Friday, 20 December 2013

Pineapple Express



A process server and his marijuana dealer wind up on the run from hitmen and a corrupt police officer after he witness his dealer's boss murder a competitor while trying to serve papers on him.







Pineapple Express (2008) on IMDb

Does AGE OF ULTRON Have a Second Villain? (It Probably Does)

Latino Review has the best track-record of the independent movie gossip-hunting sites, even if they're by no means "always" on-target. But their big post-holiday (possible) "get" makes all kinds of sense. It doesn't sound like something that'd be a "spoiler" for the movie itself, but it does sound like it could be a spoiler for one of the other (by then previous) movies, so I'm putting it after the jump.


POSSIBLE SPOILER SPACE

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According to LR's sources (which a few other industry journos appear to be backing up) the secondary villain is BARON WOLFGANG VON STRUCKER, a perennial Captain America enemy and (traditionally) one of the surprisingly large number of immortal Nazis running around the Marvel Universe. In the comics he's technically the founder of HYDRA, but in practical terms he's become the guy you get when The Red Skull and Baron Zemo have been used too recently (or are dead.) 

According to Drew McWeeny at HitFix, the plan is for The Baron to be more of a guest-villain than a co-nemesis: He'll the threat The Avengers are dealing with as the film opens, and will primarily serve as a means by which the team encounters Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen). Even before McWeeny had jumped in, that's where my mind immediately went: The important things (character-wise) about Pietro and Wanda, in the books, are that they're siblings, they start out as villains and their father is a supervillain.

This is where it gets wonky: In the comcis, dad is Magneto and the twins are mutants (make no mistake, though - otherwise the pair are tied almost exclusively to The Avengers, they're not considered "X-Men characters"), which of course isn't going to work out because of movie studio business stuff i.e. only Fox can make X-Men movies. Strucker, meanwhile, traditionally has as lieutenants twin offspring of his own, Andrea and Andreas. McWeeny's story only says that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch will be "working for" The Baron, but it's easy to imagine Whedon etc. wanting to preserve that crucial "kids of a villain" element by making them Strucker's children in this incarnation... though it's equally easy to imagine Marvel waiting until the last possible moment to decide that, shooting dialogue "both ways" or having them be adopted on the off chance that Fox wants to start playing ball on crossovers (remember: it was supposedly only a matter of logistics and time that kept "AMAZING SPIDER-MAN's" Oscorp Tower out of "AVENGERS'" New York skyline.)

All well and good, but we're still a ways out from the actual shooting of this movie, which makes this kind of early for Marvel to be casting around (and psuedo-secretly, no less) for what might be a cameo at best. Which leads me to wonder if we won't actually be seeing Strucker a lot sooner - like say just a few months from now. At least part of the plot of "CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER" looks to be that S.H.I.E.L.D is being influenced/overtaken by nefarious forces, and "AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D" has been teasing "The Agency is going bad" as a substory for awhile. That's typically the sort of thing The Baron can be found behind, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if whoever they end up casting (supposedly Marton Csoksas and Dougray Scott are on the shortlist) ends up shooting a quick cameo (or post-credits stinger) so as to be revealed as the real power behind the throne in "WINTER SOLDIER." 

Escape to The Movies: ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

Not as good as the first time, still good, might as well go see it.

Also some WOLF OF WALL STREET (not a review) because why not?

Thursday, 19 December 2013

A.I. Artificial Intelligence



A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become "real" so that he can regain the love of his human mother.










A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) on IMDb

Vantage Point



The attempted assassination of the American President is told and re-told from several different perspectives.





Vantage Point (2008) on IMDb

RoboCop


In a dystopic and crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories.


RoboCop (1987) on IMDb

Now You Don't Need To See EXPENDABLES 3

The "EXPENDABLES" movies are, objectively, awful - even by the incredibly low standards of the "Hey, remember when action movies sucked but sucked in a different way than they do now?" genre. The sole (and evidently sufficient) reason they have for existing are the handful of shots where a bunch of actors you remember from the 80s are standing together in the same shot and you can get 1/400th of the charge you might have gotten if someone had actually made "RAMBO VS. TERMINATOR" in the early-90s.

Outside of that, there's no reason to watch either of them. And now here's the trailer for Part The Third, which helpfully eliminates any further need to do so by simply having everybody stand a line and acknowledge that yes, they're in this. The "new" blood includes Antonio Banderas, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Wesley Snipes and Ronda Rousey as We Couldn't Get Gina Carano: