Film Reaction: THE WORLD'S END

Only just realising now that this poster kinda spoils

the climax.  Woops.

Edgar Wright is a very odd filmmaker, but I can't help feel a little kinship with him, even (or perhaps because of) when his films seem to make strange tonal shifts and swerve off in strange directions.  Take Shaun of the Dead, which was promoted as (and likely sold to its distributors as) a spoof of the typical zombie apocalypse movie.  And that's what it is for 70% of its runtime, until towards the end it drops the spoof and simply is a typical zombie apocalypse movie, albeit a very good one.  Ditto for Hot Fuzz and buddy cop actioners.  There's a sense of Wright wanting to have his cake and eat it with these films, and honestly, if I was in his position, I'd wanna do the same thing.  Most 'comedy' directors settle for just being comedy directors, but Wright has aspirations and he's somehow managed to successfully duct-tape them to what outwardly look to be comedies.

That pattern continues with The World's End, which is a comedy about five friends getting really drunk, and also about robots which aren't robots.  Okay, this one is going to take a little longer to explain, so grab a pack of Jaffa Cakes* and settle in.

* - WOOT SPACED REFERENCE

PHICEN Nina Armoury Post 2

Thought about sitting on these pics a while longer, but it's a slow period right now, so here we go.

Just A Random Bunch of Faora GIFs

I think I mentioned in my Man of Steel review post that I was impressed with Antje Traue's performance as uberstrong henchlady Commander Faora-Ul (she ditched the 'Hu' in the film*), bu-u-ut that's really understating things.  Faora represents two conflicting fixations for me: the nerdy, over-analyzing part of my brain recognises the presence of a truly strong female character, who is allowed to be prominent and dangerous in a film largely dominated by male characters, and whose gender is never once brought up as an issue, which is fantastic; the more simplistic, primal side of me sees an exotic, beautiful actress with an all-kinds-of-sexy pan-European accent, somehow made even more intimidatingly unattainable thanks to power armour and a frickin' cape.  IS THIS LOVE????

So, here's a bunch of GIFs of the lady I found by tooling around on Tumblr and Google.  This is really more for my convenience than yours, yes.


* - Nerdy subnote: For some reason, it's long established in Superman comics that female children of Krypton take the full name of their father as their surname rather than just the hyphened suffix that serves as a family name - so while Kal-El is the son of Jor-El and you know they're related because they both have '-El' in the name, Kal's cousin Supergirl is named Lara Zor-El, with Zor-El being her dad's full name.  I really don't know why this is the case, other than maybe some anachronistic misogyny that never got retconned...and if that's actually the case, it makes sense for Faora to shorten her surname down to just '-Ul', as it sticks with the crazy man-hating persona of Faora in the comics.  Just a thought.

Now Playing: DEADPOOL

"THIS IS WHAT THE COVER LOOKS LIKE" - Craig

Released late June 2013.

Developed by High Moon Studios.

Published by Activision.

Available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Version played: PlayStation 3.

The story of Deadpool (the character) is an interesting one.  Not the actual in-universe 'origin' or whatever, that's fairly bland stuff existing solely to drag another character out of some part of Wolverine's past to further capitalise on the pointy-haired Bananaman lookalike's popularity, and perhaps to copycat DC's Deathstroke The Terminator because why not.  Anyway, he quickly evolved from just being a dude with swords who dressed kinda like Spider-Man into a kind of walking in-joke, the court jester of the Marvel universe - a means for his writers to satirise the ludicrous conventions of the very same cape comics their co-workers were hawking to the masses.  DP wasn't a huge success but he had his niche, and survived for most of the 21st century living on the outer fringes of Marvel...and then all of a sudden, people started noticing him.  Part of that was no doubt down to the awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, although how anyone could see what Fox did with the character there and think, "yes, this is a guy I would like to know more about!" is beyond my understanding.  Whatever the case, Marvel jumped at the opportunity and cashed in big on Deadpool, and even now he's got at least 2 montly ongoing comic series all about him, not to mention an enviable assortment of toys and other merch.  I have a Deadpool logo polo shirt, for god's sake.  Y'know, in case I feel like playing golf and need everyone there to know I support Deadpool.  At golf.

The story of Deadpool (the game) is a lot less interesting.  Marvel wanted to make more money out of the character so they got some devs to make a videogame about him.  And here it is.  I have been playing it.  And now I have been thinking about it.