Movie Review – Iron Man 2
Those of you that know me know that I haven’t been a big fan of Marvel Comics for a while now. The main reason being that Marvel’s super-heroes aren’t really “heroic” enough for my tastes, or at least how I think a super-hero should be. Whether that will change with the new “Heroic Age” that Marvel is starting soon remains to be seen.
With all that said, overall Iron Man 2 was a truly great movie! There was action, suspense, great special effects, with some humor mixed in for good measure. Back in the day, I actually read Iron Man for a quite a while. I don’t remember why I stopped, but this movie actually made me want to start reading it again.
Iron Man 2 was just as good, if not better, than the first movie in my opinion. This is really hard to pull off but I think that the fact that they are staying pretty close to the original source material (from what I remember anyway), has a lot to do with it. This is usually the fatal mistake that Hollywood makes when making a movie based on a comic book character. The two Hulk movies are a great example of this. The first one strayed too far from the original material and was horrible, the second one was a lot closer, even pulling from the 70’s TV show that was popular at the time, and was so much better for it.
Even though I really enjoyed Iron Man 2, I still had some issues with it. More on that after the jump. I must warn you, spoilers abound from here on out.
Review of Justice League: The New Frontier DVD
Filed under: Movie Reviews, Animated News, DC Comics
My review copy of The New Frontier was waiting for me in the mail when I got home on Friday, and the Wife and I watched it as soon as we got the dogs fed and settled down for the evening.
Overall, I liked the movie. It left me with a big smile on my face. My Wife liked it too (a self proclaimed hater of cartoons, even though she usually likes watching superhero stuff me when I watch it 
) and even said it was “pretty good”. We had a lot of fun figuring out who was doing the voice on all the characters.
From a “big fan of the book” perspective, I was a little disappointed. I knew that they had to leave a lot of stuff out, but I think they took some of the best stuff from the beginning of the book out and the movie kind of suffered. If there was any movie that DC was going to do where they went longer than 75 minutes, this is the one. Just like the review on Blog@Newsarama said:
The New Frontier, book and movie, answers in the resounding affirmative. If you liked the book, and won’t miss the non-super folk, this movie is a no-brainer. If you’ve never read the book, the DVD is a great introduction.
Ultimately, JL:NF is at least worth a look. It’s not the Peter Jackson version, but it was never going to be.
If you have never read the book, I highly recommend you do. For me, it replaced Kingdom Come as my favorite story. I love this story so much; I have all of the original series, both of the trades, AND the Absolute Edition.
I also really liked the JLA documentary. I have never been a big historian of the “behind the scenes” stuff on how comics were made over the years, so this was a lot of fun to watch. I even watched the audio commentary with Cooke this morning, which I usually never do, and enjoyed that as well.
Even though I got the one-disc edition for free, I think I am still going to buy the two-disc edition just for the extra stuff on the second DVD. I really enjoy those documentaries on comics. The one on Superman: Doomsday was even better than the movie in my opinion.
In a nutshell, if you are, or used to be a big fan of comic books, this DVD is worth a look.
Movie Review: Ghost Rider
The Wife and I went to see Ghost Rider last weekend, so I thought I would write up a review while the movie was still fresh in my mind. Warning, spoilers may follow.
