We’ve Always Got Room For A…: The Goon Movie Panel, SDCC 2013

Editor’s Note: This article was written last night at around midnight Pacific time. It is only being uploaded now because the Internet access I paid my hotel $14 for was unable to keep a connection, what with everyone being back from the convention and presumably watching the hell out of Netflix on their iPads. The annual San Diego WiFi drought has begun in earnest.

I have attended San Diego Comic-Con for the past eight years, and today I saw cracks occur that I never remember seeing at previous conventions. First, there were the trains. The railroad tracks run right down the middle of the road in front of the San Diego Convention Center, and you learn pretty quickly to hear, then grow annoyed by, and then ignore the constant clanging of the trolley bells. The air horn of the freight trains, not so much, but the point is that generally, the trains are a loud and short term annoyance.

Generally, but not today. Both at lunchtime and at at 7 p.m. – prime time for people to be leaving the convention center – long-ass freight trains pulled up in front of the convention center and just fucking stopped. Thus blocking off the primary route between the center and the Gaslamp Village, where all the restaurants and half the hotels are, and turning the area in front of the intersection into a human clusterfuck so bumbling and useless that, if any of the local cosplayers were actually aliens, they would report to their overlords that the human race deserved to be wiped out like a termite nest.

Now I am not under any illusions that the people behind SDCC have any control over the schedule or driving of freight trains. But they do have some control over the clearing of rooms and the start times of panels, and of the three we attended today, two of them started late. With the earlier Avatar Comics panel (which I will likely write about tomorrow), the volunteer line wrangler told us that the panelists were delayed and at least kept us informed… while still preventing us from entering the room so we could sit the hell down.

But with the panel regarding the Kickstarter work on the proposed movie version of The Goon, no one told us a Goddamned thing. They lined us up in a weird accordion pattern, and when they realized that it was a much larger crowd than anyone anticipated (which seems a little odd; the project pulled in nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter, which, since The Goon is a little indie comic, should indicate that the movie version has a little interest behind it), one of the volunteers tried to get people who intended to stay through the Goon panel into the following panel to split off into a different line, which is truly unprecedented in my SDCC experience… or at least it would have been if anyone paid any Goddamned attention at all to the poor, deluded dingbat. After all, Comic-Con runs on the ability of the truly obsessed to park in a panel room all day if they want to to see something in particular. Had someone implied that people waiting for a particular panel wait in a separate line until that particular panel started say, last year outside of Hall H, they would have found the guy floating face-down in the bay with his volunteer badge choked around his nuts and “Team Jacob” hammered into the flesh of his forehead.

So instead, we all waited in the same line until someone’s shit was finally gotten together at about 6:10 p.m. – ten minutes after the scheduled panel start time. Once inside, we waited another five minutes (my notes read, “Fifteen minutes late – this is not the Superman movie panel, motherfucker”) until The Goon creator Eric Powell, computer animation studio Blur Studios co-owner Tim Miller, and Blur Studios Animator / Director Jeff Fowler took the stage, to the side of a screen showing the world’s most simplistic Samsung DVD player main menu screen.

And where most movie panels open with some hype guy whipping the crowd into a frenzy, this one opened with Powell saying, “Since this is a Goon movie…” and cracking open a can of beer, “That Kickstarter is a hell of a drug.”

Yeah, this panel was not your average SDCC movie hype machine. Which makes sense, considering it is drumming up publicity for a movie that has been in development for five years, and still exists only as a dream that was given life support by a crowdfunding drive only strong enough to create a black and white animatic story reel, all in the hopes of attracting a real movie studio’s attention.

Shit, I’d be drinking, too.

Excitement In Travel: Extended Sequence From The Wolverine Released

The week before San Diego Comic-Con is pure bleeding hell. We here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office are busy collecting and testing the new equipment for covering SDCC (Amanda and I both have new smartphones that can act as WiFi hotspots for the actual writing equipment, and a new camera that can hopefully take pictures at panels from further back than the front row is working out swimmingly – if I can take a zoomed photo of a flower from across a backyard at twilight while shitfaced, I think I can get Bob Harras screwing up his face while trying to come up with an answer that doesn’t include the phrase, “indiscriminate firing” from halfway back in Room 6BCF). But not only that, we are squaring away both of our day jobs, which are each of the type where when you tell your boss you won’t be around for a week, they act like you’re telling them you FDISK’ed the database server and shit in the payroll filing cabinet.

So not only are we are busy as hell, but we can’t even make a command decision as to whether or not we want to brave Hall H on Saturday because the entirety of 20th Century Fox’s panel description is: TBA. Now, the smart money is on that panel including something about Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it is possible there will also be something about The Wolverine, which opens a couple of weeks after SDCC ends. Sure, the odds are long on that count – two weeks before opening, the only way any real buzz is gonna arise from Comic-Con is if Hugh Jackman is caught disposing of a dead hooker in the bay behind the Hyatt – but I guess it’s possible.

But let’s face reality: the odds we’d spend all day in Hall H to catch footage of The Wolverine are pretty long. So let’s all pretend that we spent a long morning in a sun-blasted line behind a kid in an anime costume that makes him smell like hot PVC insulation and foot, and take a look at the first extended sequence from The Wolverine right here. You can catch it after the jump.

Kick In The… Ah, Forget It: Jim Carrey Disavows Kick-Ass 2, Mark Millar Responds

Kick-Ass 2, the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s and John Romita Jr.’s first sequel to Kick-Ass (which itself was made into a movie with much of the same cast as the first Kick-Ass 2 movie three years ago), is scheduled to open in the United States on August 16th. And considering that it has been a big summer of superhero movies so far, what with Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel, with The Wolverine and R.I.P.D. on the way, one would think that the Universal Studios would be excited to ramp up the publicity machine, maybe including a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, with some of the stars of the movie, including the biggest name, Jim Carrey, who’s playing Colonel Stars and Stripes in the flick.

Yeah, you’d think that, except, you know… you’d be pretty fucking wrong.

I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to e

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

I meant to say my apologies to others involve with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

Okay, this is a tricky thing to comment on. Because on one hand, you’ve gotta respect a guy who’s willing to publicly state a conviction, and stand by it. And God knows that gun violence in the United States is a serious issue that is worthy of continued debate.

On the other hand… did you read Kick-Ass 2, Jim? Hell, did you at least watch the first Kick-Ass movie? And if you did either: can Universal Studios expect a refund check for your fee?

Gotcha, Man: Japanese Gatchaman / Battle of The Planets Live Action Trailer Released

It is a busy morning here at the Crisis on Infinite Midlives Home Office – new equipment for our coverage of the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con and Boston Comic Con has been purchased and now must be studied, fucked with, fucked up, cursed at, fixed, synchronized, desynchronized, stopped from being thrown at a wall, attached to the correct online accounts and finally understood – plus there are personal deadlines and commitments to meet before Friday night’s serious drinking can begin.

However, I do have one quick thing here, albeit something mostly for Japanophiles and, frankly, old American farts like me who remember sitting in front of a 19-inch tube TV at 4 p.m. after school, with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch (or, if you were unlucky like me, with a 1970’s proto-granola bar so hard you could tack down carpet with it), to watch edited, imported anime on local UHF stations. Of course, we didn’t know it was anime at the time; all we knew was that, by 1978, we were hooked on cartoons and on Star Wars and on superhero comics, and that there was one cartoon that mixed them all up and fed it to us in a quick, daily, 30-minute dose of awesome: Battle of The Planets.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I learned and understood that Battle of The Planets was just the gaijin title of Japan’s Gatchaman, Gatchaman, of course, being the Japanese word for “gaijin.” And while in America, the show generally lives on only as late-70s nostalgia, it is apparently still a viable property in Japan, as Toho Studios has just released a trailer for a live action version to be released over there.

The thing is in Japanese and not subtitled, but if you grew up on Battle of The Planets, you’ll see a lot you recognize. So get yourself a bowl of something sugary, then remember that you’re an adult now and put the cereal away and grab a beer, and settle in for incomprehensible goodness, right after the jump.

You’re Just A Guy In A Suit: Man of Steel Review / Observations

Editor’s Note: I was born in spoilers, Colonel; you can’t get more ruinous than that.

Man of Steel is a pretty decent superhero movie, if not necessarily the best Superman movie if you’re a purist about the character… but if you are, you’re probably off in a dark room somewhere writing hate messages to Dan DiDio about the New 52 reboot and scoffing at the sheep running to movie theaters when there’s a perfectly good Superman DVD with Christopher Reeve’s picture on it on your shelf, and you don’t give a fuck what I think about Man of Steel anyway.

Which is a shame (not that you don’t care what I think; hell, before I’ve had at least three beers, even I think I’m an idiot), because in most of the ways that matter, director Zack Snyder gets the character right. Snyder’s Superman is a man of two worlds who has made the conscious decision to favor and protect humanity over anything else. He’s generally humble and patient and wants only to be trusted to help us. And Man of Steel screenwriter David S. Goyer, probably remembering the shitstorm he himself created in Action Comics #900 when he implied Superman would be renouncing his United States citizenship, makes it abundantly clear that the Superman of Man of Steel is all about The American Way.

But Snyder and Goyer chuck a certain amount of what your average guy on the street would consider to be Superman canon. Superman never really is the Last Son of Krypton here, and the whole secret identity conceit is kinda thrown out in all the ways that most people would consider to really matter to the character. And it’s a little odd that our first introduction to Superman is at gunpoint in the desert so that he can turn himself in to American authorities; I’ll tell you this: Batman wouldn’t put up with that kind of happy horseshit.

So when it comes to reviewing Man of Steel, I’m gonna pretty much leave it at: yeah, it was pretty good. Because I’ve only seen the movie once, and by the time I’m finishing this article up It’s been three days since I saw it, so some of the details aren’t going to be as clear as they could be in my mind. But I am going to make some observations about some things about the movie that I noticed, and a couple of things that have driven some people who saw the movie apeshit, but which instead make a lot of sense to me having had a few days to give them some thought.

The first of those observations being: the greatest accomplishment that Man of Steel makes is that it puts on the big screen the first relatively true adaptation of Miracleman #15.

Summer Weather, Winter Soldier: New Captain America: The Winter Solder Set Pictures

We were without power here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office for the past several hours up until about fifteen minutes ago thanks to some truly impressive thunderstorms, and there is more thunder rumbling on the horizon. So for good or ill, my review / observations of Man of Steel will need to wait a while longer (although for a sneak peek, Google “Miracleman #15”) while I frantically try to get a post up before we’re reduced to drinking warm beer in the dark and watching Amanda’s four-year-old bootleg copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on her five-year-old Zune.

So in that spirit of quick, yet entertaining and informative: The Cleveland Plains Dealer has been doing a daily liveblog of the filming of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and recently released some more pictures of that movie’s principal photography. And several days ago they broke (and we rebroke) some of the earliest pictures of Bucky as The Winter Soldier… and now they have released some of the earliest pictures of Cap. And Cap’s new costume.

And you can check those out after the jump.

Take A Chance, Win Some Crap: World War Z Screening Wednesday For 50 Bucks

World War Z is a movie about the zombie apocalypse. It started its life as a spectacular zombie novel by Max Brooks, the guy who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide. The first few drafts of original movie screenplay were written by comics stalwart J. Michael Straczynski . That movie, starring Brad Pitt, who played Jeffrey in Twelve Monkeys and who millions of genre fans saw in Meet Joe Black (as it was the movie that the first, pre-broadband Internet trailer for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace premiered in front of), opens widely next Friday, June 21st. This movie is, for lack of a better term, geek bait.

So what if I told you that there was a way that you could go see that movie on June 19th: two whole days before the rest of the drooling, release date-shackled masses? And no, this is not me with some press-related advance passes trolling for a blowjob… but make no mistake: somebody wants to fuck you.

Paramount Pictures has announced that they will, in Houston, San Diego, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, be screening World War Z on Wednesday in premium theaters. And you can be a part of one of those limited screenings for the low, low price of 50 bucks! A piece! To see a movie! A movie that has been through reshoots, a handful of screenwriters after Straczynski, and enough release delays to make a dominatrix weep with professional jealousy!

But that’s not all! You also get some crap!

The Head of The Giant Magic Lizard: Trailer For The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Released

We are in the height of summer movie season, which means that the movie studios, flush with cash and sucking in more every big weekend, are busily humping the beginnings of their holiday movie offerings. Because after all, three or four billion dollars between May and August is nice, but Christmas is in December, and every good movie executive knows that Paco, their pool cleaner, is relying on their holiday tip to make the down payment on the Porsche.

And if you’re gonna tease a future movie in the time of the massive explodo picture, it had better be a big one… and it surely is. The rumor is that, opening up for screenings of Man of Steel, will be the first trailer for the second Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug. And considering that the title of the movie contains the name of a fucking dragon, that trailer had really deliver some giant fire lizard goodness (That’s what she said! …yeah, sorry; even I feel guilty about that gag. Moving on…).

What’s that? You simply can’t wait until the day after tomorrow to lay your eyes on that massive, slithering heat-spitter (Jesus, now even I feel dirty)? Well, I have good news for you: you can check the trailer out right here, after the jump.

Leather Pants In Cleveland No Longer Exclusively A Sign Of Terrible Desperation: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Location Photos

The original plan for today’s post was to comment on DC Comics’s upcoming Villains Month, and how it is not only a lead-in to DC’s first great crossover event since the New 52 reboot, but to implicit bankruptcy – seriously, DC is shipping 16 different Batman Family titles in September, and multiple shipping almost every other title, meaning that I will be surviving on bricks of ramen noodles in September, while the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I have their money – not some of their money; all their motherfucking money – makes the down payment on the new 911 Targa.

However, as sometimes happens, circumstances got in the way… those circumstances being fatigue hysteria. So an in-depth analysis over the troubling recent tendency of comics publishers to ship multiple copies of their books in a single month, and therefore effectively getting eight clams out of every reader every month while pretending that they haven’t increased their cover price, will have to wait for a day or two.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything cool going on in the world of comics and superheroes. For example, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is currently shooting in Ohio. And while it is a superhero movie, from a visual standpoint, it is a movie about a guy in a spandex suit with a painted hubcap fighting a guy in a leather suit with a machine gun. Which, fortunately, means that directors Anthony and Joe Russo can actually shoot some of it in the real world… and they have. Which means that Cleveland.com has some location photos of a gunfight scene, that includes some of the first photos of The Winter Soldier, so we can see if they’re keeping the same look from Ed Brubaker’s comics.

And you can check some of those pictures out after the jump.

The Rains of Smallville: New Man of Steel Featurette Released

We are in a strange form of angry detente today at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, based on the fact that I have read George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice And Fire. Because of this, I knew the term “Red Wedding,” and all its ramifications for certain characters on last night’s episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation of that series… while my co-Editor Amanda, who has not read any of the books, did not. Therefore, things have been tense here, beginning with the moment when Amanda asked, “Why is Roose Bolton wearing chain mail?” moving through cries of, “You could have warned me, you insensitive douche!” and continuing through this evening’s, “Here’s a surprise for you: you’re getting your own Goddamned beer.”

So after almost 24 hours of being face-to-face with bleak nihilism in a world where honor fails, justice is dead and the most fortunate member of an idealistic  family is the one who watched both her parents die in front of her, the only cure is some good, old-fashioned, American superheroics, free of senseless murders, gratuitous dismemberments, and where the phrase, “Winter is coming” only means that we’re in a break from big summer event crossovers.

And to get that pure experience, that means Superman. And thankfully, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel opens in just a couple of weeks, which means that we can distract ourselves from the fall of the House of Stark with some solid studio hype over the rise of the House of El.

And in that spirit: a ten-plus minute featurettte about the making of Man of Steel, including some new stills and video footage from the flick. So if you’re still reeling from seeing Ma Stark get a Westeros Necktie, you can check out Pa Kent tell the last survivor of House El how he’ll always be his dad after the jump.