Luke Judge

Visually, the graphics and 3-D technology are stunning. This is a movie that truly exemplifies what 3-D films should look like, with chunks of shattered buildings flying toward the viewer during fight scenes. The audience enjoys a new element of depth in even the simplest of shots, from a camera angle down an elevator shaft to following Iron Man's flights in his jet-pack-powered suit. This makes the film appear more interactive, allowing fans to feel truly immersed in the experience.

In addition to the alluring aesthetics, the most charming aspects of the film are the eclectic bits of personality each Avenger brings to the plot. There's a tinge of Tony Stark's self-absorbed cocky nature pitted against the humble yet heroic Captain America. The reclusive Hulk and stealthy Black Widow also help make for a compelling mix of characters. Thor and Loki, separated brothers and each gods representing the struggle between good and evil, add to the mounting conflict throughout the story as well. for viewers who haven't seen each character's individual feature film, there are enough backstory bits and revelations of personality traits to keep them in the loop.

With a star-studded cast representing Marvel's Avengers, there was little room for failure in terms of performances. The audience is familiar with most of these actors from previous screen adaptations, but this is the first time mark Ruffalo has played The Hulk, following in The Hulky footprints of actors such as Edward Norton and Eric Bana.

The 44-year-old actor certainly has a variety of film genres under his belt, with big roles in movies ranging from the quirkily romantic “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to the psychological thrillers “Shutter Island” and “Zodiac.” but Ruffalo fit into the time-bomb-tempered Hulk role well, acting as a scientist constantly struggling to keep his anger under control.

Underneath all the attention-grabbing combat and impressive visual effects, the movie is true to the comic book's feel-good ideals. The Avengers — alongside Nick Fury, the admirable agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s staff — board a massive aircraft to track down the coveted cube. with each supernaturally strong personality bottled up in one location for an extended period of time, tensions are bound to rise. This is exactly what Loki and his minions had hoped for, with the heroes' negative energy fueling the powerful cube.

But, in true comic-book fashion, when the heroes realize they need to put aside their differences and work together, success ensues.

“The Avengers” achieves just what the graphic novel intended: to tell a great story. one of the hallmark features of comics is the ability to portray moral-reflecting themes through images and dialogue, and that's exactly what Whedon did with “The Avengers” motion picture.

The movie delivers what fans love about graphic novels, leaving the audience feeling somewhat heroic, empowered, and fulfilled. in one of the most compelling and rewarding scenes in the film, Iron Man states something along the lines of: “If I can't save the world, you can be damn sure I'll avenge it,” encapsulating the energy and determination apparent throughout the adventure.

“The Avengers” makes its U.S. debut on May 4 in 3-D and IMAX theaters. Check out the trailer below, which premiered during the Super Bowl this year.

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aliens Comics captain america, d technology, elevator shaft

Violent J wants to play me a song.

It’s a late-summer evening in suburban Detroit, and J—whose real name is Joseph Bruce—is unwinding in his home studio, a compact yet neatly kept space decorated with wrestling belts and posters of Eazy-E and Michael Jackson. As one-half of the white-rap duo Insane Clown Posse, Bruce, a roly-poly 38-year-old, has recorded or produced hundreds of songs here. but this one, he says, is a favorite.

“Do you know who Color me Badd is?” he asks in his sleepy-bulldog voice, a lit blunt jutting from his mouth. “They were the shit. we did a song with their lead singer.” he cues up 2007’s “Truth Dare,” a thumping, midtempo number that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme sing-along, complete with playground taunts:

I double-dare you: Swallow every pill in the bottle.

I double-dare you: Tongue-kiss a toilet seat at McDonald’s.

I double-dare you: Dig up a body and take it home.

Give it a sponge bath, and do what you want with it.

As the track plays, Bruce’s musical partner and childhood friend, Joey Utsler (aka Shaggy 2 Dope), sits quietly to the side, nodding and rubbing the gothic D tattooed on the back of his shaved head. Utsler is 36 and lean, with talon-sharp fingernails and the sandpapery voice of a lifelong smoker. he tends to be more voluble than Bruce, who’s pausing the song every few seconds, explaining how he paid Bryan Abrams—the R&B smoothie behind such ’90s hits as “I Wanna Sex you Up”—a mere $10,000 to guest on the track. the two men have even been talking about signing Abrams to ICP’s Psychopathic Records, a label better known for makeup-wearing, murder-obsessed rappers than for preening lovermen.

The song ends, and Bruce beams in his chair. For an ode to hygienic necrophilia, “Truth Dare” is surprisingly hummable. It might even be one of Insane Clown Posse’s best songs. Of course, that’s not saying much, seeing how ICP’s discography comprises some of the most profoundly vile music ever made. In the two decades since Bruce and Utsler formed the group, they’ve churned out more than a dozen albums’ worth of gleefully misogynist, cartoonishly violent songs. In ICP’s world, rednecks are carved up and eaten (“Chicken Huntin’”), pedophiles are stabbed in the colon (“to Catch a Predator”), and STDs get their own anthems (“Bugz on My Nugz,” which is performed, in part, in the imagined style of high-pitched venereal crabs). “Our shit is definitely male-oriented,” Bruce says.

The ICP aesthetic is a below-brow mix of tales from the Crypt comics gore and puerile shock-jockery. It’s most proudly displayed during the group’s live act, in which Bruce and Utsler—both of whom hail from the suburbs—disguise themselves with black and white clown makeup and throw gangsta leans while dousing their audiences with sticky geysers of Faygo, a midwestern econo-buy soda. not surprisingly, the music industry has long treated ICP with the sort of wary contempt with which one would eye a Chinese battery landfill. Radio stations and MTV mostly refuse to play the band, while critics have declared ICP the worst act in music (Blender) and dismissed the group as a modern-day minstrel act (Spin). and though ICP has been signed to major labels several times, each deal has collapsed.

For years, ICP operated on the fringes of the record business, selling just enough discs to get the media’s attention, however unfavorable. but by the early ’00s, with Eminem and Saw-style torture-porn movies making millions, ICP’s face-painted crudity no longer seemed outrè9. For a good decade or so, most of the mainstream world basically stopped paying attention to Insane Clown Posse, and the group went underground.

That is, until last spring, when the men behind ICP did something so strange, so offensive, the rest of the world couldn’t help but take notice: They got deep.

In April, the group released a music video for a piano-plinking, synth-heavy song called “Miracles.” In the clip, Bruce and Utsler, dressed all in white, cavort in front of a series of epic, if poorly done greenscreen backdrops—the pyramids, outer space, a giant telescope. Lyrically, there’s not a single chopped-up hillbilly or chatty STD to be found; instead, the group praises the mysteries of earth, from the sun to Niagara Falls to giraffes. the song’s best-known lines appear just shy of the two-minute mark: Water, fire, air, and dirt / Fuckin’ magnets—how do they work? the clip was an immediate web sensation, mocked on Videogum and Gawker, lampooned in the New York Times, and eventually spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Though Bruce and Utsler had conceived “Miracles” as an earnest and fairly straightforward ode to the natural world, blog commentators and YouTube pundits were unsure of the song’s meaning: Did these guys really not know how magnetism works? (Answer: They do.) why do they view rivers and giraffes with such f-bombing fascination? (Because giraffes are cool.) and, most important: Is this all one big joke? (Definitely not.)

The attention lavished on “Miracles” was largely negative, but it was enough to propel ICP up from the underground—and the duo didn’t come alone. over the past decade, Bruce and Utsler have quietly built a massive pop-culture sleeper cell of fans, who call themselves the Juggalos (so named for a 1992 ICP song, “the Juggla”). While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band’s outsider status, helping albums like 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! debut at number four on the Billboard charts. over the years, in fact, ICP has sold a respectable 7 million albums. and that’s just the beginning. Juggalos also flock to ICP’s long-running online store, which sells everything from action figures to baby gear to an energy drink, Spazmatic. There are ICP movies, radio shows, and an annual music-festival-slash-brand-enhancer, the Gathering of the Juggalos. a recent Nightline segment estimated that Psychopathic has revenue of $10 million a year, and while Bruce disputes the figure, he owns four homes in Detroit and has already saved up enough to pay the college tabs for his two kids, ages 3 and 5.

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aliens Comics badd, friend joey, insane clown posse, shaggy 2 dope

It seems like the production designers are pulling ahead of the pack when it comes to getting the new Fantastic Voyage in shape. While they’ve done “everything but build sets”, per Deadline

aliens Comics fantastic voyage, production designers, shape

There was already a rumour doing the rounds, but Deadline Hollywood confirmed yesterday that Joss Whedon is the man in the frame to direct Marvel’s much lamented and highly anticipated Avengers film. A surprise choice to be sure, but a very good one as far as i’m concerned. You see, i was in the process of writing an article about the lack of bold choices of directors for recent comic book adaptations when i heard the news, and Joss Whedon’s appointment, above all else, can be considered bold.

I think it’s important to start out by saying that i’m not one of Whedon’s loyal fans. I loved Buffy and Angel, but was distinctly underwhelmed by Firefly when i saw it. I didn’t much like the characters, and thought the storylines were a little dull. I didn’t really get the whole Doctor Horrible thing either, and only watched the first two episodes of Dollhouse. So why do i think Whedon is such a great choice? He has after all only directed one film so far, right?

I went into Serenity not expecting a great deal, as i said, i don’t really like the characters, and i wasn’t expecting a great story. What i got was a film that, though it will never make my top ten films, i considered in many ways to be the perfect movie. I still wasn’t a huge fan of the characters, and i didn’t think the actors were all up to feature film standard. But in terms of storyline, plot, structure and pace, Serenity is the most well constructed, tightest action movie you’re likely to find.

Every element, incident, joke and character moment is revisited and paid off by the end, and the banter and action carry the plot through at breakneck pace with not a wasted second. That Serenity didn’t do better business at the box office is a travesty, because it means millions of people missed out on seeing one of the most well conceived sci-fi films of all time.

If Whedon can bring the same brilliance to the Avengers movie, with the rich characters and talented actors involved, it could really be something special. He has worked on Marvel comics in the past, and the ensemble casts in both Buffy and Angel were really his own Avengers, his own X-Men, with each individual character bringing something different though equally effective to the table. He is also apparently taking a pass at the screenplay, which is more good news. He has an ear for great dialogue, and a great ability to draw a plot together by utilising all the different strands, which should make for a great, multi-layered piece.

Whedon is definitely a risk though. He lacks feature experience, and his TV work can be looked at as an even mixture of success and failure. He has never really had to deal with big actors, and therefore big egos before. His departure from the Wonder Woman project, and the subsequent collapse of the proposed movie is also potentially a bad portent. But a risky appointment, to me, is better than the safe option. A risky appointment brings the hope of a genuine classic, whilst the safe option is highly likely to lead to mediocrity. This is why i am worried about some upcoming comic book adaptations.

The Green Lantern movie is currently in production. Ryan Reynolds is, i feel, great casting. His cameo as Deadpool in last year’s Wolverine movie was the best thing about it, and he is looking to be on the verge of superstardom. My reservations about the end quality of the movie rest with the appointment of director Martin Campbell. Don’t get me wrong, Campbell is a very solid director. He was responsible for GoldenEye, my favourite Bond film, and Casino Royale, seemingly everybody else’s favourite.

Look beyond Bond, however, and there isn’t a lot to suggest he is capable of putting out a spectacular Green Lantern film. Remember, Green Lantern’s power is extraterrestrial in origin, and many of his stories take place away from Earth, with a wide variety of unusual characters. Campbell’s style is very gritty, very much grounded in reality. To be able to do justice to such an outlandish character, you need some real flair, and a big imagination. I’m just not sure if it is the right kind of movie for a director like Campbell.

I fear more for the Captain America movie. It has become obvious that Marvel are attempting to put this one together on the cheap. The list of actors being considered for the lead was alarmingly poor, but thankfully common sense won out, and i think Marvel can consider themselves lucky to have procured the considerable talent of Chris Evans, particularly given the limited salary that has been reported.

The choice of director however is even more alarming. The appointment of Joe Johnston is particularly uninspiring to me. His CV reads as the very definition of ‘bland’, and the problem is that in the wrong hands, Captain America himself can be a very bland character. He has the same ‘all American hero’ persona as Superman, but with a much more mundane origin. A director with far more flare and panache is required to bring this story alive, and considering the calibre of recent Johnston films like The Wolfman and Hidalgo, this could end in disaster.

Strange really, because i think the company has been pretty brave with their other pre-Avengers project. Kenneth Branagh hasn’t had a whole lot of experience with action, or done a great deal of feature directing in general in recent years. So his appointment as director of Thor was as much as a surprise as Whedon’s, if not more so. With a relatively unknown lead in Chris Hemsworth, it’ll be interesting to see how the movie looks to be shaping up when we start getting set photos.

Comic books have a rich history, the characters a huge, continually developed back story. It should be easy to put together a fantastic story for any one of them, and a lot of the burden for this will be carried by the screenwriters. If they pick out the right story elements, and construct an interesting plot, it will just be down to the directors to bring them to the screen in a compelling way. Both The Green Lantern and Captain America have the potential to be great, i just hope the writers and the directors make the most of that potential, and bring us the movies that these storied characters deserve.

Tomorrow i’ll take a look at recent past comic book adaptations, how some bold choices have resulted in great movies that comic book fans can be proud of, and some of the blander choices have produced comic book movies better left forgotten.

Bazmann – You can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/baz_mann

Related Posts

• April 23, 2010 — Is A Marvel Budget Range A Step Too Far?
• April 13, 2010 — Joss Whedon Taking on The Avengers
• April 16, 2010 — The Bland And The Bold Of Comic Adaptations
• March 26, 2010 — HeyUGuys Extensive Kick-Ass Coverage Round Up
• March 26, 2010 — Comic Book Review: Kick-Ass

Filed under Features, News · Tagged with adaptation, captain america, comic, comic book, film, graphic novel, Green Lantern, Joe Johnston, Joss Whedon, Kenneth Branagh, Martin Campbell, Marvel, movie, the avengers, thor

aliens Comics fi films, loyal fans, plot structure, sci fi, storylines

Every so often we live in an era when certain upcoming horror movies elicit uncommon levels of anticipation. This happens to be one of those times. In this brief article I will explore the latest horror films responsible for such high levels of interest among horror fans. These new horror movies are Zombie Strippers, Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, Paranormal Activity, American Zombie and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.

Zombie Strippers harks back to the video nasty era of the 1980s when horror movie gore was all the rage. Everything about this scary movie – from the high concept title, to the cast that includes Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson, even the humor where we see a stripper birthing billiard balls on a take of Full Metal Jacket – is over the top and out to at once shock and, let’s face it, delight. If Zombie Strippers where a food for horror fans, it would be a hugely scrumptious gastronomic joy.

Sometime in the future, President Bush is at war with half the world. In a government laboratory a secret vaccine is under development to turn soldiers into zombies; the theory being that legions of the undead would be a formidable force in their world-conquering endeavors. When a crack team of special forces fails in their attempt to quash a zombie uprising within the lab, an operative becomes infected after a bite to the hand and flees the lab, in fear of becoming cannon fodder for his comrades, to a local strip joint. It is at this strip bar, owned by Robert Englund, that he infects the talent: a line-up of stunning female strippers.

The first stripper to become a Zombie is Jenna Jameson. The onlookers are momentarily struck with shock, fear, disgust which is soon replaced, in a brilliant moment of comic-timing, with uproarious approval. It then becomes imperative among the strippers to become a zombie or fall in the popularity stakes and possibly lose employment. The real problems begin, however, when the beautiful strippers discover a hunger for human flesh!

Paranormal Activity Trailer

Do you remember the impact of The Blair Witch Project? Much of the reason behind the success for Blair was the combination of verisimilitudinous filmmaking and – at the time – uncommonly clever use of internet marketing. Paranormal Activity is one of our latest horror films anticipated to assume similar cult status to Blair. Yet this horror movie is no staged sham; no, this, my friends, is the real deal.

A happily married couple move into a new house. They quickly come to believe that it is haunted. Is it a coincidence that the woman, Katie, has been haunted by spirits since infancy? In a bid to prove the existence of paranormal activity within their home the couple make a home movie over several months. Paranormal Activity is the result of their endeavors, a combination of shocking home movie and surveillance footage.

Test screenings have reputedly seen audiences running screaming from the theater. An urban legend? A clever marketing ploy? Or is this true horror story so blatantly terrifying that we cannot help be run away screaming . . . or at least consider the notion?

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

Horror comics have for years been fodder for a glut of Hollywood horror movies. Hell Boy comics had a huge following and it was important to get it right or, from the very start, kill any possibility of a franchise. The huge anticipation over Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is proof – not that we need any – that the original Hell Boy movie, a stylish, Gothic horror thriller, was bang on the money. The sequel is reported to be even better!

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is said to be about a battle between the underworld and Hell Boy and his gang. Demons wish to conquer humanity and only Hell Boy dares stand in their way!

American Zombie is a rarity in the horror genre: a biting (excuse the pun) social satire.

We explore the lives four characters who live among zombies in a Los Angeles community: A socially-witty convenience store clerk; Judy, a zombie in denial who is searching for love; Joel , founder of ZAG, Zombie Advocacy Group; and Lisa, a florist for a funeral parlor.

American Zombie has been compared to Kevin Smith’s Clerks and is one of the latest horror films that veers away from shock and gore entertainment tactics to intellectual elicitation of emotion.

Lost Boys 2: The Tribe

I have purposefully saved the most anticipated of our latest horror films for last. Horror fans of Lost Boys, a classic horror movie in the vampire sub-genre, have waited 21 years for this, the massively anticipated sequel.

The story reportedly takes place in Luna Bay, California, a small surfer community which is – like the original Lost Boys Santa Carla – riddled with blood-thirsty vampires. Corey Haim, the lead of the original horror movie, and Corey Feldman, the two Coreys, reprise their original roles.

Chris Emerson and his sister, Nicole, are compelled to battle a crazed group of vampire surfers. Just like last time, the Frog Brothers are on hand to help in the fight against the undead!

These are the latest horror films to have horror fans on tenterhooks. I hope you enjoy them!

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