Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Re-Watch

As Michael Bay's new 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' movie is due out later this year, I thought I'd take some time and re-watch the 1990 live action adaptation. That way, it's fresh in my mind when I end up hating the new version. I'll need the geek ammunition for my inevitable rant.

I'm glad to say that the film still holds up, even after a decade and a half.

Attack on Titan

I've become convinced that the reason that the humans of 'Attack the Titan' (or Shingeki no Kyojin) keep losing is because they just won't shut up. Whenever there's a crisis, members of the Survey Corp. will invariably spend 20 minutes discussing how they feel about the situation, often with shiny quivering anime eyes, before taking any action. For some reason, the slack-faced Titans will patiently wait for said soldiers to finish their histrionic discussions and then promptly proceed to defeat the resulting plan and eat them.

This procedure usually takes up to several episodes. In fact, you could cut the series 25 episode run (so far?) down to maybe 8 or 9 and still end up with the same plot, just minus the sections where the characters are over-emoting.

47 Ronin

So last weekend the Metro Manila Film Festival finally ended and Philippine cinemas were finally free to replace the local garbage habitually exhibited during the holidays with garbage from foreign countries. This time we had a choice between two Hollywood films that have gotten abysmal reviews from critics and movie goers alike. As of this writing, The Legend of Hercules has a 4% score on rottentomatoes.com so that was out. I like a few of Renny Harlin's movies (Cliffhanger and Deep Blue Sea were both awesome, folks), but he's had so many misses since the 90's that I felt that this one didn't warrant the p220 ticket.

At an aggregate score of 11%, 47 Ronin isn't that much better, but it's got samurai in it. I'm pretty sure that it was Sun Tzu who said, "everything is better with samurai, dude". And besides, every now and then, I enjoy watching a 'bad' movie. At worst, I can write about it from experience, and at best, the reviews desensitize me so well that I end up enjoy it sans any expectations.

I'm glad to say that 47 Ronin was in that latter category.

Gamma Fist Hulk

I'd seen this figure on various online review sites, but when the Avengers Assemble toy lines hit local shelves, Gamma Fist Hulk was not among the toys. Though other figures in the line, like Black Widow, a few times, I never chanced upon Hulk, Hawkeye, or The Leader in the wild. I suppose that the figure was short packed (it is huge after all) and I have been missing the local distributions lately, so it likely sold out as soon as the boxes were unloaded.

But after Christmas, some of the toy stores must have gotten a few more boxes in. I found a single Hulk figure in Toys 'R' Us Galleria. After some flip-flopping over the new Marvel 4" figure price tag (p700), I picked it up.

Thoughts on Sherlock - 'The Empty Hearse'

Two years since Sherlock jumped to his death at the end of Sherlock, series 2, we finally get to hear how it really happened. I tried to figure out a way to review this without spoiling anything for late viewers, but there really isn't anyway to do that, so I'm going to preface this entry with a short summary.

'The Empty Hearse' is a fun, if somewhat mediocre, episode of the Sherlock series. There's a lot of exposition that is thrown at you, very little actual plot or development, and if you haven't followed the series, then you are NOT going to understand what is going on. The actual mystery in this one takes a back seat to humor in this love letter to Sherlock fans.

Now that that's out of the way:

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Time of the Doctor

In the 2007 short Time Crash, the Tenth Doctor met with the Fifth Doctor through some wibbily-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. In the episode, after a beat near the end when Ten (played by David Tennant) has acted starstruck and gushed effusively about meeting his predecessor (Peter Davison), he said to Five, "You were my Doctor."

I understood that the line referred both to the fact that Ten had enjoyed being Five, "...dashing about and playing cricket" (Davison was less stodgy and authoritative than his precursors), as well as the fact that the Fifth Doctor was the one on the air when Tennant was a boy. He would have been about 9 or 10 years old at the time Davison began his run. What I didn't comprehend at the time was the emotion that Tennant displayed when he said that line. However when I watched Matt Smith say farewell as number Eleven in The Time of the Doctor earlier, something dawned on me.

Eleven just isn't my Doctor.

Movies to Look Forward to in 2014

So every year, I go online and take a look at sites like RottenTomatoes, IMDB, and IMPAwards to see what's coming up next year so I know what I'm supposed to be geeking out about and when. It's every geek's conscientious duty to follow notables in their specific fandom and plan their days off to coincide with the various activities involving said subjects. Ticket line camp outs, midnight showings, crowded conventions, the occasional 72 hour gaming marathon, etc.

2014 looks like it's going to be a great year for cinema fans (especially for science fiction addicts), with some promising new titles, franchise reboots, and studio tent poles spread out through the seasons. Here are some of the ones I'm looking forward to, in order of announced release date.

S.H. Figuarts Iron Man and War Machine

S.H. Figuarts figures are a new thing for me. Japanese imports are toys that I've found I have to police myself away from. If I didn't, I'd be blowing every paycheck on this or that Revoltech, Figma, or Playarts toy that came out. They're generally more detailed, better built, and more nicely designed than their American counterparts, and aside from characters from Japanese characters, companies like Bandai, Max Factory, and Kaiyodo all take on the occasional American property.

Case in point: S.H. Figuarts' Iron Man 2 figures.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I've been hearing that the reception for Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't been as great as when it was premiered at the San Diego Comic Con back in July, but since its regular run on ABC started in September, I haven't had the chance to actually see for myself. There have been ten episodes aired so far, so I thought I'd be set until the series comes back from break on January 7, 2014. Today I decided to give it a chance despite all the stuff I've been hearing. Here's what I found out:

This show is boring as shit.

Thor: The Dark World

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to admit that the Kenneth Branagh's 2011 Thor was my favorite Marvel movie, surpassing my like of Whedon's Avengers. I realize that for most, that movie wasn't the best, but like Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk, I found that the film's focus on the characters as opposed to the action really made me pay more attention. Thor's relationship with both Loki, his brother, and Odin, his father, made him vulnerable. It was, for me, the perfect approach to a story about a god.