Thoughts On The Dead

Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: deadpool

Dead Dumb

February 23, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The problem with Deadpool is that, as Guardians of the Galaxy and Super director James Gunn correctly notes, Hollywood is full of morons. No more or less than any other industry, but Hollywood makes the movies. (Excuse me: produces the content.) Therefore, its moronicity is more on display. We will see the fallout from Deadpool‘s success in around a year.

Deadpool didn’t succeed because it was dirty, or violent, or self-referential: it succeeded because it was true to the character. Deadpool is a homicidal pervert that realizes he’s fictional. A PG film starring the Merc with a Mouth would have failed, because it wouldn’t have been him up there on that 85-foot Ultra Screen®. Story, tone, style, structure: everything in fiction flows from character. Character informs choices, resulting in action.

Hollywood will not understand this. Hollywood is now churning out pitches for untapped comic franchises to “Deadpool up.”

Luckily, Enthusiasts, TotD has a spy in the William Morris mailroom. (Good kid named Slick Lee. You might know his dad.) I can bring you this exclusive sneak preview of Upcoming Comic Book Movies, Deadpool-Style:

Fantastic Four: Third Times The Charm This thrice-rebooted property goes hard R, as our beloved family of adventurers spends the running time of the movie making fun of Michael Chiklis, comparing dongs (stretchy vs. rocky), and murdering people. Sue Storm is a hooker with a heart of gold.

Thor: Tapping That Asgard It’s a fuck flick. Thor fucks for two hours; he fucks well and he fucks proudly. Women, men, gods, frost giants: Thor fucks ’em. Loki shows up and guess what? Thor fucks him. Both Jane Foster and Sif are now hookers with hearts of gold.

Aquaman Shows His Dick To Fish And every time he does, he and the comic relief exchange clearly-improvised quips about pop culture. Queen Hera is a damp hooker with a heart of gold.

Man-Thing: Giant-Sized Man-Thing Two hours of a swamp monster wandering around a Canadian city failing to pass for New York. Howard the Duck is not a hooker with a heart of gold. Stripper.

Maus: Concentrated And Campy Lot more Hitler jokes than you would expect. Art Speigelman is an award-winning artist and writer with a heart of gold.

Thoughts On Deadpool

February 23, 2016 / / 2 Comments
  • It turns out the movie theater with the 85-foot Ultra-Screen© down the street has $6 Tuesdays, so you might be seeing some more reviews than previously.
  • Anyway, Deadpool is Deadpool and don’t take children to go see this.
  • Y’know that thing when the Avengers or the Star Warriors bloodlessly mow down an army of faceless robots/aliens?
  • Deadpool doesn’t do that.
  • He kills people with knives.
  • It is an extraordinarily simple movie: there are no sub-plots or “universe-building” scenes, and Deadpool is in every shot, it seems.
  • Boy meets girl.
  • Boy is wronged by British person.
  • Boy loses girl.
  • Boy kills British person.
  • Boy gets girl back.
  • That’s it.
  • Oh, sorry: spoilers.
  • But let’s be honest: the only way you do not know how this movie ends five minutes in is if you have never seen a movie before.
  • Or heard a story told.
  • Deadpool is a wonderful example of “singer, not the song” just like Mad Max  was last year, which was a similarly basic story.
  • Action movies have the same relationship to plot as humans do to iodine: a little is necessary, but too much is lethal.
  • Get to the sword-fighting and explosions, please.
  • Deadpool does, and quickly, plus there are boobs.
  • There are also tushees belonging to men and women, plus the innertubes say that Ryan Reynolds has his wang out at one point, but I saw no wang.
  • Again I implore you not to take children to this film: there is even the Gratuitous Titty Bar Scene: all 80’s and 90’s action movies required the hero to go searching for clues in a strip club at least once during the flick so the director could add some production value.
  • All the actors were good, Morena Baccarin in particular, although the bad guy looks exactly like Nicolas Hoult, who played the War Boy in Mad Max, and plays Beast in the other X-man films.
  • I may have spent an hour of the movie wondering idly why Beast was a bad guy now.
  • He was not Beast; he was some other dude; it’s not particularly important.
  • Actually, it’s a little important because Deadpool is, apparently, in the X-Man Universe, whatever the hell that means.
  • Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are in it, too, and they were great fun and I would gladly pony up $6 on a Tuesday down the line to watch their further adventures.
  • Colossus (who has been an X-Man forever and completely wasted in his movie cameos up ’til now) at last gets a personality, that of a well-meaning doofus; his fight with Gina Carano is one of the highlights.
  • (Gina Carano has been given the perfect role: she has no lines, and she punches people very hard.)
  • Negasonic Teenage Warhead has a pitch-black crewcut and supremely cool trousers; she nearly steals the film.
  • NTW was a one-off joke from Grant Morrison’s legendary New X-Men run; it was one of the last things I read before I tapered off my comic habit and it’s still one of my favorite superhero books ever.
  • Her name is a wonderful and subtle dig at comic book protocols and teenage rebellion.
  • One of the tenets of Mutant Pride has been choosing your own name, and abandoning your human name.
  • But: if mutants, Grant Morrison wondered, were allowed to choose their own names when their powers manifested (puberty), then would they really choose such lame, fuddy-duddy sobriquets like “Cyclops” or “Storm?”
  • (Well, Cyclops would have chosen Cyclops, but Cyclops is a dick. Cyclops was the Ted Cruz of the X-Men: everyone hated him, and he kept doing and saying fucked up stuff, but he was somehow in charge.)
  • Letting a 14-year-old choose their own name will lead to ridiculous bullshit.
  • “Good morning, students. I am Charles Xavier; welcome to my school. The first item on this year’s syllabus shall be choosing your own names. These names will be your names within the Mutant world, and should reflect your abilities and personalities. Please think very deeply about–“
  • “Professor? I know my name! I wanna be Mister Fister.”
  • “–your names and…what? No. Ew. No.”
  • “You said we could choose!”
  • “Professor, can my Mutant name be Fuckmaster Sex?”
  • “Like the DJ?”
  • “Yeah, he’s swag.”
  • “No.”
  • “Can I be Professor Sex?”
  • “No, I’m Professor Sex. X. DAMMIT. No. Choosing your Mutant name is a sacred responsibility, children. Please don’t just shout out the first dirty thing that comes to mind.”
  • “Can I be the Philadelphia Foreskin?”
  • “What’s your power?”
  • “Prehensile foreskin.”
  • “How’d you get in here? We have students that have eaten universes.”
  • “Affirmative Mutant Action.”
  • “Ah. Well, are you from Philadelphia?”
  • “Tucson.”
  • “Then you can’t be the Philadelphia Foreskin, can you? Next one of you that says something stupid has to shave Professor Logan.”
  • And so on.
  • Ryan Reynolds is very Ryan Reynoldsy.
  • He does that Ryan Reynolds thing.
  • Ryan Rynolds ryanreynolds as hard as possible.
  • This is also one of those movies that is best not thought about after leaving the theater.
  • For example, police do not exist in the Deadpoolverse: you can have shootouts on the highway for as long as you’d like without any bothersome cops showing up.
  • There is also a ship-breaking yard within view of a major American city.
  • They don’t put ship-breaking yards in cities; they don’t even put them in decent countries.
  • Also, Deadpool and the bad guy both have the Vaguely Defined Superpower Bundle: the main power (Deadpool has a Wolverine-like healing factor and the bad guy has super-reflexes) plus they can jump off bridges and across city streets and whatnot.
  • Finally: I won’t give it away if you haven’t see it, but Deadpool has the best Stan Lee cameo to date.

Dead Vs. Dead(pool)

August 5, 2015 / / 5 Comments

I’m marshalling my thoughts, but this one comes to mind: the announcement of new Dead shows–no matter how tangentially Dead they are–should not be overshadowed by the trailer for a Ryan Reynolds movie. (Even if Deadpool looks SOOOOOO fucking good, plus I did not realize Morena Baccarin  and Gina Carano were in it, so now I have an action-boner AND a boner-boner.)

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