* Due to freelance-related stuff that would taint me even worse than my usual conflict-of-interest calvacade, I won’t be reviewing Daredevil #501, the official start of Andy Diggle and Roberto de la Torre’s run on the title. Leave us say, however, that fans of the Bendis/Maleev and Brubaker/Lark runs should at the very least give the new team until the end of this particular issue to win them over. My goodness! Greg McElhatton agrees.
* I am 100% behind Adrien Brody starring in Predators. That makes me feel like it might be a real movie instead of just some stupid studio sequel bullshit. Then again, Christian Bale was in Terminator Salvation. (Via AICN.)
* The Missus’s sojourn amongst the Internet’s female-fandom contingent has revealed to me that Eli “The Bear Jew” Roth has set off a firestorm of fapping for ladies nationwide, which is totally awesome. Only slightly less entertaining is the fact that Roth is cowriting a kung fu movie with the RZA that the Wu-Tang mastermind is slated to direct. It’s called The Man with the Iron Fist (at least until Disney-Marvel’s lawyers get involved) and it joins Roth’s full slate of “who knows if they’ll ever get made” movies, along with the Grindhouse spinoff Thanksgiving and the giant-monster movie Endangered Species and the Stephen King adaptation Cell (which I think is officially off the table at this point). All I know is that as long as he keeps wearing wifebeaters in his on-screen appearances there won’t be a dry seat in the house. (Via Jason Adams, whose Rothlust puts that of The Missus’s Twilight-fan cronies to shame.)
* Kiel Phegley selects his favorite posts from The Cool Kids Table’s first year of blogging.
* Jeet Heer presents a nice concise summary of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy strip and its impact on comics. It’s really a public service. For comics readers like me for whom classic strips played hardly any role in our evolution as fans of the medium, the appeal and import of Nancy is the kind of thing that needs some explanation. Most of the strip’s devotees talk about it in ways that take a preexisting knowledge and appreciation of it for granted, something you don’t really see in similar cases like Krazy Kat or Peanuts.
The Man with the Iron Fist has been in the works for years without anyone saying boo about the title. Here’s hoping it gets through intact, particularly considering both properties seem to derive their names from the same source.
I don’t get why there are so many Predator movies. The first movie made less money than Stakeout, and was so boring that my friends and I took turns going to the parking lot to drink beers when we saw it during its initial theatrical run. Not even good beers. Its most memorable moments were a) Jesse Ventura’s rail gun; b) Arnold’s macho handshake with Carl Weathers. I can’t even remember the ending, although I think it may have been something about Arnold refashioning his arrowheads so they injected the Predator with shots of Dianabol. All I remember about the Predator sequel is the terrifying appearance of a monstrous alien Rosie O’Donnell.*
Is it just that the Aliens didn’t really have a natural opponent? So if the ETs or the Terminators or the Wookies or the Ewoks had stepped up a few years back we’d have no more Predator movies? Are you telling me Wookies vs. Aliens wouldn’t have made way more money than Aliens vs. Predators? What’s going on here? Whose responsible this?
*that may have been the Stakeout sequel.
Well, our mileage clearly varies on Predator, which I’ve thought was tremendous since I was a kid. The appeal, I suppose, is that it’s the purest combination of ’80s action movie and ’80s sci-fi-monster movie. Among guys roughly my age it’s also a quote machine: “GET TO DA CHOPPAH!” etc.
The other thing is that some very smart art director for Predator 2 put an Alien skull in the Predator ship’s trophy room as an eyeball kick, thus instantly launching a Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man franchise (which, unfortunately, has never been as cool as that one shot of the Alien skull in the Predator trophy room).
That’s awesome about the art director. I didn’t know that and it answers my question.
Another thing I remember about Predator 2 is that people asked Danny Glover if he could fill Arnold’s shoes and he said he could definitely beat him in a 40 yard dash and anytime Arnold wanted to go he’d race him. Funny because it’s true.