Toaster's Ramblings - New Year Edition (Part 1)

Here we are at another new year (halfway through it's first month) and geez, I had planned to post something during December. Life just gets busy... and I get lazy. I'm entitled to be lazy sometimes considering the three and a half year old I have to keep track of is like a never ending hurricane of destruction. I guess I will take this time to have a glance back at some of 2015 before looking ahead to this year and what lie ahead.

From where I'm sitting, 2015 was not a great year for music. I had high hopes for some albums that didn't pan out, such as Blur's first new studio album in over a decade. I ended up not even buying it. It was mostly unremarkable to me. Sad, because they were one of my favorites in the 90's. The musical highlights for me were Veruca Salt's first new album in almost two decades, The Prodigy's sonic assault known as "The Day is My Enemy," Modest Mouse's new album (which was pretty good, not great), and Muse's best album in a while.

Television brought us many endings to shows that I and TivoGirl loved such as Parenthood and Parks & Recreation. However, we got some new stuff like the excellent I Zombie, Amazon's promising The Man in the High Castle as well as those Netflix Marvel shows Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Hell, those two set the bar really high. I'm not sure how Luke Cage is going to live up to them.

I've already talked a lot about the movies that debuted last year, which many of them were quite good. I will talk about the last two movies I saw in 2015: Mockingjay part 2 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I will try to keep this spoiler free.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 2 finally brought to an end the child killing adventures of everyone's favorite Donald Sutherland ruled dystopia. Overall I liked it, but there were things that didn't work for me, some having been exclusive to the film and others coming straight from the source material. First, why are their C.H.U.D.s living under the capitol? My understanding was that Katniss' group that was infiltrating the capitol never went into the sewers in the book. It was just so fucked up and out of nowhere! Do we just file that under additional weird genetic monsters like giant super deadly wasps and killer dog creatures with people's faces?

Also, and this is a bit of a spoiler... a still partly brainwashed and homicidal Peeta is a last minute add-on to Katniss' group, which is revealed to be a plot to have her martyred and not be a threat to Coin's usurping command of Panem once the rebellion overthrows President Snow. So, Katniss and her allies in the group know this. At one point Peeta tries to kill Katniss. One of the other soldiers tries to pull him off of her and Peeta kills the guy. Yet the group continues to take Peeta with them. Uh, no. You put a bullet in his head and move on. This is war and Peeta has just made your group weaker and is a continued liability. I know we are all supposed to love Peeta, but no. Shoot him.

I will also say that the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman seems to have changed the end of the story a bit. My understanding (having not read the books) is that Hoffman's character isn't that nice of a guy in the books and led to the ending being a bit more bittersweet than the one in the movie. Given that this was Hoffman's final performance, they probably wanted him to be shown in a kinder light. The ending is pretty much the same but I think it was a little too happy... but that's just me.

Moving on to Star Wars: The Force Awakens... it was damn good. Abrams recaptured the magic of the original trilogy and avoided the pitfalls of the prequels. I enjoyed all of the new characters, there was a lot of good action and humor. It actually managed to live up to the hype. However, The Force Awakens wasn't perfect. I have three main complaints about the movie, but I can only go into two of them here to keep away those dreaded spoilers.

The first problem that I have is that they don't really go into the First Order, the reorganized remains of the Empire, very well. We know they are a threat, but it is never established how big of one they are. Are they just a bunch of assholes causing trouble in space? Do they possess territory? Are they an actual threat to the New Republic and if so, how are they a threat? It isn't super necessary to know, but it would have been nice to gauge how bad the bad guys were going in.

The original trilogy had the benefit of the Empire being the established evil force, something that is commonplace in pop culture. They held the power and treated people like crap, so we instantly feel for the underdogs. In this new Star Wars, it seems like the First Order are trying to gain power that the supposed good guys already hold. It makes it harder to get behind the Resistance right away as they too are explained well enough to know how powerful they are. The best explanation I heard was that the First Order were like ISIS on our world and the world powers are funding forces like the Kurdish forces and some of the Syrian rebels to fight ISIS on their behalf.

The other problem I have is one that has been brought up many times... that The Force Awakens borrows too heavily from A New Hope. Some say it is so bad it's almost a remake. I won't go quite that far, but so much of the overall plot follows key points of the original Star Wars that it bothers me a little. In an effort to distance this new film and overall franchise from the widely panned Prequels, it almost seems like Abrams and Disney decided to go for a "sure thing" and more or less copy the formula of the film that started it all.

This bothers me because I don't want this new trilogy to be a by the numbers story that closely mirrors Episodes 4-6. I don't want whatever Episode VIII will be called to be a rehashing of the plot of The Empire Strikes Back. I expect the second film to be darker and raise the stakes, but every key moment of that film should not be emulated. Already is seems hard for that to happen based on how we leave things in The Force Awakens (no spoilers).

I am hoping the next two installments in the saga are more unique. If they are, it won't bother me so much that Episode VII has so many similarities; it will seem more like a rebirth,  like the cycle starting anew. Like I said, I really liked the new Star Wars, as most people seem to have and none of my complaints really tainted the film for me. In fact, I think I may have liked it even more the second time I saw it! It also makes me really excited for this year's Rogue One and Episode VIII in May of 2017 (though I wouldn't be surprised if the movie was pushed back since they haven't started production yet).

That's it for this part. The next part I will bring up what I expect and hope for in this new year as well as some plans for stuff on this blog. Until then, Stay Strange.

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens stills... REDUX!

Toaster's Ramblings - Avengers: Age of Anxiety!

We are now less than 2 months from what is arguably the second most anticipated film of the year (some might debate that with Star Wars Episode 7). I am excited of course. I am a total geek, have seen every Marvel movie is theaters to date (note that by this I mean Marvel Studios, I skipped Elektra because it looked terrible). So there is that anxious 'waiting for Christmas' type of feeling waiting for May 1st.

That said, I am worried about Age of Ultron. I touched upon this briefly a couple of months ago, but I thought I would go into it a bit more. I am afraid there will be too much going on and too little time to do it in. Plus it seems to build into the "phase 3" of the Marvel movie-verse master plan. That doesn't sound too bad right there, but when you expand the details, the task seems pretty daunting.

First, you have a ton of new characters to introduce. So far it seems we have Baron Strucker, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Ulysses Klaw (the character Andy Serkis is rumored to be playing), Vision, some random mystery characters from the trailers (the disrobing woman in the caand of course Ultron. Now not every character here needs much of a time investment. I figure Klaw will be a brief cameo. Strucker will likely get the Batroc treatment from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as in he's a big deal for the first fifteen minutes of the film. However, the rest need some real time to explain and develop. Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Vision will probably all become prominent Avengers (based on the comics). Vision will need an entire origin story along with Ultron!

Second, let's get into Ultron for a bit. Ultron is completely new to the film universe. In the first Avengers movie, Loki already had been introduced in Thor and established as a bad guy. This allowed less time to be spent on explaining him and more on the formation of the Avengers team. This luxury is not afforded to Ultron. We not only have to establish who he is but where he comes from and why he's a threat worthy of an entire team on heroes. Also, consider this... in the first Avengers movie, Joss Whedon really nailed the Loki character. It established him as a true super villain, something that Marvel films had been and continue to lack. In order for Ultron not to seem like a flash in the pan baddie (like Whiplash, Red Skull, Malekith or Ronan), we need some real time invested into him, with major scenes and huge moments that make him memorable.

Third, you still have six established Avengers team to spend time with. Obviously, Iron Man will get his spotlight in the overall story, but Captain America and Thor have to have their screen time. Plus, you still have Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye, who received the weakest amount of screen time in the first Avengers and... aside from a cameo in the first Thor movie, has never been in any other film. So, not only do you have the six established heroes slugging it out for screen time, but from the trailer we also see Iron Patriot, Agent Hill and Nick Fury all show up at some point. So that's at least nine established characters returning for the sequel and six new ones!

Can you see what makes me a little weary? Put it this way, both Spider-man 3 and the Amazing Spider-man 2 were criticized with being too cluttered with old and new characters that sacrificed the overall story. Spider-man 3 only had three new characters (Sandman, Venom and Gwen Stacy) to add to the established Spider-man, Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn (not including cameos from Aunt May and J Jonah Jameson). Excluding cameos, Amazing Spider-man 2 had to add Electro, Rhino, Norman Osborn and Green Goblin to the story that already had Spider-man, Gwen Stacy, Peter's dad and Aunt May.

Fourth, Age of Ultron seems to be trying very hard to create new movie franchises during it's run time. If the rumors are to be believed, many new characters might be featured as cameos to help try to fill out the Marvel Films universe before Civil War and to promote new franchises like Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Dr. Strange. The fatal flaw of Amazing Spider-man 2 was the fact that Sony was clearly more interested in pushing their Spider-man movie-verse agenda than actually telling a compelling and interesting story. There are ways to insert new characters in a brief manner that will pique the audience's interest. The trick is to use fine brush strokes. You can't be forceful, or else it stops being 'fan service' and just becomes obvious desperation. If Avengers 2 becomes too crowded and jumbled with introducing new characters, cameo or otherwise, it will suffer the same fate as Amazing Spider-man 2.

Fifth, Avengers 2 is clearly a transitional sequel. By this, I mean that the movie is being used to build the next part of the story. Usually, transitional sequels tend to... not be very good. Look at Matrix: Reloaded. Now, quickly look away lest your eyes burn! While the first Matrix film was a stand-alone story, Reloaded was a mess, an obvious cash grab with a plot that I still don't completely understand. Now compare that to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. 'Empire' was a transitional sequel, but an excellent one that focused on character development and told a compelling story. Yes, it paved the way for Return of the Jedi, but unlike Reloaded, it left it's mark... more memorably that 'Jedi' did to be honest.

The first Avengers was a stand-alone film. It had it's own self-contained story that felt like a true culmination of all of the preceding films into a massive end-all-be-all over-the-top climactic battle. Avengers 2 is clearly building toward Captain America: Civil War, which worryingly has been building more hype as of late than Age of Ultron, a film that hasn't even been released yet!

To be fair, I have a lot of faith in Joss Whedon. Not only does his television biography speak for itself, but he made the first Avengers work on a huge level, making it the first superhero super-film. I hope that he has crafted a good story that gives the proper attention to the veteran Avengers while helping establish Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Vision and Ultron in the process. I hope the any other character cameos are kept reasonable and brief. Based on the trailers, it seems like Age of Ultron has that Empire Strikes Back feel to it... characters forced to face their shortcomings, a splintering of the group and high prices to pay for fighting the 'good fight.' Such themes have made for some of the greatest sequels of all time, such as the previously referenced Episode V, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, The Dark Knight and even Godfather II (though that last one wasn't exactly about fighting for the angels).

Hopefully Age of Ultron will be Joss Whedon's 'The Empire Strikes Back' and not another disappointing ill-conceived cash-grab sequel.

File Under - TOO EXPENSIVE!

On the other hand, you'd have years worth of Christmas gifts for people you hate!

na na na Bat-fett

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Toaster's Ramblings... End of 2012 Edition

So 2012 is about to come to an end. In some ways it was a big year full of change and in other ways it is just the same old shit.

The Summer Olympics were the irritating waste of time they always are, essentially being a competition between the US and China for medals… how exciting. The United States went through the most annoying and vicious election season I have ever heard of and in the end… nothing really changed. In fact, our lawmakers are just as gridlocked now as they were last year and I don’t see that changing in 2013. Same old, same old.

Television was the same as always. Cable shows, while still better than network shows, remain under-appreciated in lieu of mind-numbing schlock like crime procedurals, high-end karaoke contests and reality shows about horrible people doing stupid things. A few shows ended such as Chuck, a show I seldom watched, and House, which if you ask me ended a few years too late. Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 showed us that there’s more to James Van Der Beek than Dawson and obscurity thereafter. Nothing really monumental happened on the small screen.

The Hollywood trend of exploiting comic books for blockbusters has continued in stride with The Avengers making a gajillion dollars (that’s a kadillion more than a fazillion!). Chris Nolen’s Dark Knight Trilogy ended in controversial style; people seem pretty divided on their feelings about The Dark Knight Rises.”  Sony gave Disney the middle finger by restarting their Spider-man franchise with a well received hit movie, thus ensuring Marvel Films will be without their figurehead web-slinging character for years to come.

However, Disney was able to console themselves by buying Star Wars in their latest bid to own every aspect of my childhood. (They don’t own Mattel yet, do they? I’m not sure I can handle a crossover with Mickey Mouse and He-Man!) Just as soon as the ink dried on the contract, Disney announced plans for Episodes 7 through 9, beginning with a projected release on 2015… the same year as Avengers 2. With all the money they make from those two movies, Disney will then buy the moon and build Lunar Disneyland or Disney Universe or something. (“The Happiest Place Orbiting Earth”)

Marvel Comics did their"not a reboot" called Marvel Now because, I suspect, all the good names were taken. Aside from bringing back the mutant population and a bunch of new X-Men and Avenger titles, I don't know what all is different. I will say that so far the Uncanny Avengers book is pretty good. The new Deadpool book co-written by comedian Brian Posehn is awesome. DC Comics continued the New 52, which isn't nearly so new. The luster of rebooting their entire universe is wearing away as the realities of throwing away decades of continuity are setting in.

We lost a lot of cool people this year, such as Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Ravi Shankar, Davy Jones, Maurice Sendak, Andy Griffith, Sherman Helmsley, Phyllis Diller and the first man to walk of the freakin’ moon Neil Armstrong! We need to stop letting these cool people die. Perhaps we can create some kind of cloning device and transfer aging celebrity brains into them or something. We can’t afford to lose the likes of William Shatner, Christopher Lee, Leonard Nemoy, Bob Barker or Stan Lee!

The music industry continued its slow death at the hands of the internet. Soon there will be no stores, only warehouses to send people packages they ordered online. And everything will be sent by pneumatic tubes and we will drink recycled urine and eat Soylent Green… IT’S PEOPLE I TELL YOU, PEOPLE! I still refuse to commit entirely to the MP3 downloadable music format. I still like CD’s. I like having a permanent hard copy of my music with song liners with lyrics and pictures. MP3 albums don’t seem real to me, probably because they aren’t tangible. I do download music pretty regularly, but its mainly stuff that I am sure I can’t find in stores or just the random individual song that I don’t want to buy the whole album to get.

Nintendo’s newest console, the Wii U, launched shortly before Thanksgiving. I’m still not sure anyone noticed. I got one for Christmas (from Lil’ Toaster) that is still sitting in it’s box, next to me, as I wait for a cord or something in the mail to hook it up to the HD TV. I don’t know. This is Tivo-Girl’s domain. I just sit around and look pretty.

I don’t know how well the Wii U will do versus Playstation and X-Box, but I don’t have a lot of faith in it’s success. For one thing, the advertising for the Wii U was abysmal! I swear, I didn’t see a commercial for the Wii U until the beginning of November two weeks before its release! Now I get that gamers are well informed of these things and I knew about it for a couple of years, but what about the casual gamers? Hell, what about getting the kids excited for it before Christmas? A $300 game system (for the basic unit) is something a kid has to work at with his/her parents (through summer at least) to convince them to pay that much to buy it for them, let alone any games!

On a personal level, 2012 has been a monumental year for me. In May, Tivo-Girl and I welcomed our first child… who (for the purposes of cyberspace) is known as Toaster Jr. or perhaps Little Toaster. Either one works, really. I will just refer to him anyway I feel like whenever I bring him up. Maybe someday I will call him ‘Little Ivan Drago’…but only if his first words are “I must break you.” From then on, naptime will be purely on a voluntary basis.

And as for Jonny Prophet… I imagine that he is still hard at work in his lair developing some sort of super weapon to destroy all birds. Thankfully, between surfing the web and the hundreds of cable channels at his fingertips, he’s usually too distracted to do anything more than send me videos of ostriches getting mauled by tigers or try to petition the nation of Australia to restart the Great Emu War.

Hopefully 2013 will be good… maybe less mediocre (beyond, of course, the whole baby being born thing). Anyways, have a Happy New Year… unless you are Chinese, then you have to wait a month. Or if you’re Hebrew and you already had yours in September... in which case, how is 5773 going for you?

Stay Strange this 2013.

File Under: Darth Vader... The Early Years

                                                           Sith Lords are so cute at that age.

File Under: Miniature Mandalorians

Lil' Boba's not a menace, he's adorable!

it's a trap

Enjoy this interview with Erik Bauersfeld the voice of Admiral Ackbar

 And the oh so famous scene

Toaster's Ramblings... Star Wars Edition

I have a few observations and questions about the Star Wars movies. Just indulge me here.

Okay, so the time between Episode III and Episode IV is around twenty years, right? I’m basing this on Luke’s approximate age in A New Hope. Yet, according to Han Solo in that same movie Jedis and the Force are just a myth. Come on! Maybe… MAYBE after 100 years, but twenty? Millions if not billions of beings in the galaxy were alive during the Clone Wars and many of them would have remembered the Jedi or fought against or alongside them. Regardless of the Jedi smear campaign Palpatine created after Order 66, I find it hard to believe that the Jedi and their ability to tap into The Force would be relegated to myths and folklore after only a couple of decades. I mean, I remember there being an East and West Germany. If someone were to try to expunge that from the record and convince the world that ther was never a Berlin Wall, I would disagree. Plus, young Han Solo was alive during the Clone Wars. It makes no damn sense!

And why was the war called The Clone Wars? Was it just because Yoda said it at the end of Episode II? Shouldn’t it have been called The Separatist Wars? I mean, the clones were only one side of the war and technically it was the side with the droids that started it in the first place. At the very least it should have been called The Droid Wars.

Why did Anakin have to be the one to build C-3PO? What would his mother, a slave, need with a protocol droid? Why was he even made to be a genius with building machines? Did this ever come up again? Did Darth Vader replace his own leg when it stopped working? When Jonny Prophet and I saw The Phantom Menace in 3D (Yes, he have the complete Star Wars saga on Blu-Ray but still paid to see it in the theater just because it was in 3D. We are tools.) Jonny noticed that it seems Anakin isn’t so much a genius with machines as he just flips switches and pushes buttons until something works.

What’s great about the Pod Racing scene is that we have no idea how a Pod Racer works. It’s a total suspended belief! Oh No! One of Anakin’s thrusters doesn’t work; its okay, he can switch out power from the other thruster and BAM! He’s good to go! Oh No! A cable came off. That’s okay, Anakin, a young boy, can easily reach out a magnetic staff, grab the cable and hook it back up. Don’t worry, he can flip switches and everything despite flying at velocities so fast no other human can manage and still not run into anything.

So Qui Gon decides to venture into Mos Eisley. Who does he bring with him? Does he bring his apprentice Obi Wan, a guy who is intelligent and can hold hid own in a fight? No, he leaves him and brings along the retard (Jar Jar Binks). Couldn’t Qui Gon have just offered up Jar Jar to Watto in exchange for the starship parts? “Shut up Jar Jar, you owe me a life debt. You stay here and pay it.”

Why did the droid army work off of a central remote on the Trade Federation spaceship? They were clearly automatons (which mean a fully functioning self reliant robot with some level of artificial intelligence).  They walked around on their own, patrolled, held conversations… hell, one even cracked a joke when talking to Qui Gon. Why would they all be controlled from space? How could they all be controlled from space? They were obviously programmed to interact and had some level of problem solving abilities. That is not the behavior of a robot with limited capabilities.

At the end of Episode III Yoda informs Obi Wan that his deceased master Qui Gon had found a way to live on as a spirit through the force and wanted to speak to him. I would have liked to have seen that exchange.

“Hey, Qui Gon, it’s good to see you. Yeah, it’s cool that you can live on through the force… say… remember that kid from Tattooine… yeah, Anakin, remember him? How you just had to train him as a Jedi even though I said it was a bad idea, and Mace Windu said it was a bad idea and even Yoda said it was a bad idea? Yeah, did you happen to see what just happened? Did you see what that kid you had to make into a Jedi did? He turned to the frickin’ dark side, you ass! He helped Palpatine take over the Republic and get us all hunted down. Yoda and I, we’re it! We’re all that’s left! All the other Jedi are dead. Oh, but that’s not all, he helped ransack the Jedi temple and then, are you ready, killed the younglings! Then he flew to that lava planet and slaughtered all the Separatist leaders! Yeah, sounds like the work of the Chosen One to me! But don’t worry, I’m fine. I was able to defeat him by getting on the high ground. No, it’s where I get up on a higher elevation while he was floating on a river of lava. No, he didn’t just float farther down and jump onto the high ground with me.  He decided to try to jump over me. I guess he forgot about the lightsaber in my hand. Needless to say, I had to cut off his legs and one good arm. I left him a burning head and torso with his one robot arm. So, hey, thanks for going against everyone’s advice, separating the kid from his mom, which really left him permanently psychologically damaged by the way, dying and getting me to have to train the boy that would one day destroy our entire culture and plunge the galaxy into death and bloodshed. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to live in a cave for the next twenty or so years on a planet that never rains and is always a brisk 120 degrees. Asshole.”

Christmas with the Sith

Do you think he tries ruin life day celebrations as well ?

What Darth Vader was thinking at the end

This or damn my kid is a real buzz kill.

Awesome Costume

http://www.obviouswinner.com/obvwin/2011/9/21/darthman-batman-darth-vader-mashup-cosplay.html

 i hope he has lightsaber batrangs 

May now they can hit a target

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