I spoke of obsessions a few post back and wanted to mention another one. I am obsessed by the movie Beautiful Girls. I can’t put my finger on just what it is about the flick that I’m obsessed with. I just love the movie. Timothy Hutton, Michael Rappaport, and a few others are in it. Hutton is excellent in the movie. Natalie Portman is in it also. Rappaport’s character in it is just one of those guys that I would immediately like. Just a strange guy. The guy he plays is obsessed with supermodels. He does this bit were he explains himself to Hutton’s character. It goes like this:

The super models are beautiful girls.
A beautiful girl could make you dizzy, like you been drinking jack and coke all morning. She can make you feel high.

Full of the single greatest commodity known to man, promise. The promise of a better day, the promise of a greater hope. The promise of a new tomorrow.

This particular ore.. can be found in the gate of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, and in the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like its gonna be ok.

The super model that’s all they are, bottled promise. Scenes from a brand new day. Hope dancing in stiletto heels.

A beautiful girl is all powerful and that is as good as love.

And heck for some reason I just like that the bit.

So I’m going to let you in on another one of my recent obsessions. This time its the movie Bull Durham. I recently picked up the movie and I have been watching it over and over. There just is something about these Kevin Costner baseball movies that make me wish I could appreciate baseball. As it is I find baseball to be one of the most boring sports around. Watching it is right up there with watching golf. The funny thing is most of my good friends all like baseball.

Both Stanley and Izer love baseball. The both of them are chronic Cubs fans. They go to games and every once in a while they try to get me to go. I thought about it. But decided to pass as soon as I found out beer is cut off around the seventh inning. That’s a problem I am trying to work on.

Here is the infamous speech from Bull Durham:

Well I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, hi-fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self indulgent over rated crap.

I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing astro turf in the designated hitter.

I believe in the sweet spot, softcore pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve.

And I believe in long slow deep soft wet kisses that last three days.

I just love that.

Last time I asked if anyone had seen the new movie Jurssic Park 3. Before I say what I thought of the movie let me pass this along from Sherry the webmistress of Life Of A Crackwhore:

i was just reading your site and saw that u wanted an opinion on Jurassic Park 3. i went and saw it this weekend and i thought it was awesome. alot of action and a few new dinasours to add to the mix. it is definately worth seeing if u liked the past 2 movies.

Here is what I think. The movie sucked! Before anyone takes this as I’m trying to throw mud in her eye let me explain. I really liked the first movie. Read the book and everything. I read the second book when it came out. The book is great. The second movie sucked. The reason? Well I guess it didn’t follow the second book as closely as the first movie did the first book.

I just feel the third movie was a cheap attempt to cash in on the whole dinosaur craze started by the first movie. A kid goes parasailing over Jurassic Park? Jeez they could have come up with a better plot device than that. To me the movie just made no sense. What do the rest of you think? Am I way off?

First let me say that I read some where that the reviewer didn’t understand the ending. I guess maybe I have watched to many sci-fi flicks, because I didn’t see what could be so baffling. I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen the flick. Of the movie of the summer Planet Of The Apes was mediocre at best. And lets face it mediocre is as best as we can hope.

Of the big movies of the summer I’ve seen Scary Movie 2, Jurassic Park 3, and now the Apes movie. The next big movie is Jay And Silent Bob Strikes Back. Yeah I have a weak spot for the Kevin Smith flicks. It’s a return to his dick and fart jokes venue. But that’s ok.

It sucked. I’m sorry but this one can’t be argued. If you disagree, your wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion, it sucks and that is a fact.

It was all wrong. And that is something I can’t understand for the life of me. How can this movie suck when they have such excellent source material?

All these pinheads had to do was follow the stories from the classic comics. And I’m not talking about the the original stuff that Stan Lee wrote. Sure some of that was good. No when I say source material I refer to the great Frank Miller run on the comic in the early/late 80’s. Man that was good stuff.

One point that really irks me. Is how they changed the accident that made DareDevil what he is. What we have in the movie is the kid getting his powers and blindness in a stupid accident pretty much caused by himself. What does this add? In the original DareDevil gets his powers in an accident sure. But he gets in that accident saving an old guy. That’s heroic. That say’s a lot about the character. The movie version just cheapens the character of DareDevil. It’s to bad.

Another point and then I’m done ranting. Did you notice that DareDevil killed more than a few people? Either directly or indirectly, he killed people? That’s another thing I don’t remember about the character.

Well they all can’t be as good as the Batman or Spider-Man movie. Here’s hoping that the Hulk and the second X-Men movie are better than this piece of shit.

I’ve seen the second X-Men movie twice now. I have been holding off on commenting for a reason I really couldn’t identify. But after going through some of my old comics I realized what it was. It was a certain deja vu I felt seeing the movie. I guess it shouldn’t come to anyones surprise that the new X-Men movie is not an original idea. God Loves, Man Kills (pictured below) was Marvel Graphic Novel number 5.

It was published back in 1982 and it and the X2 movie share the same basic plot and characters. William Stryker, his plot against the mutants, making his own Cerebro, Magneto and the X-Men teaming up is all there.

The story is just broken down to it’s simplest form. Simplified for the non X-Men fans. But it’s pretty much the same. Except it’s not. It’s really a watered down version of a groundbreaking comic story.

Let’s take Stryker for example. The movie Stryker hatred for muties is fueled by the fact he had a son that was a mutant. Yeah that’s pretty good motivation. Throw in the bit about how he sent the kid to Xavier’s mutant school adds to the movie Strykers dislike of mutants.

But in the comic the character of Stryker is so much more. This Stryker also had a child that was a mutant. But his reaction to the child was that it was a monster and the comic Stryker killed his child. But that wasn’t enough. The comic Stryker also kills his wife because he had decided it was her fault for bringing the monster into this world.

Now you have a good start for the comic Stryker going here. But it gets better. The comic Stryker finds religion and truly believes that all mutants are the spawns of satan. So the comic Stryker sets up a church to start a crusade against the worlds mutants.

All of the religious ideas are stripped from the movie. And it hurts the movie Strykers character. The movie Stryker is a hollow movie badguy and nothing more. It’s a shame in a way because the comic Stryker was just a guy doing what he believed was right. Sure he was a madman but it worked better.

The rest of it was pretty much the same. But it’s all mixed together with other X-Men stories. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the second X-Men movie. You can’t take a comic book story and translate it into a movie. Some of the ideas and plots have to be dropped or changed to suit the fickle movie going audience.

And I think that has to be done, I really do. If the third movie is going to cover the whole Phoenix story it has to be taken a carefully look at and cuts and changes need to be made to make it a non comic fan friendly movie.

In the end if you like the second movie and you want to experience this story the way it was meant to be go to your local comic book store and look for the just republished God Loves, Man Kills.

Nuff Said.

This title may tell some people enough. But for shits and giggles I’m going to explain it like you all don’t know what I’m talking about.

The first thing we need to is figure out just what the term fanboy means. No legitimate dictionary has the word in it’s pages. So you have to look else where for a definition of this term. The only place I could find on the net that has a definition is a place called Wikipedia, a self described “free encyclopedia”. Here is what they say:

Fanboy is a derogatory term used to describe someone who is utterly devoted to a hobby or a subject, to the point where it becomes an obsession. “Fanboys” are often experts on minor details regarding their hobbies, and they take these details extremely seriously. The stereotypical image often associated with Star Trek fans (or Trekkies) can be used to describe a fanboy: a person with little or no social life outside the circle of fans he or she associates with.

Hits it on the head in my opinion. Of course it’s not something I admit to people who are not into comic books. On the other hand the other Marvel fanboys irritate me. I can’t stand them. My favorite comic book store Tomorrow Is Yesterday is full of them.

But since I’m coming out of the closet, I admit I am a Marvel fanboy. I have been for a long time. To some who actually read what I write this may not come to any surprise. The next question is why am I a Marvel fanboy? The simplest answer is that when I started reading comics Marvel had the best stuff. I’m talking late 70’s early 80’s. Marvel’s characters had a touch of the common man. They had problems that you and me would face. And in my opinion the stories Marvel told were just the best comics at that time.

So it pisses me off big time whenever a Marvel character gets the big screen treatment. It pisses me off because the Marvel fanboy in me always comes out. I can’t help it. I nitpick the movies. I bitch and complain when they fuck up a totally perfect story and make a shit movie. Daredevil jumps to mind.

It boggles my mind. Lets use the Hulk movie for example of how they take a simple concept and ruin it by trying to modernize it. Betty Ross (the girlfriend of Bruce Banners) in the movie is a scientist. In the comics she’s just a housewife kind of women. What does turning her into a scientist accomplish? Other than appeasing the beast that is politically correctness?

The way the Hulk comes about is another thing I have a problem with. In the comics it’s very simple. Banner worked for Betty’s dad General Ross. Banner invented the gamma bomb. A commie spy sabotage’s the test run of the bomb. Banner races out to save Rick Jones who had wandered out into the test site. Simple yet effective. Sure you can’t have any references to a commie spy. But you could have still used the sabotage plot.

There were other issues I had with the film, but that’s something for another post. But you see now what I mean when I say I’m a Marvel fanboy.