Monday Book Pick: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD: Empyre
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD: Empyre by Will Murray
Will Murry is well known to pulp fans for his new Doc Savage novels. This book is about Marvel’s Nick Fury, Director of Shield. It was published back in 2000, and features the “old school” Nick Fury. The one who lead the “Howling Commandos” back in WWII. This is before someone decided that Sam Jackson would make a Bad Ass Nick Fury (which he did/does). In this adventure, Nick Fury has brought back the psychic division (called “Special Powers” in this iteration), and just in time too. The Special Powers group plays a major role in solving the latest evil plot from Hydra to cause death and destruction around the world. The afterword to the book says that Will Murry is a practicing psychic and has used all the of the techniques the SHIELD Special Powers group uses, including remote viewing. For you skeptics, consider this. This book was published in 2000. Spoiler alert here: It has a Middle Eastern base group (a fragment of Hydra and a thinly disguised Saddam Hussein) using commercial airliners to attack major cities by crashing the airliner into the target city. OK, Tom Clancy also used that one his books back before 9/11/2011. Still, the point had to be made. Either way, this is old school Marvel adventure with a flying SHIELD Humvee taking out Iraqi (of course they use another name, but it’s not hard to figure out) MIGs and Nick Fury at his cigar chomping best.
Friday B-Movie Pick: The Wolverine
This Marvel Comic based movie didn’t get the best reviews. It worked for me, but then I was really into comics back when Wolverine was first Uber-Popular with the fan base. So I knew all the backstory they tried to cram into this movie. It was a good action movie with nice fight scenes. The “ghost of Jean Grey” that the writers stuck in in order to give Logan more of tortured back story was a trifle over done in my NSHO. Bottom line, this is a Marvel Fan-Person movie. If you aren’t you can give this a pass. If you are, and are willing to put up with the backstory butchering these films are infamous for, fire up the popcorn.
Friday B-Movie Pick: The Flashpoint Paradox
Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox
One of my kids told me about this one. A deliciously dark alternate history story that starts with a good deed. Events ripple out from that change up and down the timestream and the Flash ends up in a rather nasty universe. One of the best parts was the effect on the Wayne family. In this timeline, it’s Bruce who is killed, not his parents. Thomas Wayne becomes a very dark and deadly Batman and the shock turns Martha Wayne into the Joker, his arch nemesis. The Flash works to find the cause of the timeline change and set things right. It’s hard road, but the Speedster is ready to run it.
Friday B-Movie Pick: Dredd
It’s back to Mega-City One and the world of Judge Dredd. This time it’s with SciFi fan Karl Urban in the lead role instead of Stalone. Urban played this role much truer to form. As in the Comics, you never see Dredd’s face. He always wears the helmet. It’s gritty, dark, nasty, and a lot of fun to watch. The bad guys are bad, the good guys are damn harsh, but fair. In all, a fun ride for fans of gritty SciFi action films.
Friday B-Movie Pick: X-Men First Class
If you knew nothing about the X-Men and just wanted to see an action comic book superhero movie, this would have been a decent movie. Of course, they did the standard tossing to the wind of decades of history generated by the X-Men comics. Given that, it was almost painful to watch. Some of the things they did to the Marvel Universe was on par with the fictional soap opera, The Sun Also Sets, making Montana Moorehead the daugther of Maggie.
Friday B-Movie Pick: Jonah Hex
I caught most of this turkey on cable and oh, it was sooooo bad. Bad acting, bad scrip and Megan Fox. Even a dial in performance by John Malkovich (and a Malkovich dial in is still pretty good) couldn’t help this truely bad film. OK, decent special effects, but a bad film none the less.
Friday B-Movie: Kick Ass
Not your typical comic book hero movie. None of the “super heros” have any powers (well, Kick Ass comes the closest, but his “powers” just allow him to take and survive your more than average ass kicking). The title hero is just an everyday high school kid who decides that he has had enough and does something about it. More than a bit violent at time, but it about putting the hurt on bad guys. The character Hit Girl steals the show though.
Friday B-Movie: The Spirit
Another comic adaptation movie. This time it’s Wil Eisner’s classic indie comic. The cast is top notch and clearly had a lot of fun making this. Samuel L. Jackson is the villian, and Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes, well it really doesn’t matter what role they play, they raise the eye candy factor a bunch of notches. The fact that they do a fine job of acting just adds to the fun factor of this movie. Eisner fan Frank Miller was behind this and it shows in his unique visual style.
Comic book movie goodness
Scarlett Johansson will be playing Natasha Romanoff, aka The Black Widow, in the upcoming Iron Man 2 and The Avengers movies.
This is cool strickly on the Eye Candy meter alone. She has pulled off some good action rolls before (The Island), so it could be cool in other ways too.
A major change to a bedrock of American culture
After decades of chasing both Betty and Veronica, Archie Andrews is going to propose to someone is September 2009!
This should be bigger than the Archie/Punisher cross over book!