REVIEW: DAREDEVIL, the series

On May 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television5 Comments

maxresdefault tl;dr version: More like Dare-MEH-vil, amirite???

My wife and I finished the last two episodes of the first season of Daredevil Friday night. It took, oh, two and a half, maybe three weeks from watching the first episode to get to the finale– which for us implies a fair amount of dedication, as no adult TV happens when the boy is awake and after that literally every single other thing we might wish to do with our lives competes with watching fictional white dudes punch each other on TV. So I can’t claim I roundly disliked the show or anything like that; I didn’t. But on the whole, having watched the whole season, I’m not super excited about watching more of this.

Let’s start with good stuff:

Casting, at least to a certain point. I don’t remember dude’s name and I’m in no mood to look things up, but I liked the dude they’ve got playing Daredevil, and the casting for Foggy Nelson and Karen worked for me too. Racebending Ben Urich was a good call, and Vincent D’Onofrio certainly looked the part of the Kingpin, but more on him later. I loved Rosario Dawson but we didn’t see enough of her. Madame Gao was also fantastic. In general the acting was effective.
Mood/Direction: Excellent, especially early on. Daredevil was a hard show to watch at times, and I mean that as a compliment; when the show wanted to fuck with your head, your head was gonna get fucked with, and the grit and grime of Hell’s Kitchen left me wanting a shower after a few of the episodes.
Fight scenes. At least early on; the hallway fight in the second or third episode was outstanding and the fight with Nobu later on was a standout as well. That said, all the flippy stuff got annoying after a bit and sometimes the fight scenes got a bit repetitive.
Stick. I loved Stick.
Matt and Foggy’s relationship. The highlight of the series to me, in a lot of ways.

All that said, I have some issues:

Kingpin. There’s lots of folks praising Vincent D’Onofrio’s take on the Kingpin to the high heavens; they didn’t watch the same show I watched. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t need Daredevil. It needed Zoloft. Supervillains shouldn’t be in need of antidepressants, and I expected this dude to end every single conversation with a sigh and the words “I’m sad.” There was also enough portentous speechifying to fill a Lord of the Rings film. I kept expecting to find out that Wilson’s middle name was actually Lenny, too.
Vanessa. Related to the Kingpin issues; Vanessa did not help. Their relationship made no Goddamn sense at all and just served to remind me repeatedly that this Wilson Fisk is a twelve-year-old in an oversized body, which could work with certain villains, but not with the Kingpin. And this show had Madame Gao in it! They didn’t even need to put Kingpin on screen in the first season. Make Gao the villain, keep Kingpin offscreen, and use Wesley, who was way more interesting, instead.
Karen. For the last two or three episodes, I kept yelling “You’ve known them for two weeks!” at the screen. No one could hear me. I know Karen’s a character from the comics and all and so she has to be there, but she’s totally passive-aggressively worming her way into both of the guys’ backstories by the end of the series, acting like they’ve all been friends for years and that their friendship as a group is The Most Important Thing Evar. No. You’ve known them for a month. You don’t get to pretend that you’re part of a we yet. Go ‘way. Also, I swear her hair was a different color in every scene, and for most of an episode it was green. Not actually a problem, but super distracting once I noticed it.

I dunno. If you’re interested in checking the show out and you haven’t yet, go ahead; it won’t kill you. But that’s about as excited as I can get about this show right now.

On th’ pitcher shows

On April 18, 2015April 18, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn movies8 Comments

You remember when your grandpa used to call movies that? And it was a weirdly redundant phrase, but also oddly comforting? I miss pitcher shows.

Anyway. You’ve seen this already:

I had a few things to say about the first trailer, both right after I saw it and after I had some time to think about it. My main concern, right now, is that the movie’s going to end up being a bit too scary to take my four-year-old to, and taking Kenny to see this movie is literally the main reason I want to see it. That image yesterday wasn’t a joke. Now, most of the scary scenes seem to be confined to John Boyega’s Finn character, so I’m hoping that it’s just a few bits from early in the movie. But look at this:

The bloody handprint– or at least what looks like one– on his helmet has me a bit nervous. This is a series that managed to burn three characters to a crisp and cut off multiple limbs without getting bloody. I’m not making doom and gloom proclamations, mind you– it just makes me a teeny bit less likely to take my son to see it. It’s not going to affect whether I do.

(Note: I don’t know whether Finn is in costume for these bits or if he’s actually a Stormtrooper. I kinda like the idea of a main character being a former Stormtrooper.)

On the good side, and this isn’t in the trailer, there’s this:

This is the hilt of Kylo Ren’s cross-guarded lightsaber, which caused so much kvetching when the first trailer came out. I was not happy with the new look for the lightsaber blade (not the crossguards, the blade itself) and said that I’d drop my objection if there seemed to be a story-based reason why the blade looked different.

That saber hilt looks like it was put together by an amateur. And I note that Kylo Ren’s name does not include the word Darth. Therefore: objection dropped.

Everything else about the trailer? Gold. I’m not super keen on the idea of the Empire and the Rebellion being renamed the First Order and the Resistance, but I’ll roll with that for the time being and it’s not in the trailer anyway. But yeah, I’m a lot more psyched about this film now than I was for the first teaser.

On the other hand…

Nope.

Noooooope.

One of these days they’ll make a new Superman movie. Hell, one of these days they’ll make a Batman movie; they haven’t made one of those in like two decades or something. Make all the movies you want about Angsty Alien No Moral Core Raised by Assholes Dude and Snarling Ninja Bat-Costume Dude, but stop calling those two “Superman” and “Batman.” Wild fucking dogs couldn’t drag me to see this shit.

(“But, Luther, you were down on the new Star Wars before the second trailer came out, and you seem to have changed your mind! What makes these different?”)

The entirety of the Nolan Batman films and the horrid piece of shit that was Man of Steel. Ain’t nothing gonna change in this one.

(“How dare you judge an entire movie on a two-minute trailer!”)

Can we change the subject for a sec and talk about how fucking stupid this is as a line of argument? Trailers literally only exist to make people want to see things. They exist to make people judge movies. They’re put together by the same people who put the movies together. It’s bullshit to say that you can watch a trailer and go “I want to see that!” but it’s somehow illegitimate to see a trailer and (backed up by the last four entire movies by these idiots) claim that you think it looks like a piece of shit. And this movie looks like a piece of shit, and is a sequel to a movie that was a piece of shit, and there is no indication that anything has changed.

(“But what about Aquaman? And Wonder Woman?”)

Okay, Aquaman looks awfully cool and fuckit I’ll be honest by awfully cool I mean amazingly hot:

That said? This whole design is more of the what am colors? nonsense that both of these franchises are draped in, and frankly the inclusion of the characters just makes me think the movie is gonna be unwieldy and overstuffed in addition to depressing and stupid. Be honest: would you really know this was supposed to be Wonder Woman if no one told you in advance?:

Totally something I wanna spend ten bucks on.

(EDIT: Just saw this. How infinitely better is this? Way infinitely better.)

My new best friend

On April 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek23 Comments

…is this adorable little dude right here. He’s going to sit on my desk and make me happy every time I look at him forever.

On Wonder Woman

On March 13, 2015March 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

I have no idea how widespread or old these pictures are, but: this, DC.

It’s time for a plague.

On February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

So, Knighthawk Armory, an organization I’d never heard of prior to today, just posted some fucking amazing pictures to their Facebook page. I’ll show you two of them; click through for the others. They made a Hulk out of scrap metal:

(CORRECTION: They didn’t do it, they just reposted the pictures. Actual artists are Old Steel Art out of Thailand, whose page is mostly not in English but whose pictures are amazing anyway.)

Here’s the fifth comment on the post:

There are some dumb, dumb, dumb motherfuckers in this country, people. Christ.

REBLOG: Sikh Captain America: The Man Behind the Shield

On January 22, 2015January 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

I love this story, and the more attention it gets the better.

Here is a story of how I am dumb.

On January 9, 2015January 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews8 Comments

So this is a true story of how I am a huge idiot.

I buy comic books, right? If you’ve been reading for very long you surely know this about me. I generally drop $20-30 a week on comics, which nowadays tend to run $3-4 each. I bought issue 1 of a new creator-owned book by writer Matt Fraction about a month ago. I like Fraction’s superhero work quite a lot, and generally if I like a writer’s work for hire stuff on superheroes they didn’t create, I make sure to check out the stuff they came up with on their own.

The book’s called ODY-C. It’s pronounced “Odyssey,” a fact I didn’t pick up on until discussing it with the owner at my comic shop on Wednesday. I assume the pronunciation would have been perfectly obvious had I read the comic, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I vaguely recall having a pretty heavy day that day, both in terms of stuff at work and number of comics bought. The first issue of ODY-C involves a nine-page timeline, right at the beginning. Understand that I tried to take a picture of this thing and couldn’t figure out a way to do it, but this is the image on the other side of the timeline. Sort of:Now, again: that’s a big art spread. The other side was a detailed timeline.

Those are not my legs. I found the image on Fraction’s website.

It made me tired.

I closed it, closed the comic, added it to a pile, and never opened it again. I thought about it a couple of times, sitting there and all not being read and representing wasted money, and just never bothered.

ODY-C #2 came out Wednesday. And I bought the motherfucker, on the off chance that I was going to someday read the first issue, like it, and then want the second.

I have still not read either issue. Now, granted, I’ve only had ODY-C #2 for two days at this point. Really only one, because I’m writing this Thursday night. But you really have to wonder just how far out I can take this. Am I going to buy issue #3 in a month because I haven’t read #1 or #2 yet?

And how about when I tell you that this isn’t the only book I’m like this about?

I am a dumb person.