An avenging assemblage of superheroes

Despite the enraging experience of having to see the film a promotional screening — at which they tagged and bagged my phone out of the absurd fear that I would use it to record the whole movie and then sell it, even though the movie has been out in international markets for a week — I loved The Avengers.

I just saw a headline online that asked, “Is The Avengers the greatest comic book movie ever?” It’s the one of the click-here-and-argue-in-the comments sort of headlines that websites love because it gets readers to stick around and earn the site advertising revenue. I don’t know what the writer’s answer was, since I do my best not to read reviews before I write mine. But I know what my response to the question would be: No, it’s not the greatest comic book movie ever. I think there’s a case for The Dark Knight and possibly the original Superman; those are profound films that are also fabulous popcorn movies. The Avengers is about as deep as its superfluous 3-D effects, but it is the most entertaining, and most expertly made, big-budget action movie of the year. It’s a great way to start the summer movie season. Continue…

Don’t go in the basement!

OMG. I loved The Cabin in the Woods. It was all Whedonesque and awesomesauce. I dunno when it will appear on the LGBT Weekly site, so here’s my review.

If you’ve seen the ads for The Cabin in the Woods, I think you may have the impression that it is the same old horror movie: a group of sexy, stupid, and doomed young people go to the woods for a weekend of liquor and sex and they get attacked by creepy things wielding big knives. That movie has been made before, and you’ve seen it. But there are some quick glimpses in the ads of some things that don’t fit in the traditional hack-and-slash-in-the-woods film. You see a room full of computers, and some technicians are fiddling around with knobs and keyboards and on monitors above them, we see the nubile victims. They’re being watched, and maybe their fates are being controlled by these nerds. This makes the movie a little bit different, because it’s not a lone nut pulling the strings, as in Saw, but rather something like NASA. Continue…