Saturday, February 27, 2010

Hungry Like The Wolf


 

This is going up a couple of weeks late, but it's my first real movie review, and I want to do more stuff like this for the blog, so I'm posting it anyway.

For Valentine's Day, Jill and I decided that we wanted to catch the "counter programming" film for the weekend and opted to go see The Wolfman. There were a hundred reasons that we should have liked this film. There was an excellent cast, and it's based on the classic Universal Monster film of the same name. However, the story/script seem like they were rushed into production half finished, and the director made some questionable decisions with the film.

For those of you that aren't up on the story, Benicio Del Toro's character is a tragic figure who the audience is supposed to sympathize with. However, the scenes of the wolf unleashed are so brutal, it's hard to feel too much sympathy for the man that just brutalized 2 dozen people.

The biggest issue I had with the film is that it seemed to be lacking a clear identity. The film begins like a murder mystery similar to Tim Burton's re-imagining of Sleepy Hollow. But then half way through the film, the movie shows it's hand, and shifts gears more into an action/horror film. By the end it decided to go for the obvious tragic ending with a predictable twist. However, once we got there, I was less concerned about whether or not there would be a sequel and more concerned with why Universal would release this in the hopes to reignite it's Classic Monster franchises.

That being said, I didn't hate the movie, I just didn't particularly like it either. I really wanted this movie to be good, and I would have excepted it had the story at least felt finished. However, this movie was so rough in so many places that I can't say much good about it.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Ring of Emotions




It's kind of ironic how these comics come about sometimes. I had the idea for this one the other day, because I've really been into the previews that WizKids has been doing for this Starter Set. The sculpts look fantastic! And the one dial that we've seen over on icv2, for The Flash looks great too. I am very excited about this set, and I can't believe how long we're going to have to wait to get our hands on it. There was also a call to action by WizKids to get word out about this set. I think it's cool that they're trying to mobilize the fan base to get the word out, and this is a heck of a product to do it with.

Unfortunately the previews for the starter are so good that they're really overshadowing The Brave and the Bold which is an expansion set that comes out a month before the starter. Part of the reason I'm personally not all that excited about that set has partly to do with disliking the Duo mechanic and it's application to some figures. Particularly ones that are vastly different in power sets. However, only time will tell if the set will actually be good or not. I'm hoping they preview the new Alter Ego mechanic soon, because that'll be another make or break mechanic seeing as it will contribute to 10 slots in the set (I think). I'm sure I'll post more on that as more information becomes available.

With that, here are the images of the awesome sculpts from the upcoming Blackest Night starter, releasing on May 12, 2010.