Showing posts with label fantastic four. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantastic four. Show all posts

Saturday, March 12, 2022

PodCast 188: "Fantastic Four" (2015) - FF Part 2 - a Kryptonian Thought Beast Episode w/ Danny Horn and Ryan



Watched:  03/01/2022
Format:  Disney+
Viewing: First
Director:  Josh Trank




Danny Horn and Ryan continue on their Marvelous adventure, picking up with Fox's fabulous alternative attempt at bringing the Fantastic Four to the silver screen. And what's more fun for the kids showing up for a superhero romp than turning Marvel's first family into a body horror spectacular? Why, you can also double-down with dead-eyed stars, a grim-as-hell plot and an ending that is dumb as hell. But you WILL reconsider the 2005 film and bump it up a few notches in your personal rankings.

SoundCloud

YouTube


Music:
Fantastic Four Prelude - Marco Beltram and...  Philip Glass?  WTF?

The mentioned article about how Miles Teller sucks

Marvel Madness Playlist!

Sunday, March 6, 2022

PodCast 187: "Fantastic Four" (2005) - FF Part 1 - a Kryptonian Thought Beast Episode w/ Danny Horn and Ryan




Watched:  02/27/2022
Format:  Disney+
Viewing:  Third?  Fourth?
Decade:  2000's
Director:  Tim Story




Guest contributor Danny Horn joins us as we miscalculate and wind up victims of a mutation leading to a 2-part episode! To be completely transparent, in this installment, we stretch our film reviewing, but wind up with some rock solid observations you'll find hot, hot, hot. First up we talk the 2005 attempt by Fox to turn Stan and Jack's creation into a film, by making a movie about people who do nothing particularly heroic and keep making Jessica Alba disrobe for no reason.






Music:
Fantastic Four Main Theme (2005) - John Ottman


Marvel Madness - Movies and More..!

Sunday, August 27, 2017

A Century of Jack Kirby


You're going to see the names Jack Kirby and Jacob Kurtzberg a lot today.  Jack Kirby is the pen-name of the greatest comic artist and creator to grace this orb we call planet Earth.

Here, on the centennial of his birth (August 28th, 1917), it's possible to suggest that Jack Kirby may be one of the most important artistic and literary figures of the past 100 years.  The recognition came late, decades after his passing, and, still, his name is hardly a household word.  But the creations he unleashed upon popular culture from the 1940's to the 1990's would either be taken up directly by the public (at long last), becoming part of the parlance, or influence generations who could never produce that same spark of imagination, but built either directly or indirectly upon what he had done before.

There are Kirby bio sketches out there a-plenty (but no definitive monograph that I'm aware of), a magazine dedicated to the study and fan-splosion around his work, and Mark Evanier - who apprenticed under him - has become the living memory of his professional life while his grandchildren have taken up the cause of preserving the memory of the man.  Now there's a virtual museum (which deserves a physical location), and a charity it's worth considering giving to sometime.  And a slew of collections and books celebrating Kirby's influence and work.

Kirby was not first in when comics became a way for kids from the rougher neighborhoods of New York picked up a pencil or ink brush to start bringing in bread, but he was there really early.  He was a workman who put everything he had into the work, comic by comic, year by year, becoming better and better.  As they tell you in art-school, master the rules before you start breaking them - and that's what he did, finding his own unique style, his own way of creating action and drama, and eventually shattering what it meant to create a comics page.

Taking from mythology, from science-fiction, from films, from his colleagues and the bottomless well within, Kirby created whole universes, pockets within those universes, and held the lens to each character, bringing the internal life of gods, men and monsters to life.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

This Fant4stic 4 Trailer is in no way exciting



I confess I hoped Fox would embrace the Kirby-ness of the FF, but, instead, they clearly translated this from Ultimate FF, a comic nobody ever cared about and I wouldn't recommend.

Maybe the next trailer will knock my socks off, but this looks as lackluster as the last two FF movies.  Which, wow, that's actually kind of hard to do.

Discuss.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Signal Watch Reads: Fantastic Four - Season One

Before I'd read the names associated with the books, I generally liked the concept behind Marvel's Season One initiative.  The books would retell the origins of Marvel's top characters and get something in bookstores and online that a new reader could pick up and enjoy.  Unlike DC's now baffling Earth One effort, Marvel basically chose to retell the same stories in a fashion that seems ready-for modern audiences.  In a way, this is the same continuity - just a wee bit cleaned up and with modern backdrops.

I believe this Fantastic Four Season One is the first Season One release, and its a promising start if the goal is to create a comfortable entry point to the Marvel Universe for someone vaguely aware of the brand and characters.

As a veteran comics read, I've tried to become more aware of the Fantastic Four in recent years, but I find my FF fandom extends only as far as the person working on the book.  Kirby?  Yes!  Mark Waid?  Absolutely.  But when Mark Millar took on the book a few years ago, I dropped it and never came back.  And that was after some bumpy readership between Waid and Millar during which my reading was never steady.