single fuck if he accidentally mows down entire herds of innocent people, does he? SO many of those gunshots came incredibly close to blowing civilians' heads off, and it seems like Frank's aim isn't very good in this show. So far he isn't being portrayed anywhere near as careful and disciplined as the character usually is in the comics.

A prequel to a movie which was entirely set around the concept that the cop and the crook had never met each other before? So, it's basically gonna be two different movies about two unrelated stories that just happen to be arbitrarily cramped together into the same feature?

Yep; and the really funny thing is, almost ALL of them were like that. The first two movies were adapted from novels... by completely different authors, involving completely different characters. (The original book was a sequel to The Detective, which was itself adapted into a Frank Sinatra movie back in the late sixties.) With a Vengeance was indeed written as a script called Simon Says (no relation to the godawful Dennis Rodman flick, to the best of my knowledge). The fourth movie was also an original non-Die-Hard script which was eventually rewritten to star McClane. Part 5 was the only one to be specifically written as a Die Hard project; and considering the results, shee-yit, let's hope they never do that again.

I was actually trying to forget his most recent work, considering one of 'em was Sabotage and I fucking hated that one. But then I think "well, he is the guy who designed that brilliant shot in The Other Guys where The Rock and Sam Jackson dive off the rooftop in slow-motion" and then I am at blissful peace again.

Considering that Congo was fucking AWESOME, what's your point? (C'mon, Bruce, don't act like it's not FAR better than the majority of films you've starred in.) And while I'd call it a bad movie, I still think it was probably the best WWE Film that I've seen. (I mean the ones they make in-house, not the ones they just distribute and slap the label on.) Of course he's done a buncha other stuff, he did the Bourne trilogy. (I specifically avoided that one because of how much people complain about its shaky camerawork, despite the fact that I personally didn't mind it and that such a stylistic choice would almost certainly be made by the director rather than the DP.) I just named Face/Off because it was my favorite on a visual level of all the movies he's done. I technically coulda named Anchorman 2 or Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey cuz he shot those too.

To be fair, the pedigree of the people involved with the new Ben-Hur is better than average. It's directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the guy who made a concept as silly as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter into something that was shockingly watchable (and he also did those awesome Russian Night Watch movies). The script is cowritten by the guy who wrote 12 Years a Slave. Lead actor Jack Huston is a damn fine performer, he was the traumatized veteran with half his face missing in Boardwalk Empire; and the rest of the cast is, well, WAY more diverse and colorful than you usually get in most of these modern swords-and-sandals epics. (And really, isn't it just goddamned amazing that sword-and-sandal action epics are now A Thing again?) On the technical side, it's a Who's Who of fine people: they've got the editor of Memento, the music composer of Snowpiercer, the cinematographer of Face/Off, the second unit director of Iron Man, the sound designer of Birdman, the production designer of American Beauty, the special effects supervisor of Mad Max: Fury Road, and the stunt coordinator of Captain America. That's a hell of a lot of talent, way too much for us to write the movie off as inevitably being doomed to failure. ...of course, all those people have also all made BAD movies, and the new Ben-Hur might still suck the balls of Christ himself. Ya rolls the dice and ya takes yer chances. But let's not judge the whole thing based simply on a shitty trailer, let's wait for the finished movie or at the very least an RT freshness score.

One unheralded and under-discussed income stream for stuff like BvS is the merchandising aspect. They sell toys, video games, t-shirts, commemorative cups, and about a million other things. The studio gets at least a little piece of every bit of that, but none of that income is ever reported to the public in terms of how much money the film actually drew for the studio's overall bottom line.

I don't think it's fair to count characters who were only in one movie, that's way too easy and there's countless examples. Let's keep it to protracted franchises. As for the Die Hard discussion, McClane also becomes a much more polished generic-action-hero-guy as the movies progress. -In the first movie, he didn't want to be there, at all. He was forced into playing hero because there was literally no other choice, and only did so after he repeatedly tried to pass responsibility off to the LAPD to come in and save the day for him. McClane spends most of that movie running and hiding; almost every single fight scene is instigated by the bad guys finding him, rather than him seeking out a confrontation. If suddenly Arnold Schwarzenegger had kicked down the door and massacred all the terrorists, John would've been all like "THANK GOD" and gone home a happy man, rather than the usual macho hero horseshit of being peeved at not getting the action and the glory. -Now in Die Harder, John technically has the option of saying "fuck this" and just abandoning the whole thing. Yeah, his wife and a buncha other people would die, but he wasn't literally physically imprisoned in Dulles Airport the same way he was trapped in Nakatomi Tower. He repeatedly instigates violence by poking his nose into the bad guys' business, starting right from the beginning when he follows the suspicious character with the Glock through the employees-only door. There's still a little bit of "enough of this bullshit, let somebody else handle it" when the special forces team arrives, but of course we all know what eventually happens there anyway. -Part three STARTS with John being forced into things, but John quickly tires of being a pawn in a larger game and decides to sabotage the whole thing from the inside. The whole "McClane must solve Simon's puzzles" subplot is dropped by the halfway point of the film, and the rest of it is John continuing to pursue the villain out of sheer altruism and personal anger. This is especially apparent at the end, when the conflict is technically over; the plot is finished, Simon's gotten away with it, and there's no longer any ticking clock or innocent lives in jeopardy to make it completely necessary to stop the villain. John is just so goddamn pissed off that he can't stand to not end the movie with a vengeance, and he chases Simon to hell and back out of sheer spite. -Live Free or Die Hard is aptly named, because McClane COULD have chosen to live free. For once, he's got absolutely no personal stake in the conflict which motivates the plot (remember, his daughter doesn't get personally involved until the last act). There's no real reason why he can't just hand Justin Long off to the FBI and then go have a drink. By now, John's become accustomed to seeing things through out of sheer habit. Killing entire armies of terrorists is what he expects of himself. "With great die-hardiness comes great responsibility", I guess. -And finally, the less said about A Good Day to Die Hard the better, but: at long last, this is a movie where John isn't even involved in things against his will. He literally flies all the way across the planet in order to go looking for a fight. And it's not like he could've expected to help; when he travels to Russia, his son is currently in prison on charges of attempted political assassination. There's absolutely jack shit that McClane Sr could do to aid McClane Jr in this situation, he's a street cop with absolutely zero experience in international diplomacy or Russian criminal law and he doesn't even speak the local language. So, it's a good thing that suddenly a whole buncha gunfights just so happen to occur and put John back in his comfortably familiar element. (And by god, he is COMFORTABLE in this film; he barely even seems like he cares that people are shooting at him again.) Also, he becomes more of a total dick over the course of the series. Remember how cool he initially was to random sidekicks like Argyle the limo driver? By the time he's dealing with Kevin Smith as a brilliant hacker who is risking his life to give McClane priceless information which is vitally necessary to stop the villains and which he couldn't have gotten from any other source, John is acting so inexplicably sour and hostile that you almost wish that Silent Bob would just tell McClane to fuck off and go save the world by his damn self if he's going to be such a whiny bitch about everything.

I'm guessing the latter, since DeMille never made a Ben-Hur movie. (Of which this new one is at least the SIXTH version, Lew Wallace's novel was first adapted as a film all the way back in 1907.) And upon looking it up, I was surprised to find that Now You See Me actually managed to gross over three hundred and fifty million bucks in worldwide ticket sales, making the sequel's existence much more explicable. To put it in perspective, that's over twice as much as Olympus Has Fallen drew; so if London Has Fallen somehow makes financial sense, then I guess Now U C Me Too makes that much more sense.

The Terminator, maybe? I dunno if it counts since we're really talking about half a dozen different robots, but he basically stays the same over the course of five different movies. James Bond is close. Daniel Craig tried to make him a bit more complex, and of course there's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but for the most part he tends to be played as the same guy from film to film within the tenure of each actor. I think John McClane in the first and third Die Hards is probably in further-apart psychological places than Bond ever gets in different films. And of course there's all the various horror villains who never fuckin' change over the course of a dozen different films, but I don't think it's really fair to count Pinhead or the Leprechaun for purposes of this question.

Looking at it from the point of view of the filmmakers: -Sidney Lumet's Making Movies is simply the single best book I've ever read on the subject of directing, bar none. There's a lot of books out there about creative decisions and practical considerations, but few of those are written by a five-time Oscar nominee, the guy who made motherfuckin' Dog Day Afternoon and 12 Angry Men. He goes step-by-step through the process of making a film, in production and pre- and post- and everything, always painstakingly illustrating his theoretical points with specific examples from his huge filmography where he points out some particular thing he did and exactly why he did it. -Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew is a nice journal of the making of his debut film El Mariachi, throwing together an entire action film with nothing but passion, duct tape, and seven thousand bucks. In terms of pure underdog inspiration, I don't think I've seen a better one. -Although, Lloyd Kaufman's books come first. All I Needed To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger is his autobiography, and Make Your Own Damn Movie! is his magnum opus in the how-to section. Both are... well, if you're a fan of Troma movies, you know the kind of general tone and humor to expect here. They're a lot of fun. Kaufman's following book series, Direct/Produce/Sell Your Own Damn Movie, unfortunately involve a whole lotta repetition and diminishing returns; but they're still worthwhile to anyone who's seriously thinking about working in indie film. -Speaking of autobiographies and entrepreneurs, Roger Corman's How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime is an interesting read, largely focusing on the movies that he directed in the 50s and 60s. And from the audience: -From a critical perspective, it's hard to beat the various bound collections of Roger Ebert's reviews. I'd especially recommend the ones devoted exclusively to his most negative reviews, like I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie. -For a sociological point of view: Kevin Murphy of MST3K and Rifftrax fame once wrote a book called A Year At The Movies which is absolutely fascinating. He set a challenge for himself: see a movie in the theater, every single day, for an entire year straight (and write a book about it). It's the best analysis I've ever read about the theatergoing experience, about why/where/how we go to see movies on the big screen in this communal ritualistic fashion. -For those interested in older history, Kevin Brownlow's brilliantly-researched book Napoleon is a great look at the historical and archival side of film appreciation, centered around pioneering auteur Abel Gance's legendary silent masterpiece of the same name.

Yep. They totally shit all over the magnificent gravestone that was Death of Spider-Man, all for... well, basically no reason at all. They did absolutely nothing worth noting with the character after resurrecting him.

Yeah, unless they change Negan a LOT from the comics, all this wacky speculation about false identities is nowhere near how it's really gonna go down.