Welcome to my inaugural Friday article!
It will be filled with bile.
Only because I promised to share my least favorite things. In movies and comic books. As a rule, I usually banish memories of things that I dislike. Nerd rage is exhausting, folks. And why wallow in stuff of such misery and anger?
The only answer I could come up with was to write this article. Seems legit at least for this week.
Also: ***********SPOILER ALERT! SPOILERS AHEAD!**************
To get started, I shall spit out a big silver screen piece of bile:
ULTRAVIOLET
Milla Jovovich is an awesome person. And she does what she can with this piece of crap. That’s it. That’s all the good I can say about this awful movie. The story is absolutely confusing. I cannot tell you what happened in this movie, except for some fighting, ball morphing, and colors. The editing is maddening. Out of nowhere, entire scenes seem to disappear, or simply make no sense. And the CG has sudden bursts of laziness, with incomplete work. I watched this thing in theaters and nearly threw my soda at the screen out of sheer frustration. The horror… the HORROR.
Next up is comic book All-Star Batman & Robin:
“What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I’m the goddamn Batman.” This scene… nay, the entire comic book, felt like Frank Miller flipping me off. Just the hateful kind of flip off. The kind of flip off that feels like “Oh man if I only had a gun I would shoot you and then poke my middle finger into the bullet wound BECAUSE I HATE YOU PLEASE DIE.” In this “bold” re-imagining, Frank Miller writes Batman as deplorably, certifiably, and absolutely bat-shit crazy. Kidnapping a young Dick Grayson minutes after Grayson’s whole family are brutally murdered.
I hate this book. It seems to drip with sarcasm and anger. By Miller, directed at us. How dare we ask him to write Batman again? How dare we want to give him money to create make-believe? This book feels so hateful. I stopped reading after the second issue and never looked back. (Believe me, from outside accounts, it got worse).
X-Men 3 – The Last Stand:
The story behind this movie is just as disappointing as the outcome. Bryan Singer had made two successful X-Men movies. But he really wanted to make a Superman movie (Superman Returns… I have some huge issues with that movie, but not all out hate). Fox’s response was the equivalent of an angry ex-significant other: Petty. Vindictive. And ugly. It decided to say “screw you” to Singer and rushed production. No director wanted to deal with their crazy ass, except Brett Ratner. He ended up making a hodge podge movie of “cool” moments and awful writing. I completely wrote this movie off after Cyclops’ death scene.
Oh wait, that’s right, HE DIDN’T GET ONE.
Cyclops. The leader of the X-Men. Dies off screen. Jean Grey kills him. Because she does that now. To men she supposedly loves. I really hated X-Men 3.
Nemesis:
Apparently, the premise of this comic book was “What If… Batman Was a Super Villain?” I saw a little of that, but I mostly saw “What If… Mark Millar Just Stopped Trying to Write Good Stories That Make Any Sense?” Basically, the villain (Nemesis) is evil. That’s it. Just pure evil for the ridiculous escalation of evil’s sake. He does evil stuff and gets off on it. He impregnates an underage girl with her brother’s sperm and finds some way that she can’t have an abortion. Because he’s evil and apparently doesn’t have to worry about things being at all possible. Oh, and the ending is that if you’re rich and evil, you can become as dangerous as Batman. Don’t worry about logic, they can be mass produced. Apparently, Batman was a good fighter because he was rich, not specially focused or driven. Such a stupid comic book.
Uwe Boll:
No, Uwe Boll is not a movie. He’s a director. A really, terrible one. He’s the cockroach of horrible films. No matter how bad the reviews, or how passionate the dislike for his work, he just keeps making more movies. House of the Dead, Far Cry, In the Name of the King, Blood Rayne, etc. One abomination after another. Its pretty exhausting. Though he did something very interesting by actually fighting critics that panned his work fight him in boxing matches. Though Boll was a trained boxer, and might have chosen which critics he actually fought. Whatever. I just hope somebody landed a punch.
Identity Crisis:
This comic event written by Brad Meltzer is especially aggravating because its well written, but written wrong. There’s almost a constant apology from the books. Saying “Oh geez, please don’t think these old stories were stupid.” Not once did it accept the source material. It always seemed to be too busy explaining away any silliness with an overly detailed and overly “mature” excuse. But really, THIS page was all I needed to know I was finished reading:
Dr. Light has his tongue out showing everybody (the Justice League and the audience) how he raped a woman. This whole scene was just distasteful. And is part of a whole use of rape in stories in general that felt cheap, irresponsible, and all around wrong.
Well, there you have it. All my dislike. Okay, no, this is just some of the dislike I have rolling around in the depths of my beaten soul. I can always summon up some more nerd rage down the road.
Oh man, Dads sucked… Okay, see you next week!