Asa Butterfield Is Probably Your New Spider-Man

According to the fine folks at Latino Review, Sony and Marvel are currently negotiating with young Asa Butterfield to take up the web-slinging mantle as the next Spider-Man.  The webhead is set to appear in a limited fashion in Captain America: Civil War, which is filming in Atlanta as you're reading this, so I suspect that we'll get an official press release any day now.  Spidey won't be alone, as the film will also feature the entire team of New Avengers as seen at the end of Age Of Ultron, along with Hawkeye, Agent 13, Ant-Man, Black Panther and whoever the hell Martin Freeman is playing.

There was a short list of young actors circulating a few weeks back and aside from Liam James, star of The Way Way Back, Butterfield was pretty much my top choice.  While Ender's Game was at best a mediocre adaptation of the book, Butterfield's work is top notch.  He adeptly portrayed Ender's peculiar mix of strategic genius, ruthless efficiency and emotional pathos, all of which will come in handy for playing nerdy-boy-genius-turned-superhero Peter Parker.  Mostly I'm just excited to have a Peter Parker that doesn't look like a 30 year old pretending to be in high school.

I've been meaning to rewatch Martin Scorcese's Hugo for months now, but despite a few long flights I still haven't gotten around to it.  Maybe this news will finally get me off my ass.

Podcast Episode 34: JOHN RAMBO Is A Small Wonder

And thus concludes our Epic Rambo Rewatch.

The fourth entry, titled John Rambo or simply Rambo depending upon which version of the Blu-ray you're watching, is most notable for being the least Rambo of all the Rambo movies.  There aren't many hallmarks of this franchise but the most recognizable of them, namely a scene in which Rambo slowly takes out a group of enemies in an enclosed space one at a time as well as the presence of an on-the-nose power ballad over the closing credits, are conspicuously absent in this (perhaps) final go around.  It's therefore hard not to walk away from this movie feeling like Rambo/Stallone accidentally wandered into some semi-generic action film.  Julie Benz will try your patience as she spends most of the first half of the film blandly monologuing, although every time her dickhead fiance wanders into frame the potential for unintentional comedy skyrockets.  (I'm looking at you, awkwardly staged boat scene.)  And Stallone's desire to legitimately educate the audience about the plight of the Burmese people while simultaneously portraying the military as virtual caricatures of evil is so blunt that it's kind of astounding.  It's as if he's trying overly hard to justify the violence that Rambo will visit upon these bastards later on.  But stick around because the last 20 minutes is a glorious melee of CG blood and guts as Rambo rips throats, cuts off heads and shoots guys so severely that they simply explode into a completely liquid state.  It's awesome.

I'm really happy with the say this whole revisitation played out, as it gave me the chance to honestly re-evaulate the Rambo franchise for the first time in a decade.  I discovered that Rambo III was much better than it gets credit for, while First Blood Part II is kind of an overhyped snore.  I'm can't wait to dig into the next franchise on our docket, Terminator.

A note on this week's podcast: We spend a bunch of time talking about Marvel's plans for Avengers 3 and beyond, name the idea that most of the current Avengers may not actually appear in that film and the possibility of Sony, in a fit of desperation, finally allowing Spider-Man to play in the Avengers sandbox.  As I was posting this podcast last night the news broke concerning Robert Downey Jr's deal to appear in Captain America 3, signaling the beginning of Marvel's Civil War storyline.  I'll have more thoughts about this later, but I stand by everything we talked about in the podcast and I think our positions are pretty fairly validated by this latest development.

Also, fair warning: The section where we watch 80's sitcoms of our youth is a little uneven from an audio perspective.  The TV audio is a little quiet and our reactions are pretty loud.  Be glad that I edited that section down a bit, particularly the moment from the Small Wonder pilot where the son gropes his robot sister and says, "She even feels like a girl," which literally sent us screaming out of the room in horror.  It's a wonder we didn't break the microphones.



Next Week: Brad Pitt drives a tank in Fury and hopefully also The Terminator.

Podcast Episode 13: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 Swings Straight Into A Brick Wall (Literally)

"I AM THE RHINO!"

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might not be as muddled and incoherent as its predecessor, but at least it's a lot more boring and silly.

That's a real shame, because I can't shake the feeling that there really is a very good Spider-Man film trapped underneath an imposing mountain of stupid.  The chemistry continues to crackle between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and is the closest thing to a grounding force this franchise has going for it.  While his Peter Parker remains far too mopey and not nearly smart enough (he literally looks up YouTube videos to learn how batteries work), Garfield totally kills as Spider-Man, bringing an infectious sense of energy and joy to the screen whenever he dons the mask.  Tobey Maguire always made the web-slinging feel like a burden, whereas Garfield truly comes alive when he's facing down baddies and tossing off clever one-liners.  Webb really nails most of the action beats too; the opening chase/fight scene featuring Paul Giamatti's inexplicably cartoonish Russian gangster is absolutely magnificent to behold in IMAX 3D and from a purely visual standpoint, Jamie Foxx's Electro makes for a really cool and dynamic physical threat to Spider-Man.

Unfortunately the story remains dull and bloated, clocking in at over 2 hours and 20 minutes yet still leaving you feeling as if nothing much actually happened.  Electro isn't really a developed character with clear motivations and a plan of action so much as he is a walking special effect designed to make the trailers more exciting.  In fact, if Electro had simply been a autonomous robot or a natural phenomena, there would have been almost no impact to the way the plot unfolded.  Meanwhile Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), who by all rights should have been the misunderstood victim turned ruthless criminal mastermind, comes off as little more than an afterthought, an aimless dick who exists solely to literally swoop in at the eleventh hour and act as the mechanism for the latest overly foreshadowed tragedy in Peter Parker's life.  Say what you want about The Lizard, but at least that guy had an evil plan that needed stopping.  And don't even get me started on the unmistakable streak of absurd silliness running through the whole movie.  Bad puns and mustache twirling are the order of the day if you're a Spider-Man villain; Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze would be right at home here.  If nothing else, I'm now outright terrified at the prospect of the upcoming Sinister Six film, which now feels destined to be nigh unwatchable.  If you think I'm exaggerating, just know that at one point Electro tries to kill Spider-Man via nursery rhyme.

The latest episode of the podcast goes into all that and a whole lot more spoilery detail, so I don't recommend listening before you've seen the movie.  I suspect that many of you have already subjected yourself to this nonsense however, so tune in and perhaps find a bit of catharsis.  We also chat about the Star Wars casting and the bizarre announcement of a Beverly Hills Cop "reboot".


(Point Of Order: In my excitement to make Ronny Cox joke, I mistakenly identify his BHC character as "Andrew Bogota" instead of the correct "Andrew Bogomil."  I also realize that I fudged the details of the famous Gwen Stacy scene from the comics, but I wasn't able to cut around it.  My bad.)

The Chuck Norris Power Pack, Part 1: MISSING IN ACTION

"Do you mind?  I'm a bit shy."

So my best friend from high school (who also officiated my wedding) is a guy named Bart.  We were born a mere two weeks apart, so every February we engage in a little birthday tradition: we give each other the shittiest movies we can find on DVD.  Seriously terrible stuff.  Ice Spiders.  Death Bed.  The Uwe Boll Collection.  Just the absolute worst of the worst.  

This year Bart outdid himself.

Along with The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (on blu-ray no less), he gave me one of those combo packs with multiple movies in one case.  Henceforth it shall be known as The Chuck Norris Power Pack.  It contained three movies starring the great bearded one: Missing In Action, Missing In Action 2: The Beginning, and The Delta Force.  There was simply no way I was going to watch these movies by myself, so when I recently went over to Bart's to break in his new TV, it seemed appropriate to bring them along.  Since I suspect that The Delta Force will probably turn out to be the best of the bunch (it's got Lee Marvin!) I figured we should start by lowering the bar a bit.  And thus we battled through Missing In Action.  

It only seemed fair to let Bart voice his own opinions on the movie, since he's the one who brought it into our lives.  I'm hoping to do a few more of these "conversational" pieces in the coming months, so let me know what you think.

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Daley
Lets start with the following question: how in the hell did Chuck Norris ever become a leading man? Strike that, how did this guy become THE LEGEND he is today? His physical prowess is certainly legit. He's got serious karate skills (the guy was was an undefeated World Professional Karate Champion for six years, plus he fought Bruce Freakin Lee) and was famous for doing most of his own stunts. In his heyday, which definitely includes Missing In Action, I have no doubt that he could have broken me into many small pieces in a dozen different ways, but the guy has all the charm of a tree stump. Like the early work of Channing Tatum, Chuck Norris comes across as a walking absence of personality. I don't get it. Did people really respond to Norris? He barely speaks in this movie, and spends a lot of time silently taking in his surroundings or pensively staring into the middle distance. I can't tell if this was an intentional move to minimize the amount of "acting" or if director Joseph Zito honestly thought that Norris was pulling off some kind of smoldering Steve McQueen thing. (Note: IMDb claims that McQueen, who was a karate student of Norris, urged him to get into acting. Thanks a lot Steve!) Either way, it just doesn't work. Also, was Norris a legit sex symbol at this point? He's certainly treated like one, since his glistening chest hair is on display for much of the film's running time.

What's really surprising is the lack of actual fighting in Missing In Action. There's plenty of Norris stalking around the jungle with large automatic weapons and a hilarious bulletproof inflatable raft. (This was 1984, so one of the characters actually has to stop and explain what kevlar is for the sake of the audience.) However, there's very little actual hand-to-hand combat. That's Norris's ace-in-the-hole, yet somehow the movie suffers from a pronounced lack of roundhouse kicks to the face. Instead they've got Norris...climbing the sides of buildings? It reminds me of all those long, dull shots of the Enterprise flying through the many chambers of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture, but here it's a black pajama-clad Chuck Norris shimmying up drainpipes. It's impressive I guess, but not exactly exciting stuff. I did enjoy that he spends the entire opening scene silently watching a Spider-Man cartoon, which I'm pretty sure means that Peter Parker is his spirit animal.

What do you think? Were you as let down as I was by the absence of sweet Norris fisticuffs, or was the absurd military action entertaining enough? Also, do you have a theory as to why Norris's James Braddock is somehow able to walk away from gunshots and grenade explosions without so much as a scratch? I'm thinking gypsy curse...


Bart 
The first thing about the Chuck Norris Legend is the man's borderline absurdity. I think it works like this: when I was in college, I briefly dated a girl with dreadlocks...a redhead with dreadlocks. These are things that should not go together, and something about the awkward juxtaposition made it interesting, even if only in a fleeting way. Chuck Norris is, fundamentally, an actor who can't act and a martial arts master who isn't Asian. That's interesting...for a time. This was a large part of the problem with MIA -- it's only interesting when he's illustrating the contrast by fighting Asian guys or trying to act, and he simply isn't doing either of those things for most of this movie. Even on a conceptual level the direction of this movie shows a lack of understanding of this simple idea -- why would you include so many shirt-off shots of your leading man -- a sweaty, muscular action hero -- if the audience can't see his chest because Chuck has that bearskin-rug catcher's pad?

The next pillar of The Chuck Norris Institution is the simple idea that he is all that is Man. Remember that scene in Louie where the teenager harasses Louis CK in the donut shop and makes him beg not to get beaten up? What is Louie's date's reaction to this mother-creature of emasculation? She appreciates that Louie probably did the mature thing in avoiding the confrontation, but she has to dump him just the same because it was just so wimpy. She can't stay with him, just out of instinct. This is a function of natural selection, not choice. I go to this example for two reasons - first, because I love that show, and second because it illustrates the point that simply having a red beard does not grant you man-powers. It follows that being afflicted with big-fat-ginger-ugly-itis really comes from within. Chuck Norris doesn't have that gene. In the same scene, Chuck would have stared at the kid dead-pan until his eyeballs popped out of his head and pummeled the kid and all his little yelling friends. Mature decision-making wouldn't enter into the equation. Somebody threatens you, you beat him up. Hulk Smash!! And then you FUCK the plant.

I almost hate to say it, but all the Spider-Man stuff in this movie actually makes a ton of sense if you think about it. That's what Chuck Norris is in this movie -- a superhero without a face. Everything he does is superhuman - the careless violence, puzzling invulnerability, questionable motivation, and, of course, the inexplicable lack of consequences. Oh, and the needless climbing. And Chuck does it all without his face moving, just like Spider-Man. He just stares at you with those emotionless eyes and stone-faced...err...beard. And then you die, and he climbs away. The real problem, as you said while we were watching this, is that he only gets to fight minions, and he dispatches them far, far too easily and quickly because he's a superhero. There's no big baddie to legitimize his quest, no grand evil for him to defeat, no sleek Asian yin to his fuzzy ginger yang. He has no equal, and that makes the movie boring.

...that and the script, direction, acting, editing, and horribly misleading blu-ray box.

Daley
So who else was in this masterpiece? Can we officially classify M. Emmet Walsh as the strangest possible choice to pair with Chuck Norris in an action movie? I mean the guy was already 50 years old and about 260 lbs. when this movie was shot. They have to be the greatest odd couple in the history of Vietnam revenge movies. If they cast the tubby Walsh to make Norris look even more badass, it definitely backfired. Walsh easily gives the most convincing performance in the entire movie and I love that his refusal to go back to Vietnam eventually gets whittled down to, "I ain't gettin' off this raft."

Best of all, after some careful frame-by-frame examination, I think it's safe to say that during the big final stunt jump on the shark-faced battle raft, the AARP-eligible Walsh was doubled by a 24 year old Jean-Claude Van Damme! I'm deadly serious, Van Damme is a credited stuntman on the film and there is some heinously incongruous stunt doubling at play for pretty much everyone who isn't Norris. Can we confirm this?

And I would be remiss if I left out the great James Hong, who can soon be seen playing Ryan Reynolds alter-ego in the upcoming RIPD. He gets a few choice scenes as a smarmy Vietnam general who accuses Braddock of war crimes, but he gets dispatched (too soon) as a result of Chuck Norris's uncanny climbing ability. Somehow he's not even the real villain of the movie! It's actually some underling who tortured Braddock when he was a POW (this time it's personal!) played by a guy named Ernie Ortega. Is it possible they hired a Mexican to play Chuck Norris's Vietnamese nemesis? That would certainly explain why we couldn't understand A SINGLE WORD HE SAID. He was just speaking straight up gibberish!

Any theories on why all the minions kept trying to fight the assault raft by driving their trucks into the river? And how about that love interest? Can we even call her a love interest? I think we can call her a breathing human woman, but I'd hardly imply she was in any way interesting.

Bart
First things first -- that raft. We have to talk about Imperial Death Raft (...Raft Punk?).

We've already established that its kevlar hide made it nigh-indestructible, but somehow no one ever mentions its slipstream technology. I don't know how, but somehow it carried our bearded champion and his be-chubbered sidekick Lord-only-knows how many miles in a very, very short time. The convoy of trucks carrying the POW's had left, what, a half a day before Chuck blows up the camp they'd left? He catches the trucks in minutes. I think there's literally only one day-for-night shot in the interim. That's...no passage of time.

And about that convoy: one would think that, upon seeing Chuck coming, they probably should have just, you know, turned away from the river. But one would be wrong! Obviously they had jungle intel that Raft-narok wouldn't be stopped by something so pesky and trivial as land. So they decided to turn the whole motorcade into the river itself. Really, 90-degree turn directly into the river. Perpendicular. Maybe their plan was to limit his maneuverability by putting obstacles in his way -- I dunno. It's also moot, because, unsurprisingly, that sucker immediately went into super pursuit mode and started jumping over stuff and doing bombing runs. Too bad it didn't start making snarky comments at Braddock. That probably would have been better.

I'm not really sure what to make of the other characters. They were mostly there, I think, for the sake of audience expectation. None of them had any particular impact on the story at all. But a movie with no one for Chuck Norris to fight or befriend probably wouldn't be that interesting. Probably. There was that raft. Maybe if Mr. Feeney was involved.

Daley
Alright, final thoughts: single favorite Missing In Action moment? You already know mine: Chuck Norris is idly staring out the window of his hotel room in Thailand. He slooooowly buttons up his shirt, wanders over to a large maple wardrobe and then stands there methodically rolling up his sleeves in silence for approximately eternity. This prompted me to say, "Man, if there's not an angry Asian guy with a knife in that wardrobe, I'm gonna be VERY disappointed." Then, right on cue, Chuckles reaches for the wardrobe and a flurry of sharp-edged Vietnamese fury bursts forth from inside the wardrobe and I promptly take a screaming victory lap around the couch, arms raised in triumph. It was downright sublime.

Finally, what are you hoping for from Missing In Action 2: The Beginning, a.k.a. the movie that was shot first but released second as a prequel because the producers realized that THIS WAS THE BETTER MOVIE?!? Maybe if we're lucky Braddock will wander past someone painting the shark teeth on the front of a kevlar assault raft. Then he'll stare off vacantly over the horizon and whisper, "Next time..."

Bart
I want jungle warfare from the next one, plain and simple. And at least one roundhouse kick to the face. I'm pretty sure we didn't get any from this one.

My favorite part, wardrobe notwithstanding, was when the Robin to Chuck's hirsute Batman declared, unceremoniously, that he would not be getting off the raft. This seemed an odd choice to me, seeing as his much larger, much more comfortable, much more not-baking-in-the-Vietnamese-sun-without-any-water boat was, oh, 30 yards away.

But it was a pretty cool raft, though. I'll give him that.

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Stay tuned for Missing In Action 2: The Beginning!

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Title: Missing In Action
Director: Joseph Zito
Starring: Chuck Norris, M. Emmet Walsh, James Hong,  Lenore Kasdorf, Ernie Ortega, David Tress
Year Of Release: 1984
Viewing Method: Blu-Ray