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The answer is still NO. As in HELL NO. As in NO WAY, Mr Foster! I wouldn’t even make it up half the stairs, I’m sure….

From the Seattle PI:
Heart pounds, eyes close on the tallest waterslide

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wally:

kaiju!

and finally – oops!

Finished the novel Civil War a few days ago. It is based in the Marvel universe, with Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and Captain America as its central characters, amid a cast of many, many more minor hero (and villain) characters.

This novel is a very mixed bag for me. On one hand, it’s interesting to see these characters applied into a semi-real world situation (the ever-expanding American Police State we live in – the novel is set just after Obama’s election, even though he’s not mentioned in the story). On the other hand, I really find it hard to believe that Captain America would be the only ‘main’ hero with serious problems about the main plot of the novel (which I won’t spoil for you) – and Reed Richards in particular seems a complete sell-out from the first page, almost like he was drugged or something (cult follower). Just not believable based on past stories from these various characters. And fine, Tony Stark is leading the compliance charge, but that itself flies in the face of immediately recent past stories too – heroes just don’t lie down and give up like seen in this novel.

Finally, this novel completely demonstrates a fundamental problem with superhero stories as a genre: They really only work well when you have ‘one’ team of them that are the good guys, amid a possible sea of villains or indifferent others. When you have too many, it just doesn’t work well because the story has to pay homage to all of them and in the end, shortchanges nearly all the characterizations and plot in the doing. I thought the X-Men movies in the past (not all of them being very good, of course) effectively walked this line, because most of the X-Men aren’t heroes and aren’t interested in being mutants much for that matter – they just want normal lives. So having a bazillion of them all over the world isn’t near as much an issue as most aren’t going to be putting on spandex anytime soon. Here, it seems like there are so many superheroes that its hard to see how there COULD be any crime (save possibly white collar – but for that, we have The Punisher anyway) because there are so many of them.

Moreover, SHIELD ends up in a villainous role here too for the most part, and given their historical role, that’s fairly unbelievable too. Yes, Nick Fury isn’t running the show here either, but they just seem like high-powered vigilantes that effectively force the human govts to kowtow to them too.

Basically, this story is a big disappointment, even if the ending does ring a bit true for Captain America’s fate – he is effectively painted as the one true soul throughout the book, and remains that way.

Sigh…..

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Given yesterday’s post, I can’t help believing this is true – although SOME people weren’t laughing (me! 🙂 )

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As I’ve continually maintained, being a child of the ’70s means that you automatically use that decade as a baseline cue for style, sensibility and your world perspective. Setting aside many abnormal (if not outright offensive – but then again, hawaii shirts and golf-anything are still with us, so you can’t *only* blame the 70s) fashion trends, what still most often resonates is 70s music.

In this case, however, you have a cut-rate sci-fi film – Starship Invasions – that has a typical plot (alien race needs to colonize and overrun Earth because their home planet is about to die, unseen guardian aliens already reside here and would stop them but they are all but wiped out by the invaders until a UFO expert and math whiz human pair are enlisted to help, then things work out) with B list actors (Robert Vaughn who plays it fairly boring, Christopher Lee as the more interesting archvillian, the rest of the actors are no-names.

While the plot varies between boring (the attempts at transition scenes to show character development fall fairly flat), predictable (the invaders being successful and then being thwarted), and unconventional (Ramses’ visit to the pleasure center at the guardian alien base, which is populated, of course, by scantily clad alien women – Capt. Kirk, eat your heart out) – what carries the movie is the soundtrack, really. It goes between ’70s action scene’ upbeat jazz to piano interludes and stuff that wouldn’t otherwise be out of place in The Six Million Dollar Man or similar – definitely not your typical overblown orchestral fake grandeur by any means.

The spaceship effects are fine given the obviously low budget, despite the androids on the base looking like paper mache halloween costumes painted silver and every guardian alien having a huge, white bald egg-shaped head. And the fact that they were able to repair (well, temporarily) the saucer when they were on the run by raiding a downtown Toronto computer company – impressive…

As I saw this movie back in the day, it was nice to revisit, but it’s not going to win any Oscars anytime soon. Still, the soundtrack was very cool, i’ll have to look for other movies by the composer to see if they measure up.

Other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
IMDB

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don’t miss the hover ALT text…! 🙂

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Love it!

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