Here’s a fascinating little post from Siskoid on two of my favorite current superhero comics, Green Lantern and Immortal Iron Fist, and how their writers have created independent “bubble worlds” of their own within the larger shared universes they inhabit. This is certainly part of what has made them so appealing over the past year or so, and one of the reasons why I tend to mention them in the same breath. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
And here’s a post I don’t like at all from Reverse Shot on two of my favorite movies of the past year, 300 and 28 Weeks Later, tagging them as among the year’s worst films in an almost willfully ad hominem- and inaccuracy-laden fashion. Bonus points for the now de rigeur slogging of 300 director Zack Snyder’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, which they sneeringly attack for its proficiency with action in much the same way that previous gatekeepers of good taste sneeringly attacked horror films like the original Dawn for their proficiency with being scary and gross.
I didn’t love 300–I thought it was too stylized, more something to be admired than viscerally experienced; I wanted to be caught up in the moment, and I found myself pausing to admire the artful way a limb severed. It didn’t feed my inner Beavis, and there wasn’t enough there for the adult me.
But you can’t slag it for laziness, and you have to admire they way it cheerfully goes about its own crazy business on its own crazy terms; it’s the perfect Frank Miller movie in that regard.
The Reverse Shot post lost me the moment it trotted out its little political litmus test.
Re: Reverse Shot
Yow. Now there’s someone really pleased with laying on the smackdown and less so with, I don’t know, accurately portraying something. “More poetic than true” is a pitfall for most critics, and that is its ugliest face…
The really sad thing is that neither of those reviews were entertaining. I mean, I can ignore wrongheadedness. But not being entertaining? Capital crime.
I may be slightly biased; both of those movies made it into my top 10. I just get turned off when a critic is talking just to talk, rather than driving toward an actual point.
Transformers was “raped” by Michael Bay?
What the HELL are they talking about?
IT’S FUCKING TRANSFORMERS!
Good point. Using the word “raped” in connection to a children’s show — or anything other than the actual act itself, really — is the new Godwin’s Law corollary.
Rape has been raped by bloggers.
I thought Chris Claremont raped rape first.
He did everything first.