This is a cool little video that lets everyone know how much we like the webcomic xkcd. It features, Neil Gaiman and his daughter Maddy, Wil Wheaton, the Tor.com editors Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Cory Doctorow among many others. Pretty cool.
Well it seems that Deadpool movie is actually in the works. No one is certain if it will be before or after the Wolverine: Origins time line, however. In case you don’t know Deadpool is fairly well disfigured and gains a multitude of other mutant powers at the end of Wolverine, oh yeah and he dies. Well, he dies until you watch the little easter egg at the end of the credits that show him searching for and picking up his severed head from the rubble of Three Mile Island.
http://www.scifiscoop.com/news/fox-confirms-deadpool-is-in-development/
I swear I am not trying to rain hell down on comic book movie adaptations. Really I’m not. And this new Punisher movie with Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle has been one of the most anticipated viewings on my list. I mean this had Titus Pullo in it for fuck’s sake! But alas, it was not to be. Stevenson does a fine job in which he barely speaks, likely trying to hide his British accent, but hey The Punisher isn’t known for his witty repartee. No, he’s known for kicking some serious ass, which Ray Stevenson does in spades.
No the problem is the villain. Dominic West was brought in to play the gangster Billy Russotti, ok fighting gangsters so long as they’re fighting i suppose. But then they actually attempted to turn Russotti into the Jigsaw. What the fuck? The result is a bad mix between Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman and a second rate demon from a Hellraiser movie.
Now think back like five years ago. Thomas Jane was Frank Castle in The Punisher and it was OK, you know? Ray Stevenson would have begun filing Rome at about this time as well. Can you believe that The Thomas Jane version would have been the better movie? The one with Travolta in it?!?
Yeah scary thought isn’t it.
Maybe it was just me, but I could hardly stand to watch this show, even with such starlets as Scarlet Johansson an Eva Mendes. I was a really disappointing ride through a pretty decent graphic novel from Frank Miller. I thin that due to the success of Sin City and 300 that Mr. Miller might have assumed an instant hit. The truth is that this is not a comic that should have been translated to film to begin with.
Mr. Miller has managed to run through his more popular pre-existing work as part his earlier films. And The Spirit marked his first screenplay adaptation from Will Eisner’s original comic. I honestly hope that Mr. Miller gets better at this than reflected in The Spirit, else he fall to the curb as another brilliant but burned out two-timer.
The Tentacled Monkey
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