Chris Braak's Blog, page 34
August 2, 2011
The 7 Greatest Lines in Wikipedia's 'BraveStarr' Entry
You might have had your Transformers and your GI Joe (or if your moms shopped at Woolworths, you might have had your GoBots and your The Corps!), but for my money, the greatest toy/TV combo to come out of the 80's was BraveStarr. If you are unfamiliar, you can just believe me when I tell [...]
July 29, 2011
MY New DC Comics (Or: Work Smarter, Not Harder)
With Comic-Con finally wrapped, I've been thinking a lot about how I would've handled the DC Reboot situation, were I the Man in Charge. Since the initial announcements, there's been some moments of brilliance – starting with the fact that doing something as drastic as restarting and expanding all the properties has people paying a [...]
July 28, 2011
The 5 Captain America Comics You Should Own (or at least read)
Whenever a superhero movie comes out, both regular bookstores (remember those?) and comic shops tend to stock up on paperback collections of the featured characters. But this can be daunting because Marvel and DC tend to go apeshit with their trade paperback publishing, flooding the market with everything they can gather. Go type "Captain America" [...]
July 26, 2011
5 Great Things About 'Captain America: The First Avenger'
I could just title this post "Captain America Is Great And Everyone Should Go See It Now," but that would be a bit lazy of me. So here are five solid reasons to go see what is maybe the best Marvel movie out there. (Sorry, Iron Man. I still love you, too. Stop looking at [...]
July 21, 2011
Sex and the Superhero Movie
And so there came a day, when Roger Ebert's usual pissy, off-hand dickishness about "fanboys" in a comic book movie review irritated me: Young Steve's Army confidante both before and after his transformation is the sultry Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), whose full red lips make her resemble a classic military pin-up of the period. He [...]
July 17, 2011
HP2: Voodoo Boogaloo: On the Art of the Wizard's Duel
So, the big problem that I always have with Harry Potter is that no one seems to actually give a crap about magic in it. I don't just mean the characters in the stories (except for Fred and George, whoever uses magic to actually do something they think is interesting?) but I mean the filmmakers, [...]
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2: Some Thoughts
For as much as I have some problems with the series in general, and with the character of Harry Potter in particular, I really love the climax of the story. The last book — and this second part of the last movie — is probably my favorite part, because by the end there's a lot [...]
July 14, 2011
Armchair Screenwriter: The Martian Manhunter
So, let me think about this a little. I feel like, because we don't have the "hero discovers his powers" option available to us (actually we do, but let me save that for a minute), then this is another "superhero" movie that needs to not have the superhero be the protagonist (see: Aquaman). And we [...]
July 12, 2011
Armchair Screenwriter: You Heard Me, A Hawkman Trilogy.
While I'm generally against movies trying to build themselves up as sequels regardless of the audience's say in the matter, I'm of a different mind when it comes to Hawkman: It has to be the most epic action-romance ever. Here's what I'm thinking: HAWKMAN 1 It's the 1930's, Midway City (set designers could go apeshit [...]
July 11, 2011
Armchair Screenwriter: The Hawkman Trilogy?!
We all agree that big summer blockbusters probably need to stop acting like they deserve a sequel, and should focus on making a cohesive movie that will make viewers demand more, right? This is advice both for horrible movies that felt entitled to sequels (looking at you, Last Airbender) and for movies that actually do [...]
