Dan

I just finished mainlining all of The Man in the High Castle, and he is by far the best thing in it.

This wall. Look at this wall. That is a Jack Kirby wall.

Mazes and Monsters (seriously, it's a real thing), Splash (the movie that really cemented him), Big, The 'Burbs (a lot smarter than its rep) Wow, so many. A League of Their Own, Philadelphia, That Thing You Do! Also, +1 to the "Forrest Gump is overrated, saccharine garbage" pile. Also, The Bonfire of the Vanities could be interesting as one of the most legendary Hollywood fiascos of all time. Road to Perdition, Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can.

OH MY FUCK

Because we backed the Kickstarter, Wendee and I got early access to the premiere of the new MST3K. Long story short, they did it. This is for real. It's been updated but they haven't sacrificed the "we made this in our garage" aesthetic, and the feel of it is pitch perfect. The ratio of jokes that work to ones that don't is pretty much on par with the old series. The Mads are fine if barely onscreen, but the fact is Jonah Ray does a creditable job as the new host (Wendee exclaimed "We're five minutes in, and he's already better than Mike!", although she and I are on opposite fronts in the Joel vs. Mike debate) and the bots are pretty good (especially Crow, who sounds a lot like Bill Corbett, although that's not hugely important to me, but the characterization is spot on). In short, I am quite definitively no longer worred. It's back.

The idea of his being written by someone other than RTD is legitimately exciting to me.

In spoiler tags although this comes straight from the Beeb: Of course, we also already know that Interesting. More to come.

USA! USA!

There's every reason to think that the price will come down between now and then. DC Omnibuses are usually sold well below MSRP. or they go out of print and keep or increase their value like the fucking New Warriors omnibus for god's sake. Really want that, but not willing to drop $100 on it. Oh, when they go out of print forget it. It took years for me to find a copy of the Hulk Omnibus for under $200, and I had to get one where the dust jacket was all kinds of jacked. That said, I've had my eye on the New Warriors collection for a while myself. I've seen it for way less than $100.

There's every reason to think that the price will come down between now and then. DC Omnibuses are usually sold well below MSRP.

DC is releasing an omnibus edition of Jack Kirby's Fourth World, including every issue he did of The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle and Jimmy Olsen. Currently slated to come out in December.

So, that was pretty much the entire movie, yes?

The Sentry, and specifically the tortuous retconning that swirled around him. He's been ignored long enough that it's almost like he never happened, but he bugged the shit out of me.

Finally finished. It did improve about halfway through, but still never really rose above the level of adequate. Far too much time was spent on the corporate stuff, the action tended to be dull and badly choreographed and shot (the episode directed by Kevin Tancharoen was a notable exception), Finn Jones was totally miscast both in terms of his acting and his ability to fight, and the writing was very weak. However, it looked good, was generally an easy way to kill a couple of hours at a time, and if you had told me at the beginning that Ward would turn out to be the most interesting and three dimensional character in the series by orders of magnitude, I would have pointed and laughed at you, but here we are. Also, does Colleen Wing even OWN a pair of shoes?

I doubt that is unintentional.

Mary Poppins.

I love this era of Batman, but I think it's really interesting that his reaction to Jason's death - becoming super grim, angry, "I don't need anyone's help", really just a huge asshole - which was presented as precisely the reason why it was so important that he bring Tim Drake on board, essentially became the default Batman characterization within a few years.

If nothing else, they got the look right. I mean, there's no way to know until it actually airs, but I'm still giving it a shot.

The trailer for the new season of MST3K is up.

You are the literal worst. 1974 - Young Frankenstein 1975 - Jaws 1976 - All the President's Men 1977 - Star Wars 1978 - Superman 1979 - The Muppet Movie 1980 - The Empire Strikes Back 1981 - Raiders of the Lost Ark 1982 - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 1983 - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life 1984 - Ghostbusters 1985 - Back to the Future 1986 - Big Trouble in Little China 1987 - The Untouchables 1988 - A Fish Called Wanda 1989 - The Little Mermaid 1990 - Goodfellas 1991 - The Silence of the Lambs 1992 - Unforgiven 1993 - Schindler's List 1994 - Pulp Fiction 1995 - Toy Story 1996 - Fargo 1997 - L.A. Confidential 1998 - Saving Private Ryan 1999 - Magnolia 2000 - O Brother, Where Art Thou? 2001 - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2002 - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 2003 - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 2004 - Spider-Man 2 2005 - Batman Begins 2006 - The Departed 2007 - Juno 2008 - The Dark Knight 2009 - Up 2010 - Toy Story 3 2011 - Captain America: The First Avenger 2012 - The Avengers 2013 - The Wolverine 2014 - Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2015 - Star Wars: The Force Awakens 2016 - Captain America: Civil War This drove home just how many movies I haven't gotten around to seeing in the past five or so years. I was also a little surprised at how many genre films I listed, though I probably shouldn't have been.

Damn. RIP.

Even if you discount the unfortunate "white guy goes to the East to learn Eastern things and becomes the best at all the Eastern things" motif (and so soon after Doctor Strange, which was really poor planning),my main thing is that the whole point of Iron Fist is that he's the greatest martial artist who ever martial arted, and if that's the case, the fight scenes in this should be fucking spectacular, and they just aren't. I'm not looking for another hallway fight or Luke marching through the community center, but these are just standard issue TV fight scenes that aren't even as good as some of what they've been able to do on Agents of SHIELD.

Yeah, Iron Fist isn't great. It's not TERRIBLE, but it's nowhere near at the level of any of the other Marvel Netflix series.

Wendee and I are actually gonna make things official.

They used to fill the five-minute shortfall in the Danger Mouse slot with Bananaman. That was some wacky shit right there.