Eventful couple of weeks, I’ll hopefully get some of it down later, but for now:
HELL YES
I know many of you don’t care, but if you don’t, you’re only kidding yourself. Imagine if Spaced was a comic. It would be Scott Pilgrim. Only not this good. This is presumably the middle point so feel free to go any pick up the 3 back issues, you lucky bastards. Not that anyone EVER takes my comics-buying advice. Would it KILL YOU?
Christ, remember when I used to blog?
This weekend, Josh and I took a brief sojourn out into the real world to hit up the Jeffrey Brown signing at Gosh! the comic shop in London. The tubes were in fine form, and we were subjected, sometimes concurrently to a group of venture scouts turning cramming into our carriage, a group of drunken football fans singing swedish football anthems, a clearly drugged-up and drunk woman loudly announcing that she would like donations to keep her, “a single, obviously not drunk and drugged-up woman” off the streets tonight, and the pure horror that is the Waterloo and Shitty line. I’ve never used that term before, but I feel like I have grounds to join the rest of you now.
Still, tube issues aside, we did make it in, and we did manage to meet Jeffrey Brown. Josh asked him about his Death Cab video (he drew stuff for the video for “Your Heart is an Empty Room” off Directions, the DVD of Plans) and I asked him about his Wolverine comic that I once saw an interview about. He did submit it to Marvel, but they didn’t want to publish it, and he may re-do it as an outright parody, instead of the relatively straight treatment it’s being given. I also comiserated with him about the forthcoming Transformers movie - he’s using that as a reason to put out his parody book, The Incredible Change-Bots, which, let’s face it, is going to be much better than the film.
I got him to sign his three main autobiographical books - Clumsy, Unlikely, and Any Easy Intimacy, as well as the new book “Cat getting out of bag” - you can see what he drew in the Jeffrey Brown Signing Flickr set I made, though here’s my fav(ourite):
After failing to find Motor Storm at a reasonable price, Josh and I met Sam, Ian, Al and Seb at the ‘Bush VUE to see Spider-Man 3. It’s fair to say you can all predict what I thought about the film, but anyone who was calling it rubbish needs their head looking at. Given that both Spidey 3 and 300 were utterly massive films, despite poor response from the critics, suggests that maybe people have stopped listening to them, if indeed they ever did. There was so much I loved about Spidey 3, a small amount I didn’t like, and some things I’m not sure about. The best things about the film:
The Good:
Gwen Stacy. Come in Ms Dunst, your time is up.
Harry helping Peter out. Utterly excellent moment, seeing someone helping Spidey out, underscoring the basic need to give Spider-Man a partner in the next film. Black Cat or NOTHING, that’s all I’m saying.
Comedy. This was easily the funniest Spider-Man film yet, and genuinely so. Some parts I was literally unable to control my laughter.
The Sandman. Utterly awe-inspiring effects, and a perfect performance from Thomas Hayden Church. He’s so far the only major Spider-Villain to make it to the end of the film alive, which has to be a plus.
Evil Peter. I love it when characters turn into complete dicks for no specific reason. The bit where he threw Harry’s Pumpkin Bomb back at him was fucking hardcore.
The Middling:
Venom. Looked excellent, but as predicted, somewhat under-used as a villain. Also, I don’t think they actually called him Venom in the entire film, but hey, we know who it was.
Harry’s new costume. Okay, at least they didn’t call him “Night Surfer” or “New Goblin” but seriously, they could’ve gone with something a bit more Goblin-themed, perhaps?
The Bad:
That English Reporter. She seems to have grated on everyone I’ve spoken to. Maybe us Brits are upset at our representation in the film. To me, it utterly smacked of the way they inserted an American reporter into the original US release of the original Godzilla - I think they were just localising Spider-Man 3 for us.
Mary-Jane. Even leaving aside how irritating I find Kirsten Dunst, it was very difficult to feel sorry for MJ in this film, the lying, cheating, irritatingly self-involved sow that she was.
It’s clearly a less tight film than either 1 or 2, but after one watch, I think I prefer 3 to 2. The second had an irritating segment where we had to sit around “convinced” that Peter had quit being Spider-Man, and watching him almost, but not quite put the costume back on, which made feel overly long for my liking. If anything, Spider-Man 3 was too quick, with all that was going on. Needless to say, I’ll be first in line for the DVD.
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