[Comic Review] DCeased Event (2019-20??)

 

DCeased

DCeased

1. DCeased
2. Un-Kill-Ables
3. Hope at World's End
4. Dead Planet

Official Blurb

What happens to the World’s Greatest Heroes if the world ends? Six hundred million people. That's how many fall victim when a mysterious techno-organic virus is unleashed on Earth. Six hundred million infected. Six hundred million turned into mindless, rampaging killers bent on death and destruction. And that's just the beginning. Cities. Nations. Undersea Kingdoms and Paradise Islands. One by one, they fall to the monstrous hordes. Now only Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the Justice League stand between Earth and utter annihilation. But for how long? Nothing they've ever faced has prepared them for an onslaught of this magnitude. Nothing they've ever seen can match the scale of the tragedy and terror that have been unleashed. As heroes and villains, gods and monsters are wiped out, only one question remains: What happens to the World's Greatest Heroes if the world ends?

New York Times bestselling writer Tom Taylor (Injustice) joins artists Trevor Hairsine (Red Hood and the Outlaws) and Stefano Guadiano (The Walking Dead) to unleash an all-new vision of the DC Universe's darkest hour in DCeased. But be warned: the horror is contagious...

: My Take :

Once upon a time there was a fad that permeated all media, and comics were no more immune than the characters in those stories. Zombies were everywhere. Films, TV, Comics, Video Games, Tabletop Games... just everywhere. At the height of this fad there was a comic called Marvel Zombies that tracked an outbreak of a zombie virus in the Marvel Universe. It was insanely popular, like everything zombie was at the time, and it was not long until DC did their own take on the idea, Blackest Night.

Blackest Night was a mega cross over event that was a more DC themed take than just "zombie plague but with infected super powered people". It revolved around the a Black Lantern Core and it was really good. Not original like Marvel Zombies, I mean everyone knew it was a "lets do one of those zombie stories as well" type thing, but that didn't stop Blackest Night being extremely good.

So it was a huge surprise to many DC readers to learn that there was a brand new take on a super powered Zombie War coming from DC. I mean the Fad was over and zombies were back to their normal background level of immense popularity, and it wasn't like Blackest Night was some kind of failure. It was hugely successful. Still here we are. Sorta the same thing. Again.

The basic idea of the Zombie event has not changed much from Marvel Zombies. This is a book to see the heroes you are so used to being in control, cracking jokes and winning, instead get totally annihilated and gruesomely put down. Villains become heroes and Heroes find their morals can't hold and act like villains. Like Blackest Night though this story is deeply infused with DC Lore. Marvel Zombies was just a zombie plague (kinda), while this story is linked to one of DCs longest running villain through lines. The Anti-Life Equation.

Like the film 28 Days Later this story is not actually zombies, but something more interesting for DC fans. This gives the writers freedom to do things that would be impossible in a typical zombie story. Also, while Marvels Zombies and Blackest Night were pitch black and repressively dark, alla The Walking Dead, for this was the style at the time, this story dose not fail to forget that at the heart of every great DC Soup Tale... is Hope. Though like all good stories of hope, that hope needs to be crushed until it's just a flickering ember.

Anyone who reads big cross over events know what to expect. So many characters are in this and many have really great roles. Others die super fast for shock or story reasons and others are delegated to background drawings, that become a kind of Where's Wally? type thing which plays out on double page spreads. I am not sure these kind of events, though big and epic, are really the best place for new soup readers to jump in. The power of these cross overs is the reader knowing about all these characters, knowing them intimately, and then seeing them in alternative situations they are not normally in. Obviously these characters are very well known and this comic is not so detailed a character study as something like Kingdom Come that someone with a passing familiarity will not have footing. Still, like all cross overs, this is a story for fans.

There are some really awesome moments in this story. Some of the very coolest characters once again show you why they are the coolest and it is awesome. The entire event took 4 years and like all universe altering events that become super popular it is now a numbered Earth in the DC Multiverse were more stories are being told in that same setting. So while the entire story wraps up, aside from a few massive loose ends, you can expect a new story soon called DCeased: War of the Undead Gods an 8 part series that will end sometime in the 1st 3-5 months of '23. What I am getting at here, is that I would not post this event, if it did not have an ending. In fact I do not even read mass events like this until they are complete, as they literally take 4-6 years to come out.

I loved this event and it is probably my favourite DC event in a long time.

He spoke of improbabilities with certainty, and we just.... *believed* what he said. His true power flows from within us all. Rising us higher than what seems possible.

[Film Reviews] - Krampus, Violent Night and Christmas, Bloody Christmas

 # T'is the Season

I have been watching "Xmas" films last few days. Not sure if I will review them all but I will be posting thoughts on some....

(The next few posts on this blog are being moved from another one I started but decided I did not like)

Krampus (2015)

A lot of people told me this was a really great movie, but I just don't see it.

I know that the kind of films I've been watching this Christmas require a certain level of "going with it" and there are some cool things in this movie that I felt did work. Still, overall this is a Creep Show story that takes 1/2 and episode... not a feature length film. As a film, it just runs out of stuff to do. Way way before the end. Resulting in some bafflingly long sequences. I mean we are not talking the fight scene in **They Live** but we are talking that kind of thing.

Like I said though the film has some good stuff in it. The cast is surprisingly awesome in this one, and surprising because of the type of movie it is. Usually these sort of films are pretty low bar, but there are some actors with serious comedy chops in this and they are funny much of the time. I think it is the considerable charm of these actors that is inflating this films rep. Also this film has some really neat practical effects. I particularly liked the spooky teddy bear which reminds me, in a good way, of **Critters** (a film I deeply love), and the entire "lost in the blizzard" bit near the start is a great example of doing so much with so little.

The problem with this movie is the film maker didn't follow the "Jaws" principle. Krampus looks awesome, but not after he is in full shot for 15 mins. Some sneaker camera angles to hide him, bit of smoke or something, would have really elevated the ending of this movie. I know it is low budget, but check out **Errementari : The Devils Blacksmith** for how creative thinking can make an outstanding over the top ending without needing Disney to fund you. This film wanted an out there ending but imo failed, as we basically have a shot of a bunch of muppets standing around a pot.

The real issue I had with this film is that I wanted to like it. My viewing experience suffered from expectations. It didn't help that people have been trying to get me to watch it every Xmas for years now and kept telling me how great it was.

This is another one of those movies that I feel is just missing the mark. These films can be bad, these films can take themselves seriously, but a comedy horror christmas film, imo, needs to be fun. That is the key element missing here. I was just bored by the end.

I'm back... again!

 Recently I started using Mastodon. Mastodon is a twitter alternative that some people are giving a go. I wanted to try it out and thought I would post some of the media commentary I do on various forums I hang out on. 

Mastodon is part of the "fediverse" which is a type of internet application that allows you to follow other types of applications directly without the need for more accounts. Imagine you could follow a youtube account directly on tiwtter without the need for a YouTube account.. stuff like that. Anyway I have been playing with a thing called "Personal Journal" which is a fediverse blogging platform. 

Anyway, some people have commented to me that the service kinda sucks as there is no form of indexing. So the blog appears as a long single page.

You can see my new blog here if you like : https://personaljournal.ca/jyujinkai/

So I am considering moving back to this blog. I have not decided yet... but I may do so, and if I do I'll move the new posts from the journal to here.

You can follow me on Mastodon here : https://mastodon.au/@jyujinkai

(FILM REVIEW) - The Irishman (Martian Scorsese)

The Irishman (Martian Scorsese)

The Irishman (Martian Scorsese)

This is a polarizing film for me. I want to really like this film, but I just didn't, for the most part. This movie is what I would call the very definition of a vanity project. A bunch of creators that are not so much "past their prime" but defiantly past the use by date for this kind of film. These are people who are making a film together. To make a film together. Not because they are the best choices for actors to make the film. 

No amount of "digital makeup" can get around the fact that they move and have the vocal inflection of old, old men. In the same way that the newish Star Wars film with Vader in it sounded "wrong" as Jones's voice was so weak, this film just lacks all the energy needed to portray these villains. The old men sequences work, and work very well. Joe Pesci particularly comes off the best, as unlike Dinero he isn't kicking people in the head when he can hardly lift his foot and balance on one leg. This really brought me out of the film and the film makers knew this. That is why the "young" Dinero still looks like he is in his late forties, to try and minimise this problem. I even read that they had a "posture coach" on this movie. They just can not fake their way around how frail Dinero and Al Pacino are and despite their vast acting talent they fail to complete the illusion the movie requires for the majority of "youth" timeline. This does mean the latter parts of the film are, imo, vastly superior as their age is not something that they are fighting, and the performances feel more natural and convincing.

In the old days, there was a covenant between audience member and film maker. The film maker only had to set up the premise of someone being old or young. The visual illusion was easily seen through but the viewer understood what was meant. In Little Big Man we are not fooled by the "Old Man Makeup" of Dustin Hoffman, but we accept it. In Batman (1998) we are not fooled by the "young Jack Nicholson" but we accept it. Films nowadays are obsessed with visual illusion over the metaphoric, and I think this is a huge loss to film making. A great example is Anthony Hopkins in Nixon and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon. Having Hopkins in all that makeup actually puts barriers between the audience and the actor and while Langella looks nothing like Nixon the illusion is actually better as those barriers are absent and the actor's art is raw on the screen. What I am trying to say here is that this film would have been immeasurably better if they fucked off all that digital makeup and just hired some young actors to play them as kids, even if they didn't look exactly the same. For no matter how good the "visual" illusion was, the performances were just not able to be convincingly put onto the screen and in a film such as this which is so low key and so much about characters and in a film which has the acting right at the forefront, well, it just really hurt this movie.

Also this film is LONG. Like many vanity projects the editing is all over the shop. I read a metric that said only 17% of the viewers on Netflix finished the film in one session and most people took over a week to watch the film across 3 sessions. I myself watched it in two sessions over 4 days. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I actually think the long format film could be the future for streaming services. In the same way I think the short TV Episode could be the future of streaming TV, one we are glimpsing on Disney+ with The Mandelorian. What dose it matter how long a film is if you can pause it and come back the next day, or how short a tv show is if you can press "next" and watch another episode strait away? Even so, this film is undeniably self-indulgent. With film, I still think that single sessions are the way to consume them, to get lost in a story by surrounding yourself in it. Long form film work great on a second or more viewings, as you are watching to relive things, kinda like having a memory of a experience rather than actually experiencing it. I could hardly sit though the Lord of the Rings films at the cinema, but have no issues with watching the trilogy's extended editions during subsequent viewings over a few weeks at home. To that end I think that this film will gain ground on second or more viewing, as the viewer is not being asked to "live" the film, so to speak, and that means that length and more importantly the pacing is no longer as important.

The good stuff of this film is far more obvious. I mean this is a master craftsman doing his thing with some truly legendary actors behind him. Pesci stood out to me and really highlights the loss to cinema that happened when he walked away form hollywood. Even so I do not need to tell you that the main cast of Pesci, Dinero and Pacino are showcasing an actors workshop here. The cast of this movie is like a who's who. Even bit characters like Harvey Keitel shine and faces popup constantly that make you call out.. "that guy!" and no one can deny the understanding of film language which Scorsese has.

So this is a strange film for me. It is obviously something interesting and above the crowd, yet it is incredibly flawed, almost ruined in some parts and then on top of that there are these absolutely stunning actor on actor character scenes. It is such a mixed bag. One that feels undercooked somehow and it is not helped by seemingly overly lenient editing.

Verdict : Everyone should see this, but not everyone will like it, and that is ok.

(New Acquisitions) - Yokohama

Yokohama

Hisashi Hayashi made a splash a while back with Trains a kind of area control deck building game. This game is more of a classic euro style and also very well received.

At its core is a action select worker placement game. The game uses a variety of cards that contain the actions and worker slots. Unlike many worker placement games the workers actually move rather than being placed anywhere, meaning that different setups when dealing the locations can change the tactical thinking between sessions.

Like many euros it is a bit of a multiplayer solo game, there is some blocking but really it is more a kind of "race' game were you rush for points vs your opponents.

The game does look busy and kinda of crowded, particularly in at full player count. You deal less locations at lower counts so there are less slots, this is how this games gets around the worker slots issue that worker placement games have for different player counts. This allows great variance between the sessions as certain actions are missing from some games, but lacks the coherence of a properly deigned board. I am not sure anyone can seriously defend the look of it on the table, it looks a little worrying at first glace!

4 Player Game

2 Player Game

It is extremely well designed, and is not nearly as complex as it looks and is one of those games that has very interesting decisions on every turn.

The game reminds me a little of Bruxelles 1897. I know it is not actually like that game really, but even so it reminds me of it somehow. Maybe it is in how there are so many avenues to victory and you build this little player area as you go. Bruxelles 1897 btw is one of my favourite games, so reminding me of that game is a good thing.

Anyway, this is a top game. I have only bee able to play it a few times on TTS, and it has been on my wishlist for years, the subsequent pre-xmas sales and reprint seemed like a great time to pick it up.

Most photos are for the deluxe version, I just got the standard. It is basically the same but the small cardboard tokens are replaced with meeples and fancy meepels replace the cubes.

(Game Prieview) - Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Zen Studios)

 Operencia: The Stolen Sun

Zen Studios are famous for pretty much one thing... Zen Pinball... I always check up on their website when Xmas comes around to see if any cheap tables are available...and saw they have a RPG now. And not just any RPG one made is the classic dungeon crawler style of Eye of the Beholder.Might and Magic and Shadowgate... all games I loved. There was a recent series called Legend of Grimlock that I also really liked. My point is that this old school style of a grid based dungeon crawling is a style of game I really enjoy. It is also one that is criminally underdeveloped by the "retro" gaming boom that is going on at the moment. I suppose it is just the next sub-genre to get a crack after all the other retro revivals.

Anyway it is on sale at the mo on Epic so picked it up.

1st things 1st.... the game is gorgeous. The art is all awesome and colorful 3d renders, kinda like the old Myst games. The controls are classic as is the combat. This game is not doing anything new, I think they are just trying to do it well. Still the art is off the chain.

The combat is as you would expect. Some cool enemies but the imaginative stuff dose not come till you are deep in the dungeons. You fight in a 2x2 formation.. again, classic. The mechanisms of the combat is more modern though... more like a jRPG.. lots of buffs and shields and hastes and potion items and stuff. I think this is actually pretty cool and if you turn it all the way up, poses some challenge, at least in the early game. I suspect like all RPGs you end up godlike.

 True to form and a great nod to Shadowsgate and beyond, much of the game is puzzle design. Almost like Myst or a Point and Click adventure. Some of them are pretty cool, but nothing to hard. The hardest are the chest puzzles which are classic puzzle boxes and I also found one that was a legit cypher.. this puzzle woud be super hard if you did not recognise the encoding.

The voice acting is not the best, unfortunately, but all in all I am very happy with this one and enjoying it more than Legend of Grimlock 2. The start is a little wonky, but really it is just a long tutorial. So power through it, once you get past it the game begins to shine.

Verdict : Love it!

(TV Review) - The Mandalorian Season 1 : Episode 1+2 (Disney+)

The Mandalorian Season 1  : Episode 1+2

It is no secret that I am a buthurt and also a bitter old Star Wars fan. I loved Star Wars and Empires. I mean, loved. I can literally quote Empire backwards. Well. I used to be able, haven't tried for ages but I did so and won a competition at a Star Wars convention in the mid 90s once. Anyway, I liked Jedi less, but still love it for the most part. There is an age old joke about how you can tell someone's age by if they liked Jedi or not, as you were either a kid that loved talking teddy bears, or you thought it was off putting that people with sticks and stones could take out a highly advanced race of aliens. This joke is 100% true, imo, and the joke is now expanded to other generations who watched the newer films.

The prequels broke me. They were so atrociously bad that I find it almost unbelievable, and the fact they are now not the worst to be made astounds me in the most horrific way. All the kids that saw it, when they were 8 or whatever, are now in there late 20s, early 30s, the prequels came out over '99 and 2005, and they are a driving force of a revisionist movement where those films are widely thought of as unfairly judged. If you soil yourself on theForce.net, the general voice is that those films are great. It is these "new fans" that drive this change of opinion, as they are still active and engaged in the Star Wars community.

This is all about how we relate to the memories of our youth, and not about the films themselves. I think it also shows the innate childishness of the movies. It took me a long time to realise that Star Wars, all of them, are kids films, like say Goonies. The originals were just really good kids movies, so good that they appeal to all ages, but they are childish films made for children at their core. Which is why each generation hates the next set of films and the new generation loves the new ones. It is not that "kids do not know any better" it is that I am just far and away outside the target audience of the franchise, but I was the target audience when I was a kid, and of course I remember being a child and nostalgia is a thing. George Lucas understood this, and the attempting to force the newest movies into adult sensibilities is part of why they are spectacularly bad, in my eyes. He knew the key to the franchise was to make them appeal to the kids and cultivate new fans. Mark my words. The current Trilogy will be thought of as excellent by the next generation once they are old and judging the trilogy of 2038, or whenever it comes out.

The thing is I am burnt out on Star Wars. When the prequels were out I was a vocal poster about how shit they were, watched tear down vids and all that, but somewhere along the line between "Revenge of the endless lava fight of boredom" and "who gives a shit what it is called 2nd film that came out recently", that I am just spent. I care so little about it that I do not even get annoyed by it any more. All the fuel has been burnt. I do not like it, or hate it, I just don't give a shit about it. Star Wars is like Fast and the Furious to me, or maybe more like a long running soap opera like Neighbours. It is so under my radar and of such little interest to me that it barley enters my field of vision at all.

What I am trying to say here, besides trying desperately to not fall into a ten page rant about how terrible Star Wars is, I like to think I have no stake in the franchise any more, but deep down I do. The Star Wars I loved for so long is gone, erased by decades of "cannon" stories that removed all the magic and mystery of my imaginings and compressed what I thought to be a saga spanning centuries to 19 years. I can not help see Star Wars as a inferior shadow of what it was, and what it meant to my generation who spent decades without new content. Where we built our own fandom from what the shows inspired in us, not what they showed us. I am still bitter and this produces bias. I have tried three times to talk about this show but end up writing pages about my relationship to the material instead of the show itself... lol.. fuck it I'm not deleting it this time.

Anyway... lets get to it...

So, considering my relationship to most Disney properties, the mass of Disney+ TV shows that have been announced were as exciting to me as hearing that a new CIS show was coming out. Still, Disney+ is a film quality tv platform. Beyond its library of junk, it is pumping billions into original content. The Mandalorian looks fantastic, it looks better than some high budget science fiction films. They have hired top level actors, directors, writers and more, and it shows. The show from a production standpoint is just about as good as TV can get. So that is a big plus. There are few shows that have ever looked so much like a big budget film. The super rich source of design they have inherited, means even with only a few original additions, the show just looks amazing, as it is reproducing design elements that have been honed over decades. The outfits, the armour, the set aesthetics, the sheer amount of cash saved that other fantasy productions would need to spend, is then diverted into other areas and it really shows. Anyone that says this show is not one of, if not the, best production quality we have seen on TV is kidding themselves.

Beyond the production the real star of this show is David Filoni. He has a long history of making fan pleasing content and has shown he understands legacy as well as having the ability to add new content. It is well known now the terms of the Lucas deal means George retained royalty rights for merchandise for the prequels and the original series. "Let the past die" and all that shit coming down from high to wipe the old films away started to make so much sense when you consider this. Yet Filoni has somehow always managed to walk a line that brings new fans into the modern works, rather than alienate them. Do not be fooled by Jon Favreau's name. David Filoni is the guy behind this, and if they had any sense it would be him in Kennedy's chair, someone btw who is famously not involved in this show in anyway.

There is a lot of talk about how this show is like a western, but it isn't even remotely like one. It really shows how devoid of imagination much of the critical audience is. My guess is the "western" line came from Disney itself and then one critic said it and this just went on and on and on, each taking the lead from another. The show lacks all the cinematic fingerprints of the western, calling this show a western is like calling the 1st Conan film a western. Sure it is a lone man in a desert, doing fetch quests but that is about it. It will be hilarious once the latter episodes are on different planets and more characters have been introduced and stuff and this link to the "western" will be more and more absurd.

The episodes are short, and it is a mercy. It would have been so easy for them to fall into the netlfix trap of making a 20 hours film and 1/2 the audience loosing its cool mid way. The episodes are short and sweet, never staying to long and this makes you want more. I actually think the episode length is probably the smartest part of this production.

In addition there are a lot of touches that seem tailor made for old school fans to address issues that have come up over the last two decades of media. The "hero", for example, is fallible. Spending some time falling on his arse and getting nearly killed. The way the Jedi have evolved in cartoons, comics, games and films have made jedi characters into caricatures, and the simple act of the main dude not being perfect at everything instantly gives the show some credibility in my eyes. Also the "Judge Dredd" not taking his helmet off thing is really cool, and something I was sure would not happen.

I also really liked the main hook, that of the young Yoda. For those that do not know, Yoda's race and back story has never been named in any cannon media. Seeing a baby "yoda" tells fans that this show is going to seriously add to the lore of Star Wars in a major way. This is intriguing, on paper at least. All the "worshipping metal" and tribal stuff from the comics can go fuck a fruit bat, though.

I want to hate this show, but in truth there is little to fault it on. I mean I can talk about the bloodless violence or the shameless easter eggs to make fanatics wet themselves but the reality of this show is that it is well made, seems to take itself seriously, seems to have real direction and is for all appearances may be the best Star Wars live action offering since Rouge One, and that film wasn't exactly devoid of problems.

Yet, I still do not give a shit. I'm just not interested at all. Watching this show was like watching Downtown Abby with my wife. The show is good, well made even, but I just do not give a flying fuck about those stuck up English toffs or their hokey gutter snip domestics. Downtown Abby is just not for me. Magicians is just not for me. House MD is just not for me. Sopranos is just not for me. Breaking Bad is just not for me.

Star Wars is just not for me.

It was burnt out of me, all the things it was to me in my youth are gone and now it is just another random scifi, like say Killjoys and I doubt I will be bothered to summon the effort to watch the 3rd episode and beyond. It just doesn't hold my interest.

Verdict : George Lucus visited the set of Mandelorian and was latter quoted saying Dave Filoni "is like a son to me".