2012: The Last Year In Review: Updated Movies 10 years gone!

Hey man, we're going to do this. We're ten years out, time to update our list. I love best of movies list, especially making them smooth, flowing, and changing like water, not set forever in stone like a big rock. We listed our favorite movies at the time ten years ago but things change! Some have staying power, some don't. Some are good because they don't have staying power! It's all relative and there are so many reasons why a movie can be a good movie. But it also takes us a while to catch up to good films. So let's do this again. 2012 re-hash! Let's go!

Here's our shortlist:

The Grey

Wanderlust

Haywire

John Carter

21 Jump Street

Goon

The Cabin in the Woods

Lockout

The Five-Year Engagement

Battleship

Moonrise Kingdom

That's My Boy

Your Sister's Sister

Brave

Magic Mike

The Dark Knight Rises

Ruby Sparks

Celeste and Jesse Forever

The Campaign

The Master

Dredd

Looper

Pitch Perfect

Argo

Seven Psychopaths

Lincoln

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

Django Unchained

I was going through the beginning of the year with so many favorites and thought my list might really get switched up. Then I hit the end and was like, "Oh yeah, here are the heavy hitters. Dang. Your Sister's Sister ain't gettin' in!" Lincoln and Skyfall came out on the same day, folks. 11/09/12. Fun how that works.

Okay, let's pick the big shots. The untouchables, the stood the test of time movies. I've seen all these a few times, except Argo, which I know is the classic Oscar pick and all that crap, but I still really dug it.

The Master

Argo

Lincoln

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

Django Unchained

So that's six. Let's whittle down the rest to find our next top four, taking out the obvious bad picks. I personally enjoy a very high amount of infamously bad films from 2012. Huge year for Emily Blunt and Taylor Kitsch. Funny I gave the nod to Jennifer Lawrence and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (but did actually acknowledge Kitsch). Anyway, if I were to pick only four more...

21 Jump Street

That's My Boy

Brave

The Campaign

I just saw Magic Mike for the first time, and it lived up to all the hype. It ended up being first out, along with Dredd, Looper, and The Grey. 2012 was a great year for mid-budget action films and comedy movies. Two things we don't have any more! It's amazing how when doing the 2022 list I instantly took off No Time to Die, despite liking it a lot, but would never take Skyfall off 2012.

Comparing to the original list (funny we did leave Skyfall off originally), I have retained five of my original picks - The Master, Django, 21 Jump, Lincoln, and Argo. All made my shortlist except Silver Linings Playbook, which just really hasn't stuck with me at all.

Anyway, we've done this before. Let's see how we did when we re-appraised in 2014, 2017 and then just last year. I share a familiar six with 2017, but surprisingly only seven from just two years ago in January 2021. Notably the big six stay the same across those two re-appraisals, with Brave filling in again, but I traded The Campaign, 21 Jump Street, and That's My Boy, three comedies I can watch every day of my life for Celeste and Jesse Forever, Haywire, and The Cabin in the Woods.

I don't know what I was doing in 2014, maybe I just felt like rebelling. Dredd, Goon, The Dark Knight Rises, and Ruby Sparks made the cut for the first and only time, and I'm glad because those are all great movies that should get some recognition. But I only share four movies from this list! And three appear on all five! I make too many of these. Rest assured, I think when this becomes a thing, I'll just do the ten-year reappraisal and that's it.

Some of these are a total product of age and shifting novelty. Cabin is one of those mind-blowing movies upon first and even the ninth year watching, but everything, especially in horror right now is so meta, it's lost a bit of luster. That final scene packs an equal punch, but it's just not as shiny as it once was. It's weird how the comedy movies have kind of cemented themselves in my brain. Haywire is a little awkward with Gina Carano proving herself to be a crazy person. I did re-watch that in the past year and it's as rewarding as ever, but it doesn't quite make it out past the other great action films of the year for me anymore.

I'm very surprised I've never actually ranked Pitch Perfect in there. That's probably because the screenplay doesn't make any sense at all, even if the themes and moments are as rock solid as any movie ever made. Goon is an old favorite that hasn't held up all that well. TDKR could be in there, but there's just better movies. I'm not sure I've seen Ruby Sparks or The Grey since they came out, I should get a refresher. Moonrise Kingdom has proven itself to be quite a lesser Wes Anderson work in the wake of better pictures. Since all his movies are the same, it's tough when one proves itself to be the worst version of everything he does. Lockout is obviously still awesome.

This is obviously self indulgent, so thanks for sticking with us! As for #1, it has to be The Master or Django, I flip-flop every other year. Stay tuned next year when we recap 2013!

Stop Posting About Superheroes

Seriously.

It's no revelation to me that four out of my previous six posts had everything to do with Superheroes. Mostly complaining about them. In the wake of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Just Ass (2016), though, it seems like that's all the Internet has really cared about. At the same it's mostly just full of griping and crotchety criticism. So, what's going on here? Why have superheroes dominated not only the box office, but our critical conversation, even when there's widespread hate for the genre? That statement even supposes something else - where does that hate come from at all?

There's obviously only one truly great superhero film.

I'll start by immediately admitting my sublime addiction. I could be posting more about indie films or small dramas or other films that are actually worth something substantial, but superhero films seem to draw the most attention right now. It's not like I even care about getting hits or anything, although that's clearly a motivation everywhere else. It's tough for even old school action revivals like London Has Fallen (2016) to gain enough notoriety to make cultural waves in the landscape we're in right now.

For me, I think this stems from my childhood. Of course it does. As a kid I was heavily into comic books and enthralled by these stories that took me out of my shitty existence and into a world were anything seemed possible. This sort of wish-fulfillment is cliché, but accurate. The world of comics seemed niche and private, which created this nerd against the world mentality that a lot of us still hold today.

It's obviously a big shock then, to see the heroes that we once clutched to our breasts in nerd-filled drool and yearning suddenly these major Hollywood forces. At once they're the savior and destroyer of an industry that can't seem to find a better way to put asses in seats. The cynical question, though would be, at what cost of cultural dignity?

This is an interesting proposition because superhero movies are more a replacement for action films, which weren't necessarily any better, despite what our nostalgia might tell us. For every Total Recall (1990) we had plenty of Timecop (1994). Alongside Die Hard (1988) we had The Last Boy Scout (1991). It's not like we are supplanting the prestige of action films here. Memory tends to be selective, and I'm confident that in twenty years we'll remember Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) a lot more than Green Lantern (2011).

This obviously spurns a debate, because I actually watched Green Lantern playing on FX yesterday morning. And for a dude for whom Hal Jordan may be his favourite superhero, that's a rough fucking picture. Five years down the road no one is really eager to re-visit the film, no one is nostalgic, no one is thinking "It was really bad but this one scene was good." There is nearly no redeemable qualities. But it was on TV and I still watched it. Has this addiction become seriously bad for my cultural health?

I'm not convinced that every superhero film is terrible. There are in fact, plenty that stand up perfectly great against any other genre, while most are generally in the serviceable range. I don't think we need to necessarily begin a cultural panic claiming that we've lost all art at the cinema. These aren't really the best films of the year in any year (with a handful of exceptions), but then again, my definitions of such things tend to be drenched in proletariat rather than snobby pretentious arthouse loves. Ultimately, a film needs to be judged on its own merits, no matter what or where those merits come from. I'll gladly sit through Battleship (2012) the same evening as Frances Ha (2012) and judge the work of both.

Speaking of Battleship, the easy answer I suppose is that innocuous non-thinking blockbuster entertainment goes down smooth. And honestly, at the end of the week on a Friday night, Iron Man 3 (2013) goes down a lot smoother than Queen of Earth (2015). And there's nothing wrong with that. There isn't a need to be challenged all the time and strive for a culture of constantly high art because frankly, it's exhausting and alienating.

Of course, we shouldn't really strive for a culture of low art, either. Part of my major goal here at Norwegian Morning Wood is to elevate the low and jokify the mighty, mostly providing analysis for the mundane and showing that any work of art can have its place in the cultural conversation. This has recently slid pretty damn well into constant superhero territory.

Why is that a bad thing? Why is the genre so maligned? I suppose it is the inherently juvenile association along with the delusional male boy wish fulfillment I mentioned earlier. At some point we need to mature and gain an understanding about life and truth outside of fantasy.

On a more practical note, it's also readily apparent that the major studios are becoming more polarized. In a more risk-adverse setting there are fewer mid-range films released and more effort placed in to the distant ends of the spectrum. Studios will either throw a few bucks at a small budget film or pour all of their resources into major motion picture tentpoles. There is a fallacy here, though, because there's roughly a 37% chance that film is going to be a huge bomb anyway.

Side note: in order to get that figure I took a look at the budgets and worldwide grosses of every film that's ever cost over $150 million, which was 138 films (which I got here, obviously with the caveat that budget reporting is insanely sketchy), then determined the profitability by the logic that true costs would include budget in addition to marketing costs, estimated at 70%, and then understanding the theater take, which by rough go at it, figures a studio keeps 80% in the first week, 55% in the second, 45% in the third, and 20% from there on out. Totaling this take using The Avengers (2012) as a model, that's about 56% of the total, with some variation and the conceit that foreign theaters generally take less than domestic, I bumped that up to 70% as well. So budget plus 70% of budget subtracted from 70% of worldwide gross should equal profitability in this rough estimate. Here's some data! Now, this is clearly very unscientific, but for the purposes of this essay, it gives us some kind of idea as to what Hollywood's general failure rate is. And it's about 37%.

Now I know you're curious about the superhero failure rate, and I figured it out - using that same spreadsheet's clearly infallible logic, out of the 22 superhero films with budgets over $150 million, only five of them failed to turn a profit, which is a rate of 23%. That's a significantly lower than the normal blockbuster fail rate. Business is business.

I'm not sure if that exercise has a point in understanding the cultural dialogue of the genre, the juvenile vapidness of the source material, or our shameless addiction to men in tights. Starting next year also an Amazon in a metal skirt of some kind. But nevertheless it's good to have perspective. That perspective should also include the fact that 22/138 films with budgets over $150 million is a paltry 16% over the past twenty years. Even looking at every movie since 2011 (the past five years - 65 films with huge budgets), only 14 of those are superhero films. Sure that's 64% of the total, but still only 22% of stupid monster blockbusters.

Is that enough of a combination of anecdotal data for you? The point is, I'm not actually sure if this is a problem or not. It would seem, however, that despite the relatively low amount of superhero films being released, they tend to dominate the cultural conversation as if there were one coming out every weekend. For my money this is the reason why efforts such as The Lone Ranger (2013), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and Tomorrowland (2015) flop hard. There really isn't enough people around to care about them. And if you're going to use the argument that none of these were particularly great movies, well, the only words I have for you is Batman v. Fucking Superman.

Liam Neeson Plays the Same Character in Every Movie...I Mean this Very Literally

Liam Neeson isn't the only actor who is commonly criticised for playing the same exact character, but he is maybe one of the few in this day and age who makes the same exact movie over and over again. Especially considering the rapid fire succession of A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), Taken 3 (2015), and now Run All Night (2015) debuting today, it's time to talk about this Liam Neeson problem. Now, I don't really care about the detached criticism of him playing the same character over and over again - I want to make the argument that the reason for this is that we have been lied to. We area actually only seeing bits of one story featuring different parts of one character's life. That character is actually Liam Neeson.

So, partly inspired by this canny observation, here is the REAL history of Liam Neeson's actual life, which is all we have been watching until this point in time. Needless to say, there are so many spoilers for every Liam Neeson movie made in the past thirteen years. So, with a really select version of Neeson's recent action films, let's take a look at the Neeson family, starting from the Old Country:

They made surprisingly good movies in 1846

In the early 19th Century, Liam Neeson's great-great-great grandfather arrived in New York City. Taking the name Vallon, he feuded with locals in the Five Points neighborhood, in particular with a gang leader named Bill "The Butcher" Cutting. The Butcher eventually killed Vallon in combat, but not before Vallon birthed a son, Amsterdam Vallon. Eventually, Amsterdam's son would reject the throngs of the city, mostly because he was a homeless bastard, but found much more at home expressing his family's violent tendencies out west. He turned into one of the most dangerous men in the Arizona Territory and the first and only Irishman in the West. To separate himself from his brutal upbringing, he took the name Clinch Leatherwood.

After Clinch, generations would pass without much disaster. That is of course, until June 7, 1952 when a baby Liam Neeson shot his way out of his mother's whom. He nominally took the role of an actor as a cover for a baffling array of roles in the military and law enforcement, but he would mostly reject this and use his specific set of skills as a private mercenary time and time again. He got his start as a police officer, then detective in New York City, but gave that up when he was involved in a bar fight that resulted in him accidentally shooting a seven-year old girl.

Liam look the name Bill Marks and after drowning his sorrows in alcohol, became an Air Marshall. He was hailed as a national hero after a dangerous, bomb-laced flight from New York to London. His faith in government renewed, he joined the Army, dying his hair and changing his name again in order to mask his well-known identity as both the well-respected actor from Schindler's List (1993) and as the savior of British Aqualantic Flight 10. He decided John Smith would be a perfectly reasonable alias, although his close compatriots nicknamed him "Hannibal."

Hannibal and his cronies, though, were set-up by the CIA and estranged from the government, despite their valiant efforts in securing missing U.S. Treasury plates. Calling themselves "The A-Team," Neeson and his gang worked for those who had no one else to turn to. The life wore on Neeson, however, and he longed to again be at peace with his country. He joined the CIA, but in order to protect the rest of the A-Team he took the name Bryan Mills and died his hair again.

Quick! Guess which movie this still is from!
It's impossible!

It was as Bryan Mills that he took a job to assassinate the Prince of Saudi Arabia under the cover of Dr. Martin Harris. Suffering a car accident immediately prior to the job, though, Neeson unknowingly found himself with amnesia. I don't think this was actually CIA work in Unknown (2011), but it could have been...right? They could have used a cover name. Shut up, it fits this stupid post). This job would alienate Neeson from the Agency, though, and he retired. It was then that he met the love of his life, Lenore.

He would have a daughter named Kim with Lenore, but eventually they divorced. Neeson got a job bodyguarding pop stars, but the life pulled him back in. Kim was taken, so Neeson, using the name Mills still, killed a lot of people. Then his wife was taken, so he killed a lot of people again and got her back. Then his wife was killed, which really devastated Neeson. After investigating and avenging her death and seeing his daughter, Kim, pregnant, Neeson left for a job in Alaska fighting wolves.

He took the name John Ottway to distance himself from his tortured past, but was constantly reminded of images of his dying wife. To cope with her murder, he envisioned her slowly succumbing to a lethal disease. After a plane crash, subsequent survival in the harsh wilderness, and yes, some more wolf fights, Neeson set out across the world; a true attempt to leave the world behind.

In Asia he stumbled upon the League of Shadows, who immediately welcomed him in, particularly enamoured with his specific set of skills. They bestowed upon him the name Ra's al Ghul. In his depression and nihilism, he rose through the ranks of the League of Shadows and trained many warriors, including a young Bruce Wayne. That one would come back to haunt him. Bruce Wayne turned his back on the League of Shadows philosophy of burning the world and starting over. Liam Neeson, after his years of pain, betrayal, and hardships was a strong proponent of this insanity. When Bruce learned of Neeson's plan to destroy Gotham City using a train system that turned all of the city's water into fear gas (boy that sounds stupid when stated succinctly), he foiled the plot and killed Neeson.

Or so it would seem. Neeson was injured in the crash but crawled his way to a Lazarus Pit and regained his health. These Ra's al Ghul Lazarus Pits were actually the means by which Liam Neeson has stayed so virile all these years and how he has two fully grown daughters. He sired the second one, Talia while in the League of Shadows. She was also taken from him and raised by Bane in a hole. It was rough but she loved him. It is unknown whether or not Talia and Kim ever got together.

Seeing another chance at life, Neeson reformed and became a career military man. He joined the Navy and quickly rose up the ranks until he earned the rank of Admiral, again changing names to hide his past, this time to Terrence Shane. His polished tenure was marred during an alien attack at a RIMPAC that coincided with the much worse offense of one of his subordinates macking on another daughter of his, Samantha. Samantha was notable for being the only Liam Neeson daughter who wasn't taken, but in the aftermath of the alien invasion, his daughter became engaged to the young Alex Hopper.

Yes, even Battleship.

This turn of events again disillusioned the decorated Admiral, and taking the name Matthew Scudder, tried to forget his life and resist a return to alcoholism. He was eventually wrapped up in a convoluted story about a junkie, some drug dealers, and street rats. He again solved his problems by killing a lot of people. Finally, he is called for some of some actions he took while he was a mercenary assassin under the name of Jimmy Conlon, and has to kill Ed Harris' son. Or Ed Harris is killing his son or something. I haven't seen Run All Night.

At the end of all this, though, Zeus wakes up. See, all of Liam Neeson's life has been a dream. When Zeus dreams he pretends he is Liam Neeson, because we all want to be something more powerful than ourselves. Then Zeus died in Wrath of the Titans for some reason, so Liam Neeson's life is finally put to rest. Or...is it?

For your convenience, here are the films we were able to dissect to pull data about Liam Neeson's actual life and how they are possibly connected. Feel free to debate my order:

Gangs of New York (2002) - Priest Vallon's son, Leo ends up birthing:
A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) - Clinch Leatherwood, dies but his fierce Irish progeny with an appetite for killing everyone would live on.
A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) - (1991 scene) Matt Scudder kills a kid
Non-Stop (2014) - Bill Marks, former NYC cop, now an alcoholic Air Marshall
The A-Team (2010) - Hannibal Smith, army leader turned mercenary
Unknown (2011) - Amnesiac assassin, Martin Harris at some point cannot maintain a life on the run and buys his way out through working with a shady organization
Taken (2008) - Bryan Mills, former CIA
Taken 2 (2012)
Taken 3 (2015) - Wife dies
The Grey (2012) - Taking the name Jon Ottway, Liam Neeson flees to fight wolves in the wilderness
Batman Begins (2005) - Ra's al Ghul forms the League of Shadows in his depression
Battleship (2012) - After a guise of death, and filled with awesome stories of wolf-fighting and ninja-army leading, it's a lock that he rises to the rank of Admiral Shane

A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014) - Matt Scudder retired alcoholic cop

Run All Night (2015)
Clash of the Titans (2010) - all of the preceding was actually Zeus dreaming that he was Liam Neeson
Wrath of the Titans (2012) - Zeus finally dies.

Hello Jupiter Ascending, or Why Do Blockbusters Fail?

I am always impressed by a few directors who get to keep on making movies. Tim Burton tends to churn out more crap than gold these days, but they're at least fairly successful and moderately well-liked by their intended mass audience. M. Night Shyamalan is one who had one to many absolute failures (critically, financially, and culturally) to keep his auteur vision going, but he even seems to be failing enough as a journeyman blockbuster director for people to stop giving him work. Then there's the Wachowskis.

The Wachowski Siblings, Andy and Lana, seem to have this mysterious carte blanche in Hollywood after The Matrix Trilogy. Sure it was a pretty significant movie event with each one of those three big aspects pumping hard (critical/commercial/cultural), but when do we stop believing in a director's ability to give us a good movie again? I actually don't have much of a problem with Speed Racer (2008), although it seems to be universally derided. The plot is incomprehensible, but the production design is amazing and it's also fabulously well-cast. Needless to say, though, I'm in the minority.

They followed that bomb up with Cloud Atlas (2012), which is also fine in its own right. It just cost $102 million to make, which is absurd for a big dense film with multiple timelines and plots. It always felt more like a passionate personal thinking project than anything that anyone would actually enjoy. This combined with Speed Racer and the latter disappointing Matrix sequels, which exchanged indecipherable philosophical quandaries for earned resolutions (then discarded all that while Neo fought Smith like Dragon Ball Z), and you've got a pretty lackluster string of what was once a pretty awesome post-Bound (1996) career going.

He's a space wolf!

That brings us to Jupiter Ascending (2015). I'd like to point out that even though the marketing effort for this thing has been pretty strong, in my head I called it Jupiter Rising so often I had to double-check the title to make sure I was right when titling this post. Jupiter Ascending is just really clunky, and apparently really on-the-nose, given that Mila Kunis' character has the awkward and not-prophetic-at-all name of Jupiter. Whatever. The movie looks kind of cool, even if it also seems really dumb and silly, and I like enough of what a lot of the Wachowskis have done (even if no one else really does) to give it a shot. But we're not here to discuss whether or not I'm going to see this film.

We're here to discuss if everyone else and their neighbor is. They're not. Why?

On the surface this seems like a total win. You've possibly got an Academy Award-winning actor playing the villain (Eddie Redmayne - who is no where near any of the marketing [probably to not hurt his Oscar chances...]), two likable leads who are peaking right now in Kunis and C-Tates, directors who have competently handled complex big screen genre material before (regardless of their inability to communicate mainstream ideas, they can handle the hell out of action sequences), and a plot that beckons towards a classic hero's journey in an original sci-fi opus. This should be the next AVABAR (2009), right? I am compelled by the question of why it's not. Why does this look stupid when AVABAR didn't? And AVABAR was an extremely stupid movie after the fact, but how come it looked so cool going into it (and parlayed that into $700 million)?

Last year I was writing this article about how ridiculous and pathetic March 2014 was, and I got talking about how Noah (2014), despite containing some interesting subject material and a possibly experimentally dark direction for a blockbuster to take, will get no audience at all almost solely on the basis of its inaccessible source material. There was another recent film that I am always fuddled by, that found itself in a similar position, which was Gore Verblinksi's The Lone Ranger (2013). To add to this discussion, I also want to talk about The Rock's Hercules (2014), which was by all means a pretty fun and thrilling film that just bombed to hell. Why?

I think it's interesting how critics tend to groupthink and then pile on films like these early, which tends to set the tone for how a film is talked about. None of these are exceptionally poorly constructed, at least not to the extent that the three-piece slaughterhouse of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) were, and those were all pretty successful films financially. I would solidly argue that Hercules is a better film in every possible way than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which came out around the same time. It has a more artfully constructed tone, a better understanding of its own themes, a cognizant plot, more compelling characters, and more charismatic performances by its leads. If critics are picking movies to jump on, how come they jump on The Lone Ranger but not The Amazing Spider-Man 2?

Also you can't have a Hercules movie that debunks the
Hercules myth. No one thinks that Hercules actually existed.
I hope.

Perhaps it's just because the big difference between the films I've listed as successful Summer 2014 films (and thank goodness, most of the actually successful films last year were pretty damn good as well) is that franchise tag. There's something to be expected for dumb loud flashy action films that are intended for the 13-year old boy in all of us that just wants to see shit smashed together. Noah was insistently more darker and thought-provoking, although it was still filled with scenes that made no sense. Perhaps there's a key there, that when a movie takes itself as serious as Noah, it shouldn't have scenes of Ham saving a chick in the city and bringing her back only to have her trampled and killed because of Noah with no repercussion to any character moments later. Sorry, SPOILER, but seriously, if you see it coming and have hope that a likable character will do something that makes sense, you're mistaken. When movies that purport to take themselves as serious art pieces trip up, it's amplified much more than when Transformers makes piss and fart jokes with robots.

Critics aren't that useful, though, right? Something like only 50% of moviegoers go frequently, and presumably some percentage of those people would be the real cinephiles who are hunting down online news and critical opinions. Again, this critical consensus isn't that influential directly, but it helps set the narrative. When enough influential critics get on board against a movie, and this is sometimes years before a film comes out - so it's more the entertainment news reporters, but when enough of them lambaste a film's early, troubled production it becomes difficult for any smaller critic or reporter following up or transmitting the news to form a divergent opinion, lest they be ostracised by the critical community. Infrequent moviegoers, while they may not be researching a film themselves, probably have a friend who is, and they can see that off comment on Facebook that embeds itself as a negative opinion. Therefore this narrative is formed before something even comes out. Battleship (2012) is a solid example of this. Its subject matter was deemed far too stupid and unwatchable before it came out, even though it's no worse than any Transformers movie.

And I should clarify at some point, that I don't think these are necessarily good movies, but I just don't see them as any worse than other blockbusters who gain much more money. Actually I do think some of them are much better. But why are these narratives chosen? If you look at my list of "Competently-made-yet-universally-hated" Blockbusters (Jupiter Rising Ascending, Noah, The Lone Ranger, Hercules, and Battleship), I think the inherent problem in each is the source material. There's just no one out there who gave a shit about the story of Noah's Flood, or The Lone Ranger and Tonto, the "untold true story" of Hercules, or a two-hour advertisement for the U.S. Navy. It's that groan factor. You hear "Hey, they're making a big-budget epic about Noah's Ark!" "Awww maannnn. That sounds dumb." That's my gut reaction, to be honest. And I keep using Transformers, just because it's easiest - but why, when we hear "Hey, they're making a big-budget epic about Robots that are also Trucks!" is our reaction "Oooohh maaann!!"

Maybe it's just intrinsic. Enough people either saw the cartoon show to get a vague idea of the personalities and mythology involved while it was cheesy enough that we could easily picture a live-action treatment being exciting and awesome. This blinds our thought process to the fact that the film itself is still wretched, but that's not even important anymore. It's flashy enough to get a long life on television and home streaming and has just the right level of plot skimming that it's not even important to clue into. It's also generally a lot more cheery and digestible.

That's also a factor in each of these films. Noah, The Lone Ranger, and Hercules in particular had a maudlin air about them, even if the latter two were able to splice in some decent character humour that's virtually lost in a sea of self-seriousness. The same can almost be said for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but most Transformers tend to be decidedly cheery, or at least mask their pain in sex and chrome.

Also Johnny Depp fatigue doomed this movie.

I have actually thought about The Lone Ranger a lot, because on the surface that movie had everything going for it, but you never felt like you bought in. It had an extreme level of commercialisation with every plug and tie-in possible (who out there bought The Lone Ranger LEGOs expecting it to be like Harry Potter or Star Wars?). It was trying so hard to position itself as THE film of Summer 2013 but it just never had a shot.

Again, maybe this was intrinsic. It had early accusations of racism, fairly true accusations of anti-Americanism, bland what's his face...Armie Hammer, variances in tone, and a complex subtext that frankly, refuted all of this, but was tough for an average filmgoer to comprehend. It also simply came out smack in the middle of a very long summer where every single weekend there was a film trying to loudly proclaim it was the end-all finale of ALL EPIC BLOCKBUSTERS EVER. Things became more noise than diversified voices, and all the commercialisation wasn't clever or a fun reminder like Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) bobble-heads. It was an irritant.

If we're contrasting with Guardians, it's also because that seemed to be a movie that "got it" while The Lone Ranger appeared like another line in a long, reviled copycat Hollywood system, even though to be honest, structurally The Lone Ranger is far more innovative and its subtext is far more subversive. But that's another good question - what does it take to take charge of a nation's culture for a few weeks?

Hey 2013, what film was your Summer film anyway? Man of Steel? How do you judge what the fan community wants? Was it Pacific Rim? But the critics and even the regular public rejected that one. Was The Lone Ranger not geeky enough? It was certainly no lesser of a film than Man of Steel, in many ways it was far superior. For some reason the appeal of seeing Superman on screen in a serious adult treatment or seeing giant robots clobber giant monsters has a far better initial sound than the idea of seeing The Lone Ranger. Even with the William Tell Overture! It's bullshit. Sorry this got so sidetracked about me liking The Lone Ranger. No one talks about this film anymore, or Noah or Battleship. They're without conversation. They won't appear on T-shirts thirty years from now.

Let's get back to that question - are they not nerdy enough? Is there something intrinsic to these films that fails to inspire a devoted fanbase that will keep it alive through conversation and references for years to come? Maybe it is that seriousness. Then again, our benchmark, Transformers: Age of Extinction isn't influencing any nerds. Quick, name Stanley Tucci's company. Or character. Or any line he says that isn't this. Any reader of this blog understands that I'm constantly concerned about our lack of culturally significant original films.

I wish this movie was as good as "Four Five Seconds."

Which brings me all the way back to Jupiter Ascending. Why did you title your movie so stupidly, Wachowskis. All you needed to hear is "Wachowski" and "Jupiter Ascending" and you could predict this film's fate. It's so sad. By all regards, this film is bonkers insane, and as one of those entertainment journalists (is that what I am? I'm only comfortable with that in really REALLY loose terms), maybe I'm to blame in part for its incoming failure by automatically looping it in with Noah and Battleship as total failures. It just looks so damn stupid. If you break down what I said up there a bit more, Mila and Chan are only successful in comedies, the directors have abused their fans' trust for far too long, and the one good thing about franchise filmmaking is that you already have some understanding of character going in, so when Robert Downey, Jr. smirks, you know why. It's engrossing. Who the hell knows what any of these people in Jupiter Going Up are doing or why we should care. It's all sound and fury signifying nothing.

So maybe I'll be totally wrong. Jupiter Ascending becomes the highest grossing movie of the year and wins seventeen Oscars next year. No. That won't happen.

But will you see it this weekend? If not, stream The Lone Ranger.

2012: The Last Year in Review: Movies!

Alright folks, we've come to the last day of the Year of Our Lord 2012. What is there left to talk about? Well, we made it for one thing - those Mayans were full of shit, though there's certainly been plenty of terrible crap happening all over the world lately. This is what the movies are there for, though - to give us a break from the horrible onslaught of awful things that happen to everyone every day, or at least give us some insight into the human condition so that we may try to become better people. So, like every movie review site ever out there, here is our list of the best, brightest, and greatest moments in film during 2012. Let's start with our own Top Ten list.

I guarantee you're not going to find another list like this around the Internet. Moreso than any other year I think this really reflects what I was looking for in a movie this year - I can apparently sum up my taste in small, classy, concentrated action films, subversive comedies, and other movies that really change the game. I'm interested in cultural reverb more than anything - which films are the center of diffusing new innovations and which ones am I not going to be able to turn off when they appear on TNT in two years? That's the basis of my list more than anything else.

#10: Haywire

You remember this one from all the way back in January? Gina Carano has a bit more to come along as an actor, but Soderbergh directs the hell out of this in a distinctive narrative style he developed during the Ocean's films and Contagion (2011). Gina also kicks the ass of Magneto, Obi-Wan Kenobi, G.I. Joe, and Zorro throughout the course of the film. I'll take it.

#9: Silver Linings Playbook

It's always nice to see Bradley Cooper actually acting, because he's not all that shabby at it. David O. Russell throws De Niro the best role he's had in ten years and Chris Tucker of all people into the mix along with material to properly show off Jennifer Lawrence as her generation's best actress in this romantic comedy refresher.

#8: The Grey

Liam Neeson spends two hours fighting wolves, deals with his own mortality, and of course he survives to go on to train Batman. In the process he's become an icon of badass masculinity in the vein of Arnold or Sly of yesteryear. How is that possible? I'm not sure, but he ought to be recruited for The Expendables 3: Wolf Wars (2014), naturally.


#7: Argo

The Best Bad Idea Ben Affleck had has put him on the map of go-to directors in a way his acting career never has. Really, he hasn't had stock this high since "writing" Good Will Hunting (1997). When he started acting outside of his Boston comfort zone he really failed (not necessarily). It's good to see that he is able to stretch outside of his Southie wheelhouse for this great flick, in both acting and directing.

#6: Looper

Clearly the best original sci-fi film of the year, even if it mershed elements of many tropes together, this still took an investible high concept, big-name actors and ran with it in new and exciting ways that ought to really launch a few careers (JGL for sure) and make a significant mark on the cultural landscape. I'm only looking for Rian Johnson to be a bit busier than our last sci-fi directing new genius, Neill Blomkamp, who hasn't done a thing before next year's release of Elysium (2013).

#5: Lincoln

Probably the most prestigious film on this list, Lincoln is everyone at their best, and that's a lot of people who have done pretty damn good things. Spielberg immerses us in a few overlooked days in the life of our 16th President, and Daniel Day-Lewis takes us into his flesh and mind like we've never seen before. The only real shame is that this thing won't give a soul any other chance in the acting fields in what was really a very solid year for many other men.

#4: 21 Jump Street

Absolutely the funniest film of the year, so of course I have this ranked extremely high. It's the kind of balls-out film that absolutely kills every line and every moment, made all the better by appearing out of no where with little hype at all. Who knew Channing Tatum could be so hilarious? "FUCK YOU SCIENCE."

#3: The Cabin in the Woods

It's rare that you see a film that subverts an entire genre like this one. It makes watching any other horror film seem even more cookie-cutter than they already are, while this uses a Thor-led team of pothead, slut, jock, and virgin against vengeful gods, a shady corporation, and every monster in the book. It's something that really needs to be experienced with a bunch of friends, copious amounts of alcohol, and a dark room - at least that was how I first saw it - it's a trip in itself, and that's the whole point of the medium.

#2: Django Unchained

It may just be due to recent memory, but I was very close to naming this sucker #1. A Southern Slavery Epic that we desperately needed, this film does more for race relations than Spike Lee will ever care to realize, and it pushes its themes and narratives hard enough to give Black People the Epic Hero they've always deserved. All praise to QT for even getting this thing made in the first place.

#1: The Master

Joaquin proves that yes, he is one of the greatest actors of all time, and if not for the difficult subject matter and immense love of Lincoln this year, ought to have locked up momentum for Best Actor a long time ago. The Master is the kind of film ripe to be ignored, but really deserves to be considered one of the best of all time, though possibly not for a casual night on AMC (yeah, going against my own criteria here, but this was too good to pass up). It's full of compelling scenes, but the driving question of who the Master is and what that means is what causes this film to linger in my mind months after watching it.

Honourable mentions: Bond returns to form in Skyfall, West Anderson returns to form in Moonrise Kingdom, Will Ferrell's feature-length meta-joke in Casa de mi Padre, Soderbergh's male stripper opus Magic Mike, Rob and Dave's ethereal Cosmopolis, the immense crazy fun of Seven Psychopaths, the Rabbits of Rhosgobel leading wackiness in The Hobbit, and we got him in Zero Dark Thirty.

Best Scenes of the Year:

#10: Say what you will about Battleship, but one of the more surprisingly moments was how organic they worked the grid battle into the film, as well as how that ended up being its coolest scene. Oh Taylor Kitsch, what an awful year you had.
#9: I've never seen a film that spirals into awfulness so quickly, but the opening crash scene in Flight was mind-blowing.
#8: I wish I had a higher quality clip, but Mark Wahlberg, his Teddy Bear, and Flash Gordon hanging out, doing coke, punching through walls, and fighting ducks really encapsulated how fun TED really was.
prometheus self-abortion
#7: Django Unchained really has too many good scenes to count, but to pick one I'd take his final ride as John Legend plays in the background - nothing has gotten me more pumped for the entire year.
#6: The Campaign was an underrated comedy this year, buried under attention to the Summer Olympics and well, our own actual Presidential Campaign. The baby-punching scene is nevertheless legendary, though, especially because it's awfully Romney-like.
#5: In another film that's tough to pick one scene, Batman's return in the Bat is really one of the few uplifting moments in the whole movie, made more significant from the two hours of depressing oppression and darkness before it. This is where Batman rises, and even though we don't even see the actual man, he's done what he set out to do in Batman Begins (2005) - he's a symbol of righteousness that here not only strikes fear into his enemies, but courage in his friends.
#4: This scene magnificently took up an entire early trailer, but as Princess Merida shoots for her own hand in Brave the entire film's central conflict and characters are established in an incredible two minutes of writing and beautiful animation before the film gets real weird.
#3: It's almost as if everything in The Avengers led up to and was encapsulated by a simple command voiced by Captain America: "Hulk - Smash." A big green smile sums up the funnest movie of the year.
#2: SPOILER if you haven't seen it, and I'd recommend slogging through the entire film beforehand, but the sheer hell unleashed at the end of The Cabin in the Woods is a riotous moment, one of the more memorable bits put on film in the past decade.
#1: And now for the most intense, grotesque scene ever, the self-Cesarian from Prometheus was disturbing and crazy. That clip is the best I could find, but it's even better with the Noomi's screams and desperate actions getting that machine to work before her widdle iddle squid son bursts through her tummy. It's certainly one of the more distinctive scenes in the past year, and one that sticks with you (whether you want it to or not) for some time to come.

Actors of the Year:

For the men, though Taylor Kitsch had a fantastic year of flops with John Carter, Battleship, and Savages, certifiably dooming his career, we ought to go a bit more positive, and looking upwards, no one's doing better than Joseph Gordon-Levitt. JGL featured significantly in the second-biggest blockbuster of the year, The Dark Knight Rises (c'mon, that role should have gone to Shia...), and a little less so in the most prestigious film of the year, Spielberg's Lincoln. On his own, he also popped two headlining films, one pretty shitty bikour film (Premium Rush) and one excellent time travel film (Looper). JGL can do just about anything he wants right now, with indie cred, blockbuster cred, and Oscar cred. He's really the 2012 version of Fassbender, but with a relatively thin upcoming schedule we'll see where he can go from here.

As the ladies go, this year was all about Jennifer Lawrence. She had two tiny shitty horror films (Devil You Know and House at the End of the Street), but we care less about that and are instead looking to The Hunger Games, which Jen has totally made her own on its way to becoming the next big teen book-to-movie franchise adaptation to make a buttload of cheddar at the box office. Like JGL, she both established butt-kicking cred and cred towards actual acting talent. She was really the best part of a very good Silver Linings Playbook and we'll see if Oscar also takes notice. It was an incredible year for her, and with plenty more franchise films from both the X-Men: First Class series and the rest of the Hunger Games, she's not going away anytime soon. I just hope she can also keep pulling off those smaller, high quality films as well.

Well, that's it, folks. We've got a little less than 9 hours to go now before the end of the year. What will 2013 turn out? Stay tuned as we look forward to next year's awesome line-up of crap. What were your favourite movies, scenes, and actors of 2012?

First Impressions: Battleship

Oh, Battleship. What an OK game to play in my youth. I'd shout "B5!" and someone else would answer back "Miss!" And that was all there was for centuries. In the last few weeks though, we've seen this simple and fairly stupid game get a $209 million movie treatment, replete with Aliens, protagonists struggling to find their way, and of course, Rihanna. I, however, will not join the bandwagon in condemning this film - I actually sincerely believe it is one of the better films of Summer so far, an underrated gem that whose reputation will grow with age. Like Starship Troopers (1997) or Josie and the Pussycats (2001) before it, this is a hiddenly subversive film that mashes together Sci-Fi and Action film tropes, liberates the story from their need, and rests itself on higher ground than many other more common Blockbusters. For sure, plenty of SPOILERS will start here so if you are one of the half-dozen people out there who actually still plan on watching Battleship (2012) and enjoying it for yourself, leave now.

Pilgrims and Indians

Let's start with the big picture - the Alien Invasion. Except of course for the fact that this isn't an Alien Invasion at all. Numerous times in the film characters allude to the parallels between the Aliens touching down and the first European Settlers coming to America. Unable to work through their differences, the Europeans and some tribes of Native Americans went to war, which with their technological superiority, the Europeans came out triumphant. This is the major fear of the characters involved in Battleship - that their planet will be overrun by Aliens seeking to conquer them. This is naturally the built up suspicion from a lifetime of ingesting Sci-Fi stories like Battleship's contemporaries such as The Avengers (2012) and Men in Black 3 (2012).

That's not really the case here, though. The Aliens do not attack any humans unless the humans are aggressive first. It's also notable that humanity contacted them first, and when they arrived they are met with gunfire, suspicion, and destruction. They're also not an all-powerful race with super-strong armor like in the Transformers franchise, even a WWII Battleship puts some sizable dents in their best ride. Because of this, their communication ship goes down when it crashes into a satellite, accidentally landing in the middle of Hong Kong. This is misinterpreted by the humans as a threat, but really, the Aliens lost an integral part of their operation - probably their only ticket home.

We're conditioned to believe that these things are bad. The Aliens, though, are actually not all that different from Humans in their design, they're big fleshy, pale-skinned dudes with eyes and noses and lips and teeth. They don't mean to harm other than when defending themselves (and perhaps giving Oahu a little Shock and Aww) and they act fairly like a stranded group of survivors would. Think of a little Black Hawk Down (2001) and you can understand what these things are trying to do - it really upends the whole premise.

Within this idea there have been complaints that Battleship rips off a ton of source material, from Transformers, to Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001), it's easy to see that it's playing with tropes rather than trying to steal from them and stand on its own. It outright makes fun of its own dialogue and the zaniness of the first half-hour establishes Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) as the opposite of any "Destined Hero." In fact, the ending does the same.

Speaking of Taylor Kitsch...

This poor guy has know starred in two of the biggest flops of the year, if not some of the more famous of all time. What kind of career is this cat going to have? It's not like he hasn't done a great job. He plays well into that reluctant but brilliant rebel, sort of like a dirtier version of Chris Pine's Kirk from Star Trek (2009). He has a nice dose of irreverence, attitude, and capability that makes him a unique and engaging star.

Still, neither John Carter (2012) nor Battleship had any faith in his star power even though he's at the center of both films, not the effects and hackneyed legacy, to which the marketing of both hitched their wagons to. That's one of both these flicks' major problems - they're pretty good, entertaining, cinematic originals because the spectacle tried to outrun the story, even though the story was pretty solid in both. This of course leads us to...

The Marketing Failure

The issue with Battleship doesn't lie in the film itself. It lies in a marketing campaign that was so totally off base that it laughed away any serious attention. It didn't put anyone in a frame of mind to critically examine a new kind of action film with a cool premise and an authentic array of characters. There's a bit of irony here. The world expected a rip-off of Transformers films and avoided this one - although people never seemed to avoid that series at all. This is yet ironic, because Battleship is far more original than any Transformers film because it had to invent its own narrative material. This puts it above other Hasbro adaptations like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) or even the possible Candy Land movie.

This was another hurdle that the film just couldn't get over. The problem here is that apparently no one realized the ridiculousness of associating the film with a toy. When Transformers (2007) was first made, it wasn't just the toys that it built its franchise on, it was thirty years of animated movies, cartoon shows, and comic books, as well as some of the most recognizable characters from the childhood of Generations X and Y. This doesn't work the same way with a game that had no previous association with Aliens and thus the juxtaposition is rather jarring to just throw at a potential audience, seemingly with full seriousness. As mentioned, this isn't really the case, and nothing about the "Invasion" is typical, and this should have been a selling point. It wasn't.

With all this nonsense though, the filmmakers actually did work in a lengthy scene that connects rather directly with the original Board Game. It's a fairly ingenious connection and has some of the most tension, character development, and human success in the film. Isn't that curious? While disparaging the source material, almost all critics have agreed that the only scene that actually calls back to the source material is by far the best in the film?

There's also Rihanna. Oh, Rihanna. She isn't used for sex here, although there is plenty of unsubtle Male Perspective and boobie shots, mostly of Brooklyn Decker. I don't know why Rihanna is here and it's kind of funny and weird and awesome whenever she's on screen. Still, she doesn't take away from the film at all, and does what she needs to do, even if her speech about her father's Alien Prediction kind of comes out of left field and is never really revisited. Sequel in Barbados, anyone? If this film got her a role in Fast Six, that's OK with me. Just answer me why we didn't get a kick-ass Rihanna tie-in song for the Summer instead of Tom Morello's stuff?

This is also by and large a proud Navy film, and after years of highlighting Marines or the Air Force or SEALS, isn't it about time these boys (and girl) got a solid action flick? They even incorporate some of the Navy's most relevant history when John Carter recruits a horde of WWII vets for the final Alien Battle.

OK, So it was pretty goofy.

There is some pretty bad dialogue. It's kind of insane to see all these 90-year olds fighting Aliens on the USS Missouri. The acting is never really great. I don't really know what the point of Brooklyn Decker's hike up the mountain was other than to provide exposition, telling her bf John Carter what to blow up. There also seems to be some ignored significance in having the American and Japanese Navies unite to work in tandem right across the bay from Pearl Harbor. There's a lot of stuff that probably shouldn't be happening.

All of this contributes to the fun, though. None of it really gets in the way of the story, and every character is extremely likeable instead of frustrating. There is tension enough to panic for the characters, but never so much that it becomes indigestible. It's one of the more perfect Summer Movies that has hit theaters in a long time. Above all else, its subtext is intriguing and does things for its genre far beyond something like The Avengers, which seems awfully cliched in hindsight. I said it. I would take Battleship over The Avengers.

Let the Internet hate me forever.

The Road to a Blockbuster: The Dictator and Battleship try to Avenge

In this, the last Summer in History, we've already seen a sureproven Blockbuster. The Avengers (2012) has set the bar awfully high for any other film to challenge it. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) or The Dark Knight Rises (2012) may come close, but everyone else is playing an awfully tough game of catch-up. Opening today are two films that are trying awfully awfully hard to become the next big thing - The Dictator (2012) and Battleship (2012).

Sacha Baron Cohen seems poised to nail a final stake in all the good acclaim he's been riding since Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). The key with that film was the wit and irony it had along with the immaturity and gross-out humour. Brüno (2009), arguably starring a funnier character than Borat, lacked the solid narrative of Borat (yes, somehow this is true) and thus the gags were hollow. The Dictator seems like an interesting, controversial premise with a lot of potential. It lies at the apex of bad taste, and reviews so far haven't been all that terrible. That said, it seems almost out of date coming after a year where we saw the deaths of Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden, and the movie's most obvious inspiration, Momar Gaddafi.


But we've never really cared about the quality of a film. The bottom line makes Hollywood go round, and will this film be palatable enough to engage a wide audience and ensure a mark on comedy for years to come? Will we look forward to late Saturday night unedited airings on Comedy Central around 2015? Those are the questions we want to get after - Will this thing be a Blockbuster?


I don't really think so. The film has reeked of desperation for weeks and it seems ill-timed to become a classic. With this kind of thing to be really shocking and funny it inherently needs to be an excellently constructed film. Instead, the plot seems well-worn, insipid, and uninspired. The key to attract audiences should be the opposite. Baron Cohen has committed to the character for sure, but the film has been pushed on audiences rather than offered for them to accept it. The buzz period has been long and arduous and when the anticipation transitioned from mysterious weird photos and a general irrelevance to actual joke and plot revelations hype cooled rather than fired up. This is not ideal. After the same jokes have been played over and over again (you can think of them immediately - Admiral General Aladeen shooting his way to win a track race, throwing garbage at a cab, and then appearing to want to bomb the Statue of Liberty in a helicopter), it seems like all the funny is drained out. All in all, the best thing may be the Soundtrack - although once you understand the postmodern joke of it all, there's not much more to that, either.


We've also got Battleship this weekend. Finally! This is perhaps one of the more insane films of all time. From the first trailer line, "From the Hasbro company that brought you Transformers" we all started preparing for the ridiculous. This is a movie, yes from the same company as Transformers, that appears to completely rip-off that franchise, particularly Dark of the Moon (2011).

I want Rihanna to star in Avengers 2 as Moon Knight.

I've never seen a movie make so much out of nothing before. Sure, it's a difficult hurdle to get over the fact that it's an entire film based on this, but they've ramped up the crazy here like few mainstream flicks before it. Why are there aliens attacking from the sea? I guess the planet is mostly ocean, it should make sense, really. This is truly a landmark Blockbuster, though, if it succeeds it will prove that the incredible stupidity of a franchise like Transformers is wholly transferable to any Summer Tentpole. This is a dangerous idea. In all likelihood though, this will cave to The Avengers, and that kind of big filmmaking will win the day. Hopefully.


Battleship has tried to hard to be a Blockbuster. It's been advertised for months and months and forced itself into everyone's minds in part due to how absolutely terrible it looks. Now, making old 80s cartoons like Transformers and G.I. Joe into really cool thrill-ride action films works because there's always been that potential there. The realistic depiction of the robot-on-robot fighting in Transformers (2007) is kind of how we all pictured it when we mashed our toys together. This doesn't really work with Battleship. You can't make this board game suddenly cool with pegs and grids and be dark, edgy, and cool. That's retarded.


Still, there had better be some kind of "You sunk my battleship" line. Otherwise, what's the point, really? It seems like a film that is going for it all - excessive stupidity, meaningless stakes, an incoherent plot, and a complete disregard for convention, class, or authenticity. With this we may hope for a truly postmodern Blockbuster - one that doesn't care about its product at all and exists only as a conduit for studios to take an audiences' money while giving them nothing in return. That is kind of exciting. Still, the stupidity of both of these movies will hold them back while there is still something like The Avengers available to audiences to experience.


Both The Dictator and Battleship open today - go check 'em out and see if I'm right.

More First Impressions: The Avengers - Pulp Roots and a Balmy Future

Well folks, The Avengers (2012) is still rocking strong and is clearly the #1 thing in America right now. We should take a moment to mourn the loss of the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch, though, who has clearly had a tremendous influence on this blogger. It's been a crazy couple of days for sure. But - back to the biggest film in the country.

Can anyone see The Dictator (2012) superseding The Avengers this weekend? I don't think so. Sacha Baron Cohen's latest is appearing more and more desperate as he's suddenly appearing everywhere as his character, Admiral General Aladeen. Note how this post is becoming more and more prescient - as the desperation boils over it's clear that the film hasn't yet integrated itself into the national consciousness the way the greatest of this year, The Avengers and The Hunger Games (2012) have. That is to say, once the hype machine gets rolling, there isn't a need for the blatant and jarring bits of self-promotion that irritate rather than buzz.

Where were we?

Comic Origins: Taking Inspiration by Piecemeal

The Avengers has a team have a somewhat ridiculous history after first forming in 1963. They originally formed not wholly unlike the film - Loki tricked the Hulk into a rampage and Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, and Wasp united to fight him, eventually recognized Loki's mischief, took in the Hulk, and beat down the rogue god. Neat. So the Loki inspiration is certainly present in The Avengers, as is bits of controlling the Hulk (Loki's first main goal is to set loose the Hulk to destroy the rest of the Team on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Hellicarrier). Since then, The Avengers have taken on just about every major player in the Marvel Universe, including Spider-Man, Wolverine, and of course Iron Fist.

The important distinction is how S.H.I.E.L.D. comes in. It wasn't until many years later that the supersecret spy organization had anything to do with the Avengers - except for in the Ultimate storyline that Marvel pushed for at the turn of the century. The Ultimate Universe sought to re-boot many of their comic lines to make them more accessible to new readers who had no desire to wade through forty years of complex, contradictory history. Of course, as the A.V. Club points out, with titles like The Ultimates, Ultimate Comics: Avengers, Ultimate Comics: New Ultimates, and Ultimate Comics: Ultimates, this was still no easy task.


The Ultimates refers to a group of heroes that is more accurately reflected in the film. A Sam Jackson-looking Nick Fury recruits a bunch of ultimate heroes to come together in times of great crisis. This is really straight-up what the film is reproducing and within the context presented, is the only way for all these Alpha Males to work together. The Comic Tony Stark is a team player who recruits and defends and leads the charge (eventually becoming Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. no less). The Film Tony Stark would rather down some scotch and bang Gwyneth Paltrow. Wouldn't we all?

Anyone Else Had Enough of Massive City-decimating Alien Invasions?

This is an aside more than anything, but it seems like we've somehow emerged in a glut of big, crazy weird Alien Invasion films. And everyone is ripping off eachother's designs and no one seems to care. Remember that big chewy Snake Thing from Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) that munches through Chicago? Not all that different from the big squirmy Worm Thing from The Avengers that munches through NYC. From the looks of it, Battleship (2012) and Men in Black III (2012) will bring on more of the same crap.

It's that weird grotesque Alien Design that seems worlds away from more classic streamlined designs that we saw in Independence Day (1996) or to a lesser extent, War of the Worlds (2005). Instead now we have these intricate, squiggly looking things flying around, whether they be strictly machine as in Transformers, or actually organic as in The Avengers. In addition, the battles have become that much bigger - it's no longer outside the realm of possibility that an entire city (often somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard) will get wrecked.

We're in this age of mega-mega-budgeted blockbusters that have these new expectations of Box Office Returns. Cracking the billion-dollar worldwide is no longer a distinction reserved for anomalies like Titanic (1997) or long-awaited adaptations like Return of the King (2003). Just about anyone, from Alice in Wonderland (2010) to Dark of the Moon (2011) is game. With this in mind, filmmakers can set their sights a bit higher, and throw entire futuristic wars up on screen like never before. The results, hollow as they may be in a film like Transformers, look really rad, although they have quickly become repetitive in style.

Marvel's Future:

Ultimately this film is both an endpoint and a turning point for Marvel Studios. The Avengers was the culmination of many years of hard work, tie-ins, and massive crossover appeal. Its success, however, guarantees that not only will each Franchise continue on its own, but the central Avengers Series will also continue, single-handedly ushering in a new era of Blockbuster filmmaking, one where characters, when done properly, are not limited to any single film, which is liberating, frightening, and exciting to behold.

This film should be a landmark one for Marvel for introducing the Cosmic aspects of its Universe. Now, with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) we got into this a bit, but that's something everyone would more rather forget. Instead, Josh Whedon filled this film with the Chitauri, a more obscure Interstellar Race than most casual fans are familiar with, but his reasoning is just that. The film also introduces Thanos. Nerd as I am, when Loki was talking to the Palpatine-looking motherfucker towards the beginning of the film with cryptic references to their Boss, I was secretly hoping that would turn out to be Thanos, but I didn't think the series had really gotten bold enough to go that far.

The introduction of Thanos and his love for Lady Death is a brilliant set-up for Avengers 2 (2015) or maybe even Thor 2 (2013). I have to think that a Galactic Threat of this magnitude would be in a film no smaller than the scope of The Avengers. It seems as if Marvel is fairly content with keeping its tie-in films a bit simpler while bringing together the big army battles for the core Avengers franchises. If that is the case, there's no way the mad Titan would appear in Thor 2. This also harkens the obvious - will the Silver Surfer return? Could Marvel finally get the rights to some of its other characters like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four? Or someone analogous that hasn't been used, like Adam Warlock, Quasar, Nova, or the Sentry? Why are there so many of these guys? Are we stuck with Dr. Strange, Vision, and Moonknight?! CAN I GET A BETA RAY BILL?! Shit!

There are plenty of Easter Eggs already in place to give Thanos plenty to do. In addition to his quest for the Cosmuc Cube, Thanos is closely identified with the Infinity Gauntlet, also seen in Odin's Vault, which Marvel has already showed off. There are plenty of possibilities.

The short answer is that Marvel can do just about anything they want now. They can dig up some more villains and heroes from their massive library, throw 'em together and presto - you've made a cool billion shmagooligans. Now, if DC can get their asses moving on a Justice League film, we'd be all set...

Summer Preview 2012

Well folks, it's the last summer we'll have before the end of the world and Norwegian Morning Wood will be there to chronicle it. We have epic blockbusters coming out, the Summer Jam Royal Court of Summer, and plenty of wet and wild fun for all.

Now, tracking the Jams of Summer have been some of the worst-rated NMW posts of all time, but they're incredibly fun to do and serve as a nice weekly capsule of Pop Music Life. This year we will not be tracking the Top 8 so thoroughly and have some more room for subjective judgments, including Hot Jams of the Week as well as Old School Revivals. There will also be a greater emphasis on Hot Artists and their careers.

We've also got plenty of big-profile films coming out, namely The Avengers (2012), whose opening next week will officially kick-off the Summer Season the first weekend of May. The other release with the highest profile is The Dark Knight Rises (2012), although there are plenty more that range from the intriguingly thoughtful (Prometheus [2012]) to the retarded (Battleship [2012]). Who will earn the Summer Box Office Crown? It will very likely be someone wearing blue or black tights. Yeesh.

It's going to be some Summer. Ride or die.