just checkin in. more blogging soon....

a few things:

1. my fiance and I have started a food/cooking blog here. check it out!

2. I currently live in new jersey.

3. Robert plant has a new album coming out. normally this wouldn't matter much to me, but he's covering Low. And this is sort of amazing....

4. I'm way behind on my comics... I know there's only a couple i need to check up on (buffy and amazing spiderman... maybe whatever's going on in the batman books, or at least the return of bruce wayne) but... it's funny, I originally envisioned this as sort of a comics blog but have maybe only posted 4 or 5 entries about comics... so we'll see how that goes...

posting from my droid

yep

so this might mean I will blog more, since I can prettymuch just get to this on my phone whenever...

dangerous.

this guy at this open mic sounds like he could be playing guitar parts of explosions in the sky songs....

should I also twitter?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.4.9

iron man 2 review

iron man 2.

the good:

- robert downey jr. incredible. seriously. again, i have to give major credit to the people who cast him as stark/iron man. he was perfect note for note from beginning to end.

- sam rockwell as justin hammer. despite the lack of real development of the rivalry, sam rockwell also proves that he really is as good an actor as he always seems to be.

- visually. like the first one, a stunning movie. some overdone (the scene where black widow breaks into Hammer's offices felt too showy, as if to say "hey teenage boys, here's a hot woman in a cat suit kicking ass") but mostly fantastic.

- the nods. mostly the captain america shield. agent coulson's reaction was pretty much priceless.

the bad:

- lack of development, plot and character wise. even of the characters you knew from the first one, it felt like there was a lot just sort of thrown at you.

- shoehorned together plot. too many story lines put together with various levels of success - tying Whiplash to Hammer was good and made sense. black widow being tied to shield, eh (yes, she should be, but i think a major point was missed in both her and the villain were Russian). the whole war machine plot, while it did work, felt a little rushed as well.

anyway. so was it as good as the first one, which was completely brilliant and amazing? no. and i don't think it really could have expected to be. it really felt like, in some respects, they were saying "this movie is a stop-gap between the first one and the entire future of the marvel film universe - we're not positive if we're going to get another movie out of iron man alone, so we need to hit you with this, this, and this." it will be interesting to see where this leads once the rest of the avengers are put into place. how it SHOULD go is something like this:

at the end of the captain america movie - maybe after the credits, where we know he has been frozen in ice, we see a block of ice with a vaguely human form in it on a table, surrounded by tony stark (in or out of costume), thor, bruce banner (or hulk), and maybe some others that we will not have seen yet (wasp? pym? maybe we only vaguely identify them in this scene, just to set people up for the avengers movie, which this will then lead into). of course, i don't write for marvel studios so...

-

it's a blogapalooza

- back to the ramona books, for a second. i know her family was supposed to be relatively poor (after her dad lost his job, especially) but it always bothered me how they would talk about going out for fast food like it was going out for a gourmet meal. i do get how, to some kids, even those with money, it is. but that just always bothered me.

- henry huggins. still the bomb. paper drives and all of that. really, i love me some beverly cleary. she rarely talked about that puberty stuff that judy blume threw into everything she wrote, even stuff like Freckle Juice.

- wednesday = comics. comics = sometimes good. sometimes frustrating.

- the good. the boys. seriously. the boys, is just a great book. sometimes too dirty, but i'd expect that from anything Garth Ennis writes. his satiric take on super heroes is just... brutal. and... yeah.

- Also good: Batman and Robin #12. the reveal at the end, very unexpected. Morrison still wins.

- the frustrating. Brightest Day. after Blackest Night, i would want a really strong follow up (ie 52 following up the mostly readable Infinite Crisis). brightest day, so far, is a lot of navel gazing. more setup than necessary. it's great that these characters are back from the dead and conflicted about it. where's it going to go? (the only really good bits were the Aquaman calling dead fish part and the return of Black Manta).

- also good. but even better because it was a buck. I Zombie. mike allred's art can pretty much make me like anything. and hey, a book whose plot revolves a zombie (who has to eat the brains of the recently dead once a month to keep from becoming "totally night of the living dead") whose best friends are a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf? how can that be bad?? (seriously, check out the prequel!)

- also, they killed nightcrawler in x-men. for what? who knows. is x-men going to do that thing to me where it makes me really not want to read them for a while?? best bit: beast yelling at cyclops at nightcrawler's funeral. kind of brilliant, really.

- my blog lacks focus. just random thoughts. i hope people don't mind.

random thoughts part deux

- man, that last entry formatted really weird. i blame the video embedding.

- i grew up reading the ramona books. loved them, though i never read the ones that came out after "ramona quimby age 8" (kind of like Judy Blume's "Fudge" books, i didn't care for the characters after I and they reached a certain age). i am incredibly troubled by the upcoming movie:

Ramona And Beezus Trailer

now, the casting actually seems good/right (even selina gomez), so i don't have a problem there. i think my issue is with what Walden media does to kids books when turning them into movies: add ridiculous looking "fantasy" elements. yeah, it's great to see what Ramona is imagining, but is it really necessary to have THAT much detail. that ruined their "Bridge to Terabithia" for me - by turning the Terabithia scenes into "lord of the rings light," they sort of missed the entire point. and really, the books are better when it's just ramona being mischievous honestly, i was too big a fan of the uber cool, sarah polley before Avonlea (and then awesome goto indie actress), Canadian tv series that pbs showed for about a year to accept any other live action version of the books.

also, that kid beezus is talking to had better be henry huggins! they left him out of the tv show. henry huggins is the bomb.

- i'm also not terribly thrilled about the tron sequel. i think they are doing some pretty cool things with it, but i just don't see it as necessary. my memories of tron will always revolve around when the Disney channel was fairly new, so all they seemed to show was Tron, Ozzie and Harriet, and Mr Boogedy. i love mr boogedy.

- is curious why Marvel has to revisit the 90's so much. first onslaught, then the clone wars, then "x-men forever" and "x-factor forever"... now a new look at the Infinity Gauntlet? I do like that it will be through Marvel's "all ages" Marvel Adventures line but... still. that said, i do think it's great that Marvel is bringing back Thanos, even if it's just in the cosmic books. if i had to pick a favorite Marvel villain list, he'd be up there...

- i think, as much as the whole "brand new day" spiderman stuff has kind of made a nice niche for itself, and has had some really great moment's story telling wise, for them to go back and remind us of the bullshit that started it all - apparently they are going to have us see the new version of what happened at peter parker and mary jane's wedding that caused them to not get married... i have heard some rumor that it might ultimately lead to an undoing of it all, which might not be bad (as long as it's not done in some ham fisted "okay, other reality restored" kind of way...). i, for one, really didn't have a problem with spider man getting married. who cares if it "aged" him - he is supposed to be an adult, after all. and if people really are into the single peter parker, i would think part of that is because they want to see him develop into the no-longer-single peter parker.

okay. that's all for now. maybe more coherence later?

back

has it been that long since i last posted... seeing how there's more action coming from spammer "commenting" on an old post of mine, i figured i'd get back into the blogging game... this will just be a random thoughts post, which i may elaborate on some of later, but for now... these are things i've either wanted to blog about, thought about either recently or for years, or just... wanted to type... so without further ado...

random thoughts:

- i don't really like the Grateful Dead. i actually think they have some okay songs, but i just never got into it. maybe it was because the Dead, to me, were a lot like Jimmy Buffett (at least at my high school where someone would inevitably want "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been" as the end of year senior class song) - not musically, which i think they definitely have a leg up on Buffet with, but in terms of the people they attract. that said, I have known some really passionate Grateful Dead fans, who followed the music not the "atmosphere." I will admit to thinking the video for "Touch of Grey" is completely awesome (and i don't really even mind the song...

- speaking of "the dead," I really enjoyed DC comics recent "Blackest Night" event. Really. A lot.

There were definitely some problems I had with it (the outcome, where certain heroes and villains

were brought back from the dead, was well played, I just wish they had brought back some more than

others...). I'm really interested how this is going to play (mostly i just want to see a new Aquaman ongoing),

but again: the ending was top notch. And really, I have to say that this is where DC comics, i think, really

beats Marvel in their crossovers.

With Marvel, the last few "Major Events" (since civil war) have been kind of ham handed, and really didn't

seem to be interested in "change" - yeah, it looks like some of this upcoming "heroic age" will be a big,

permanent deal... but i still half expect "Seige" to have a huge cop out ending where the key to defeating the

now batshit insane "Sentry" is something they've had all along. With DC, although it has felt like each crossover

has just been serving to lead to the next big event, they actually have impact. (of course, Marvel does a

significantly better job with timing, whereas with a DC book, you can never tell when in relation other books

are taking place to the big event, and sometimes you get events spoiled for you. Marvel definitely is a little more

disciplined, though I think Luke Cage taking over Thunderbolts would have been a better thing to find out

when Seige was all over...

- I still have no real interest in sitting down and seriously watching James Cameron's "The Smurfs" "Avatar."

Similar to my aversion to "Cloverfield" if someone convinces me... but otherwise. I think it's less to do with the movie

itself and more to do with my loathing for most of the work of James Cameron (and, bluntly, the man is a

ridiculous asshole, but i only object to how that seems to come across in his movies). I like the first Terminator

just fine, and Aliens (although it doesn't hold a candle to the first one), but i seriously cannot name another James

Cameron film i truly like (the Abyss might come close, although, hmm, no. not really.) Also, as much as i sort of

like 3D (i think for some movies, like Coraline, it has worked really well), i'm not too terribly into seeing a 3D

movie that, as has been largely pointed out elsewhere, is either stealing the plot from disney's "Pocahontas" or something

else (Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, etc.) (or, as many critics from various ends of the political spectrum have stated, is

an extremely ham handed political analogy of anti-imperialism/racism/environmentalism/younameitsomepoliticalhackhasfounditsm).

nope. not for me.

(and really, it's the smurfs. sorry.)

- it's sort of awful how bad i want to see iron man 2. i never really liked iron man as a character. even now. even post

movie. even with all the, admitedly very cool, thing they have done to him in the comics (asshole iron man is better than

bland "rich guy uses money for superheroics" iron man any day. and now he's having to redeem himself. a lot.) i just

have little real interest in reading him.

- i don't understand tween pop stars, especially those churned out through the disney or nickelodeon machines. i'm also

a little disconcerted that there's a nickelodeon "tween" machine now. but seriously, all the tv shows are overacted, overly

broad comedy and the music just tries to hard to fit in some popular niche of music, that it all seems really trite and boring.

and i know this is how various elements of the entertainment industry has always worked (a manufactured pop star is a

manufactured pop star. period). but... ugh...

- "true" by spandau ballet is a terrible song. just terrible.

- if Marvel is bringing Jean Grey back, and i sort of hope they are, they had better not do it just to kill her in a few years.

it gets old. fast.

- even though they explain it in Darkest Night, i would have liked to see all of the unnecessary deaths from "Identity Crisis"

undone for brightest day (Firestorm's was a start, but i'm talking sue and ralph dibney). i also think they should have had - or do

as some sort of parody/one shot kind of thing, the dead black lantern versions of all the unnecessarily/ridiculously killed off

characters from the past couple of decades in DC history and have them attack the writers/editors responsible...

- all for now. more to come...

conspiracy proven

apparently, the moon landing WAS faked as an A.I.M. plot...

the proof?

well, neil armstrong is apparently, actually MODOK!

=

yep. i knew it.....