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• Matrix Franchise Films Ranked: #1 The Matrix (1999)
• Bill Skarsgard to Play Eric Draven aka The Crow in Reboot Film
• Will the Scarlet Witch Find Redemption in Doctor Strange 2?
• Top and Bottom comics of the week 3-30-2022
• “Star Trek Ain’t Marvel” Says Actor Chris Pine
• Tom King Ghoulishly Deconstructs Another DC Comics Superhero
• Even as Worst-Rated Spider-Man Film, Morbius Finishes Top of Box Office

Matrix Franchise Films Ranked: #1 The Matrix (1999) Posted: 04 Apr 2022 03:25 PM PDT   #1 in my ranking of The Matrix franchise.   I'm gonna be honest. The Matrix is overrated. It's good, a solid adventure story with great action, but it's pretty far from one of the greatest movies ever made. It has a bunch of pluses, and I understand why people fall all over themselves because of those pluses. However, at the same time, the third act doesn't really follow from the first two and I find pretty much every dive into philosophy the movie takes both unconvincing and unengaging, breaking from the film.     Now, the first thirty minutes of this film are, well, they're fantastic. The steady build to the reveal of the world is so expertly doled out and handled. We get two real reveals, the first in the very first scene and the second thirty minutes in. The first is that we're in a world where certain people can bend the rules of physics manifested in impossible jumps. It's intriguing and an introduction to Trinity the character as well the rules of the world around her. We then get Neo, asleep at his computer, with a few lines of text mysteriously coming onto his screen, waking him up, and bidding him to follow the white rabbit. One meeting leads to another which ends up getting Neo in a room with three agents who place a weird, leggy, machine bug into his navel. This is weird stuff, and it's all just clues about what's coming. We, as the audience, still only know as much as Neo even though we've seen Trinity's ability to jump. Meeting Morpheus, Neo gets his red pill, his choice, and he ends up finally waking up to one of the great reveals in popular film. The change in aesthetics from the grounded reality in the Matrix to the hyper-stylized future tech and body horror that is Neo waking up in the gooey pod on the side of a giant building with flying machines and tubes connecting all over his body is amazingly effective.     And then the movie loses a step. Neo has to recover and the movie takes some time to slowly get us and Neo up to date with the new reality. We get re-introductions to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, the ship itself, and the technical side of hacking into the Matrix as well as the instant learning mechanic that allows Neo to become adept at Kung Fu without years of training. Now, we probably did need a bit of a break from the ramping up of the first half hour, but there's something about this section that feels circular, like it's mostly treading water. There's some cool stuff in here like the fight between Neo and Morpheus to test Neo's newfound abilities, but there's also a lot of talking and explaining. The Wachowskis did their best to vary it up visually, but it's still a lot of exposition in a short amount of time. And some of it ends up feeling really wrong when you think about it like when Morpheus justifies killing anyone in the Matrix to further their ends (when you realize that the entire film is a manifestation of the Wachowskis' political philosophy it feels even worse).     Now, the third act. The third act has some absolutely fantastic action, and I love the textual feel of fights. The dust that collects on everyone, the cramped quarters, and the rather brutal feel of it all is just great spectacle, but the fights revolve around actions that don't really seem to follow that well from what came before. We get so much talk about the bigger conflict, and it would feel like the third act should be that bigger conflict between humanity and the machines coming into play somehow. Instead, the conflict actually contracts with Morpheus getting kidnapped and Neo and Trinity needing to rescue him after one of the crew betrays everyone to get back into the Matrix (with some darn good reasons, I'd say). There's more action, but the stakes actually seem to contract with fewer players and an almost myopic focus on the saving of one man in the face of the larger conflict.     Now, there's a problem through all the Matrix movies where the subtext is way too prevalent in the text and that it also ends up interfering with the actual story. The subtext of all three is choice within a system of control and free will, so that's where the source of the third act conflict comes from. It's not a story decision but an effort to force a story to fit the subtext, and I feel like that's handled rather inelegantly. The Wachowskis were treating the first film like they wouldn't have any other (a good idea in general), but their focus wasn't on making the story flow from beginning to end it was on getting their philosophical ideas in. It feels like they sacrificed a more natural third act to fit the story that came before so that they could make sure that this movie said what they wanted about choice. And I don't think they end up saying anything particularly interesting about choice through it all.     Anyway, that's enough carping on my account. For all of my problems with the film's ability to manage subtext and text, it really is consistently entertaining. The action is just simply great, tactile, and almost painful to watch (my favorite probably being the Morpheus and Agent Smith fight in the bathroom). Actors are fine with Keanu Reeves firmly within his limited range, Carrie Ann Moss blankly falling in love (in a love story I never found convincing), and Lawrence Fishburne saying everything with great importance. Hugo Weaving is the only one as Agent Smith who seems to be having any fun with his part.     It's a solidly good action film with one of the great first acts in popular film over the last few decades, a surprisingly slowly ponderous second act, and then an entertaining third act that feels like it could have been more. I kind of get the love, but I definitely don't share it.   Rating: 3/4 Originally published here. The post Matrix Franchise Films Ranked: #1 The Matrix (1999) appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

Bill Skarsgard to Play Eric Draven aka The Crow in Reboot Film Posted: 04 Apr 2022 01:15 PM PDT   There is a reboot of The Crow in the works, which has been a news headline many times over the last few years, but this one may be different. According to Deadline, Bill Skarsgard, who played Pennywise the Clown in the It films, has been cast to play the Eric Draven role with Rupert Sanders on board to direct based on a script by Zach Baylin.       The Crow is a revenge thriller that started off as a comic series/graphic novel by writer/artist James O'Barr and was famously adapted in 1994 with Brandon Lee as the star who was tragically killed during filming. The film became a cult classic and spawned two sequels.   Director Sanders spoke about the upcoming project: "The Crow is beautiful, dark, poetic and sometimes disturbing. It is a story of love, loss, grief and revenge. It is a great honor to revisit James O'Barr's iconic comic and reimagine The Crow as a foreboding voice of today." The post Bill Skarsgard to Play Eric Draven aka The Crow in Reboot Film appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

Will the Scarlet Witch Find Redemption in Doctor Strange 2? Posted: 04 Apr 2022 10:55 AM PDT   Marvel Studios just dropped a new quick trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to let everyone know that tickets go on sale this Wednesday. The film is set to release on May 6th, 2022, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chiwetel Ejiofor all returning for the sequel. There is an interesting set of dialog in the clip we haven't seen before which has Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange talking to Elizbeth Olsen who is reprising her role as Wanda Maximoff. Strange tells Wanda that they need an Avengers.     Wanda says there are other Avengers and Strange says, "We'll get you back on the lunch boxes." This is likely a reference to the events of WandaVision where she took over a small New Jersey town, forcing the inhabitants into acting out her made up perfect world. Strange appears to be offering her a chance to redeem herself by helping to deal with the Multiverse. There has been a lot of speculation that Wanda is going to be the antagonist of the film, but there is a clip in one of the trailers that shows two Wanda's at once, so maybe we'll see her as both an ally and an enemy to Strange.     Marvel could still be hiding the true villain of their Doctor Strange sequel and with many of these trailers being quite deceptive, so this latest clip continues to imply that not everything is as it seems in their upcoming MCU sequel. The post Will the Scarlet Witch Find Redemption in Doctor Strange 2? appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

Top and Bottom comics of the week 3-30-2022 Posted: 04 Apr 2022 09:45 AM PDT   This week Captain Frugal shares his top and bottom books of the week!   The post Top and Bottom comics of the week 3-30-2022 appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

“Star Trek Ain’t Marvel” Says Actor Chris Pine Posted: 04 Apr 2022 08:25 AM PDT   Actor Chris Pine chatted with Deadline recently about a variety of things, but one of the ones that stood out the most was a discussion about the upcoming return to the Enterprise. There is no script yet for his fourth Star Trek film, but he says he has met with director Matt Shakman (WandaVision) and the new folks at Paramount, plus he knows JJ Abrams is involved, but he doesn't have any story to go on. He did talk about the idea of returning to the franchise and how he thinks it should be approached as something for the fans. "Conceptually, I love it. I love Star Trek. Again, I love the messaging of it. I love the character. I love my friends with whom I get to play. It's a great gig. I mean, it's a gig I've had, working and not working, for 15-plus years. It cemented the career that I have now. I'm honored to be a part of it. It's given me so much. I think there are plenty of stories to tell in it. You know, I think Star Trek for me, it's an interesting one.     We always tried to get the huge international market. It was always about making the billion dollars. It was always this billion-dollar mark because Marvel was making a billion. Billion, billion, billion. We struggled with it because Star Trek, for whatever reason, its core audience is rabid. Like rabid, as you know. To get these people that are interested that maybe are Star Wars fans or think Star Trek is not cool or whatever, proven to be … we've definitely done a good job of it but not the billion-dollar kind of job that they want.   I've always thought that Star Trek should operate in the zone that is smaller. You know, it's not a Marvel appeal. It's like, let's make the movie for the people that love this group of people, that love this story, that love Star Trek. Let's make it for them and then, if people want to come to the party, great. But make it for a price and make it, so that if it makes a half-billion dollars, that's really good.     But we operate in a system now which I don't know how much longer we have of you have to spend 500 million dollars on a film to reach …even you have to pay all sorts of people back. So to make a billion, it's like you haven't even — a billion is the gross. You haven't brought your net in. So I mean, if I had my business suit on, that's what I would do, but I don't know where that is. That's all above my pay grade."   What do you think of Pine’s comments? The post “Star Trek Ain’t Marvel” Says Actor Chris Pine appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

Tom King Ghoulishly Deconstructs Another DC Comics Superhero Posted: 04 Apr 2022 06:15 AM PDT   Newsarama has written a pathetically unintelligible article about one of the awful Tom King’s latest abuses of a notable Green Lantern cast member, originally introduced in 1968, and along with him, another one originally introduced in 1972, in what was titled Human Target. It may occur in a Black Label book, but that doesn’t make this any less repulsive:   From the first pages of Tom King and Greg Smallwood’s Human Target, we’ve known that a DC character was going to die… …and Guy Gardner just joined him. The series revolves around the titular Christopher Chance, who has been poisoned in an assassination gone wrong. Chance has 12 days (in 12 books) to live – and to solve his murder. But by the end, we are absolutely certain he’ll shuffle off this mortal coil.   And the columnist doesn’t seem to have any complaints about tasteless clichés. The head-shaking part is that Chance was disguised as Lex Luthor when he got poisoned. It gets worse:   At the end of Book Six, that changed. Furious at both Chance and Ice, Gardner attacked with the full strength of a Green Lantern. He managed to hold off Ice’s incredible abilities with his power ring until Chance took a shot at him with his pistol. Gardner deflected the bullet easily, but the tiny distraction was enough to let Ice’s freezing powers get through his shields. Slowly, Gardner’s body began to frost over, turning him blue and statue-esque until he couldn’t even speak. Then Chance channeled his rage into a single punch… … shattering Gardner’s body. Frozen bits of what was once the most annoying member of the JLI were scattered all about his apartment, while Chance and Ice slowly recovered from the shock of what happened. Guy then thawed into gory bits of flesh and blood on the floor with Chance admitting to himself their slow response probably cost them any chance of reversing what happened.   According to the unobjective synopsis, Chance and Ice try to cover up the murder. This seems to be a repeat of past writing elements King’s already foisted on other characters, most notably Wally West during Heroes in Crisis four years back. As for Guy being the League’s “most annoying member”, well gee, did they really want him to be that, if they didn’t like the characterization? Apparently, that Guy was meant to serve as comedic fodder in the JLI 35 years ago wasn’t any good either for these propagandists.     Maybe the most disappointing part of all is that an artist like Smallwood, who complained about Wertham-ish censorship several years ago would participate in such a cheap embarrassment. As noted, it may be a Black Label imprinted book, but DC/Marvel have spent so many years doing all sorts of alternate takes on their stable of characters, it’s become alarmingly disgusting, to say nothing of a sick joke, and doesn’t serve their products well at all. That the news reporters covering this don’t even complain, because the alternate reality status presumably serves as an excuse, isn’t good either.   Related: Marvel Vs DC: Tom Brevoort Claps Back on Tom King's B.S.   Originally published here. The post Tom King Ghoulishly Deconstructs Another DC Comics Superhero appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

Even as Worst-Rated Spider-Man Film, Morbius Finishes Top of Box Office Posted: 04 Apr 2022 04:45 AM PDT   Sony is having an up and down weekend with the opening of their oft delayed Marvel film Morbius. After the film managed to drag itself to an abysmal 17% critics approval on Rotten Tomatoes, which is worse than Sony's two Venom movies, which fared slightly better with 30% and 57% for Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage respectively, both Venom movies were hits at the box office despite the ratings, Morbius had a huge mountain to climb when it is released on our favorite international holiday – April Fools Day.     However, the Jared Leto led vampire film that ties into the Spiderverse made a decent opening of $39.1 million domestically, twenty-percent lower than its original estimated $50 million but on par with the recently released Uncharted. And for the record, Morbius cost a lot less to make than Uncharted. It also brought in $45 million internationally, for a total of $84 million overall. The down part of this is that the word of mouth on the film doesn't seem like its going to help with it’s poor reviews and only a C+ from CinemaScore and the Comscore PostTrak audience polls have only 47% recommending it.   Midnight’s Edge did manage to give it a decent review though:     Another hurdle it will need to overcome is next weekend’s opening of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the wide release of the very well received Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Then the following weekend is the release of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore… so unlike Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Batman, this comic book movie will likely not repeat at the top of the box office.     With Sony’s next Spider-Man adjacent film Kraven the Hunter already filming, Sony needs to work out what has seemingly gone wrong with Morbius and how they can fix it quickly for their future Spider-Man Universe movies.   The post Even as Worst-Rated Spider-Man Film, Morbius Finishes Top of Box Office appeared first on Bleeding Fool.

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