So yeah, go see it. Like, now.
February 13th, 2016
So we went to go see a movie earlier.
You would think that, as an avowed nerd, I'd automatically dig most of the super hero movies that have been flooding out of Hollywood these last couple of years. But you'd be wrong! If you look at the history of these films, since way back in the day, the vast majority of these things have actively run away from their source material, as if ashamed of it.
If you look at the movies DC keeps crapping out, you can increasingly see just how hard they're trying to pretend their stories weren't comic books for, like, seventy years. Batman wears black, Super-Man wears muted colors, and the Wonder Woman has her wearing brown. Brown? If you remember the Wonder Woman series from back in the day, she embraced the red, white, and blue.
The first set of these that actually embraced the silliness of their premise and just ran with it were the Blade movies, which I know a lot of people didn't like for various reasons. But I liked them mostly for the same reason that I like Beavis and Butthead - it's not about the stars, so much as how the other characters react to them. Blade is a pretty one-note character, after all.
But the Blade movies, they grabbed the utterly ridiculous concept they were based on and ran with the ball. This may have been easier since, at the time, people were still masturbating non-stop over the flood of vampire movies in theaters. But while its main character took the whole thing way, way too seriously, nobody else in the films did, which made them kind of a hoot. At least, I thought so.
When franchises were being filmed which didn't suffer this fatal flaw, they were subject to a completely different problem. Take a look at the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four films, both of which have been rebooted after one lousy movie. When you keep doing this, you prevent your movies from having any continuity from one film to the next, and in the end nobody cares.
Until Marvel started making their own movies, shortly before being bought out by Disney upon seeing just how much money they were going to make, these awful trends continued unabated. And then, upon seeing just how much money a company can make by building an entire 'universe' of movie continuity, suddenly everyone wants to jump on the Marvel bandwagon. Money talks, I guess.
This doesn't seem to have fixed the DC movies at all, much less the X-Men things, which seem to be trying harder and harder to engage in both of these trends simultaneously. However, there's that one weird outlier in all of this. And that, my friends, is Deadpool. It's kind of part of the X-Men story, but kind of not, and definitely embraces the stupid essence of Deadpool wholeheartedly.
It's fun, it's sick, and it's wrong, and I can't recommend it highly enough!