Category: Feature

Venom ⭐⭐

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I am surprised that a movie based on the Marvel Comics character Venom ever got made. It seems like ever since the release of Spider-Man 3 more than a decade ago where Venom played a part there was talk of a movie featuring that character and even more recently with the Andrew Garfield version of Spider-Man there were rumors of a Venom spin-off movie then too. But over the years nothing ever happened and quite frankly I didn’t think anything was going to happen so I was kind’a surprised when this modern Venom movie was announced a few years back.

Venom opened late 2018 and was trashed by critics but it made a lot of money at the box office. Still, it took me until recently to checkout the movie on home media and honestly I think that was for the best. Venom does have its moments but for a relatively short superhero movie it drags in places and is kind’a boring.

Here, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a crusading investigative journalist who because he asks the hard questions is fired from his job and loses his fiancé. The hard questions he was asking were to Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a tech billionaire who while exploring the stars brought back a ship full of alien “symbiotes” that need to bond with a human host in order to survive our environment. Drake sees these symbiotes as a way to be able to survive things like climate change, but the symbiotes pretty much just want to eat us. That is except for the one called “Venom” who bonds with Brock and while it still needs to eat people in order to survive, agrees to only eat bad people and help Brock do good like stop Drake and his symbiote alien conquest.

I felt this when I heard about Venom and feel it still, but to me Venom and Eddie Brock are need to be the bad guys, but in Venom they’re mostly good. In the comics the Venom symbiote was the black Spider-Man costume for a long while, that’s why Venom has the spider-designed costume and shoots webs like Spidey. And after Spider-Man got rid of the symbiote, it found and bonded with Brock and became the anti-Spider-Man character Venom. Venom is one of the classic Spider-Man villains but the movies have changed him to a mostly good-guy and it’s just weird.

Why does Venom look like a spider and shoot webs like Spider-Man in Venom? Well, that’s never really explained. Why does Venom look monstrous? Well, that’s because the symbiotes look monstrous I guess.

All of which I could overlook if the story of Venom weren’t so by-the-numbers dull. It doesn’t help matters that the first hour of Venom is Venom-less and the big fight scene at the end of the movie, all superhero movies have a big fight scene at the end of the movie, is Venom against, essentially, another Venom.

But like I said this movie made bank at the box office and there’s already talk of another Venom in the works. Will that movie be as boring as this one? Only time will tell.

The Passage season 1 premiere ⭐⭐

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The new FOX TV series The Passage has a long and interesting history to the small screen. Based on the novel of the same name by Justin Cronin, originally the pilot episode of The Passage TV show was shot the summer of 2017 with an eye to be on the schedule later that fall. But FOX didn’t like what they saw and instead of cancelling the series outright sent it back to the drawing board as it were, replacing actors and reshooting the episode in early 2018. And this time they must’ve liked the result since the show is now the hub of FOX’s winter schedule.

While the series is based on the novel The Passage, the TV series does take quite a few liberties with the story. The novel is told in several time periods, the first present day where the vampires are just starting to be active and another nearly 100 years in the future where the fanged ones have taken over, driving what’s left of humanity into protective enclaves. While the TV series does focus on the part of the book that takes place present day, gone, or at least not present in the first episode, is everything else.

I left the first episode thinking that half of it was really interesting, but that the other half was pure crud.

In the TV The Passage, scientists have found what essentially turns out to be a vampire in South America and, after one of their group is attacked and turned, locks this dude up and begins studying him. In something that’s a stretch for even a horror series like The Passage, these same scientists find out that being a vampire makes you immune from all diseases, and that if they can figure it out they can make regular non-blood drinking people immune from everything too. But the scientists find that keeping people from fully turning into vampires is a lot harder than it looks and want to try the process on a child, because a child has more “something or others” than a fully grown adult.

And this is the interesting part.

The not so interesting part involves Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), an ex-CIA-Green Beret-Navy Seal-Special Forces type sent out to pick up an orphan and bring her back to the testing facility since there’s a virulent form of bird-flu about to descent on the US which will surly kill thousands unless the scientists can crack the vampire code. Wolgast picks up this girl, played by an amazing Saniyya Sidney who hopefully one day will be in something better than this, but quickly finds that he can’t go through with it and the two go on the run ala Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk.

I thought the idea of scientists studying vampires in a lab not realizing that the blood-suckers are psychically linked with each other, and are secretly infecting the dreams of the scientists at night, was actually pretty great. That alone would make a good series. The second part with Wolgast on the run was ridiculous. Like all the scientists need is a kid to run their experiments, and if Wolgast is on the run why not just find another kid?

Just as insane is the idea that the scientists are going to turn vampirism into a cure for anything since 100% of the time everyone they’ve tried it on has turned into a vampire. It seems like you’d want to do a lot more testing with something that has the ability to wipe out the human race that they are in The Passage.

What I wanted out of The Passage was either I Am Legend before everyone on the planet got turned into vampires or what Fear the Walking Dead should have been rather than what it turned out to be. But so far it’s turned out to be mostly network TV drama schlock.

I’ll give this one a few more episodes but have to admit that things aren’t looking too good for me and The Passage.

The Punisher season 2 premiere ⭐⭐⭐⭐

CategoriesComic Books, Feature, TVPosted on

Let me be what I’m meant to be

It’s only been a little more than a year since Netflix released new episodes of the series The Punisher, yet somehow it feels much longer.

When we last left Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) in the first season, he had gotten vengeance on those who had killed his family and had gotten a sort of free pass from the authorities on everything he’d done since he’d taken out some very bad people. The second season starts a year or two later with Frank traveling the country and ending up in Michigan where he finds a connection with Beth Quinn (Alexa Davalos) a bartender. But because The Punisher is, well, The Punisher things go bad one night and Frank winds up taking on a half-dozen or so trained killers out to kidnap a girl named Amy Bendix (Giorgia Whigham). Beth takes a bullet in the melee and Frank and Amy go on the run since Frank isn’t about to leave her vulnerable and alone and that’s pretty much the first episode.

There’s been quite a few attempts at “cracking” the character of the Punisher outside of the comics the last few decades, none of which we even able to get at the core of the character nor were too successful. It’s ironic, then, that the one place that was finally able to deliver a Punisher I’d recognize from the comics was Netflix rather than the big screen. Always before Netflix he was too broadly drawn or the story was too far removed from what made him work in the comics, but other than updating a few things here and there the Punisher on Netflix is pretty much the Punisher from the comics.

With one exception.

Usually, the comic version of the Punisher is like the Energize Bunny, he keeps going and going. He never quits and there’s always one more bad guy out there he needs to confront in the next issue. What was so interesting with the Netflix Punisher was that at the end of the first season his job is complete, the people who killed his family are dead so his job was finished. This Punisher had a focused set of goals, and when they were done his job was done.

So what was next? Well, ex-Marine/ex-Punisher Frank like a lot of vets wasn’t sure. After all he’s been through what’s he supposed to do? Get a job at the grocery? Go work at a factory? Instead, Frank chose to travel the US, but rather than on the back of a Harley like so many people do he chose to see the country via a van. While you can stay ahead of your problems for a while when you roam like that, your problems are always there as Frank discovers.

Here, it’s not so much there are still people out to get him since most of them are either dead or under the impression that he’s dead, Frank’s problem is that he can’t keep out of a fight no matter what the consequences. And the consequence here are that Frank loses the one chance he has at happiness since the death of his family to be with Beth.

Which is what I’d kind’a expect in a series called The Punisher. We don’t tune in to see Frank Castle happy and content. We tune in to see him brooding, and going after the bad people.

Side note — I was very happy to see Bernthal reunited with Davalos here. They played star-crossed lovers too in the mostly unseen TNT Mob City series of a few years back. That show by Frank Darabont had Bernthal as 1950s LA police detective Joe Teague with Davalos playing Teague’s vampy girlfriend Jasmine Fontaine.

Direct Beam Comms #164

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, FeaturePosted on

What To Watch This Week

Sunday

Taking place just before the stock market crash of 1987 comes Black Monday on Showtime starring Don Cheadle today.

Tuesday

The Queen biopic and the surprise hit of the fall Bohemian Rhapsody is available on digital download today.

If Bohemian Rhapsody was a hit then the latest attempt at an Lisbeth Salander movie franchise The Girl in the Spider’s Web was the opposite — it’s also available on digital download today.

Saturday

The second big screen adaptation of the Richard Matheson classic I Am Legend story The Omega Man airs on TCM today.

TV

The Punisher preview

Movies

Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Posters of the Week

  • Hellboy poster
    Hellboy poster
  • Alita Battle Angel movie poster
    Alita Battle Angel movie poster

When Shyamalan was the next Spielberg

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There was a time that I thought writer/director M. Night Shyamalan was going to be my generation’s Steven Spielberg. Shyamalan started out his career by writing and directing two forgettable films but on his third he struck gold with the modern day horror-classic The Sixth Sense (1999).

Not to be outdone he followed up that flick with two more great movies — the first was Unbreakable in 2000 and the second Signs in 2002.

If The Sixth Sense was horror then Unbreakable was a unique take on superheroes, released right at the start of the second wave of hero movies in the early 2000s, and Signs was his take on the sci-fi War of the Worlds. And for someone like me who was, and is, crazy about genre movies I was in heaven.

Because of its twist The Sixth Sense was a movie that demanded to be seen more than once, which many people did as it was the second highest grossing movie in 1999 bested only by first Star Wars movie in 16 years. And while Unbreakable didn’t make nearly as much as The Sixth Sense did at the box office, it was none-the-less one of the movies people were talking about a lot in 2000 as being a great movie and the start of something special for Shyamalan. And Signs, a movie I saw twice in the theater, did almost as well as The Sixth Sense which led many to believe, myself included, that Shyamalan was on this way to becoming a new Spielberg.

But the years after Signs left Shyamalan trying to get back some of the magic from earlier films in his new ones.

The best from this bleak period would be The Village (2004), but even this movie about a group of settlers in the 1700s dealing with monsters who attack their village felt overdone in trying to capture a “twist” ending which Shymalan had become known for by that point. I remember defending the movie at the time as being not bad, but it certainly wasn’t on the level of his previous work. Then came Lady in the Water, a terrible movie about a water nymph at an apartment complex which left me scratching my head and questioning if Shyamalan was as good as a writer/director as I thought he was, let alone the next Spielberg.

If his disaster of a disaster movie The Happening didn’t wreck his career, then big budget flops like After Earth and The Last Airbender would. On the one hand Shyamalan’s earlier works showed that he was a writer/director of great talent, but it seemed like he spend the next ten years trying to prove this to be not a fluke but failing in the process.

Then came Split in 2016.

Split
Split

I saw the trailer for this movie about a person with multiple personalities, one of which is a super-strong homicidal monster, and thought it looked great, and the reviews started coming in saying it was something special. It turned out that Split was a secret sequel to Unbreakable.

And in the first time in more than 15 years I was excited about Shyamalan again.

I remember when Unbreakable was released there was talk that it was the first of a planned trilogy of films so I was expecting to see Unbreakable 2 just a few years after the first. I had no idea it was going to take more than a decade and a half for the sequel to be released.

And now comes the final film of the trilogy Glass. Named after the Samuel L. Jackson super-genius villain character from Unbreakable, Glass looks to pit modern-day superhero David Dunn (Bruce Willis) against Glass as well as multiple-personality Beast (James McAvoy).

While I no longer think that Shymalan is going to be the next Spielberg anymore, I also don’t think that matters. As long as Shymalan keeps making good genre pics like Split, and hopefully Glass, I think that Shymalan is going to be his own writer/director and will continue making interesting movies.

And that’s better than being the next Spielberg.

Glass
Glass