Captain America: Civil War: SummerSlam (Part 1)

You know, sometimes it’s hard to come up with subtitles for these posts (especially when there’s already a subtitle built into the title).  This was one of the harder ones, for sure.  It would’ve been easy to go with something pithy yet meaningful, like “No, You Move” or “End of the Line”.  In terms of the movie’s context, there are even more examples I could’ve pulled from.

But I decided to christen it “SummerSlam”, because within the first ten minutes -- if that -- Captain America drop kicks a dude thirty feet away, while Black Widow seems to have picked up a few moves from Rey Mysterio.  Also, the whole movie is pretty much about a big punch-up between a colorful cast of characters, so why not compare it to a major wrestling event?  Besides -- and this is the important bit -- there are a lot of moments where Captain America: Civil War becomes less of a fist-pumping spectacle and more of a brutal, painful, heart-wrenching treatise on why fighting your friends can go so wrong so fast.  We could use a little levity.

It’s fine, though.  Civil War is exactly what I wanted -- which doesn’t say good things about me, but who cares? 

Our world’s about to break

Tormented and attacked

Lost from when we wake

With no way to go back…to a time before you weren’t SPOILED by the SPOILERS in this post.

(That’s how the song goes, right?)

Let's discuss Kamen Rider Gaim (Part 3).

(Cross-Up is on hiatus, sort of, but not really!  I’m going to try and take it easy over the next few weeks, because it’s the winter holiday season and I half-expect nobody to be around on the internet.  Things will get back in gear sometime in January, but until then?  If you ARE here, then enjoy a handful of high-quality filler posts.  It’ll be fun, presumably!)

Like I’ve said before, Gaim has been on my mind for a good while now -- even before I started working on these posts.  It’s not even close to my favorite Kamen Rider installment (that honor goes to OOO, the first one I watched to completion), but if things had gone differently Gaim would have taken the top spot.  And I’m all right with that; part of the reason I check out other KR installments is because I’m waiting for the series that boots OOO from the throne -- the one show that lets me say “I don’t just like OOO because it was my first.” 

That’ll happen eventually, I hope.  But it hasn’t yet.  That’s not to devalue Gaim, because even if I can point to problems I had with it -- and let’s be real, there ARE problems -- I can still enjoy it as a whole.  There are just things that any given viewer needs to consider.

And the one thing I kept considering from the show’s start to its finish is this: We Madoka now.

Let me say this to start:

I am fairly filling this post with SPOILERS!  So…you know, be wary of those.  It’ll help you in the long run, I imagine.

…

…DENEB!

Let’s discuss Kamen Rider Gaim (Part 2).

(Cross-Up is on hiatus, sort of, but not really!  I’m going to try and take it easy over the next few weeks, because it’s the winter holiday season and I half-expect nobody to be around on the internet.  Things will get back in gear sometime in January, but until then?  If you ARE here, then enjoy a handful of high-quality filler posts.  It’ll be fun, presumably!)

Before I get started, let’s play a game. 

I want you to think of a villain -- your favorite villain, from any story, from any medium, from any time.  Take as much time as you need before going on.  Then, once you have that villain in mind, think for a minute about why that villain means so much to you.  (In the event that the villain is more of a concept/conflict than someone the hero can punch in the face, substitute that instead.)  Don’t worry about forcing yourself to articulate it, or even mentioning it here in a comment.  Just keep your answers fresh on your mind, okay?

Good.  Great.  Remember those answers, because I’m going to come back to them later.  But for now?  Open your eyes for the next Faiz.

…Crap, wrong Rider.

My SPOILERS will make you cry.

Wipe your tears with this.  *tosses printed copy of the last two Gaim posts*

…That is also the wrong Rider.  Man, I’m really bad at this.

Kamen Rider Gaim: A Super Holiday Suplex Post

(Cross-Up is on hiatus, sort of, but not really!  I’m going to try and take it easy over the next few weeks, because it’s the winter holiday season and I half-expect nobody to be around on the internet.  Things will get back in gear sometime in January, but until then?  If you ARE here, then enjoy a handful of high-quality filler posts.  It’ll be fun, presumably!)

Oh man, please tell me I’m the first person on the internet to make this joke.  It would make me so very, very happy.

Well, if nothing else, I’m the first person to ever make the joke on this blog.  THAT MEANS I’VE WON!

All right, I’m about to unload a fruit basket’s worth of SPOILERS on you guys, so if you want a no-spoiler version of what I think about this show (and by extension, a trim primer on Gaim), then you’d better go read this post instead…or first.  Or you can read this one if you have no interest in ever watching it.

That would kind of make this post a moot point -- if not for the stuff I’m about to discuss.  Are you ready?  Here we gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

D.O.X. is Dead #5: Ideas and Power

Hey, welcome back to D.O.X. is Dead -- where the points don’t matter and everything is a reference to Whose Line Is It, Anyway.

It wasn’t exactly my intention to let this feature slip out of sight, but these things happen.  I’d say “blame Watch Dogs”, but it’s more my fault than anyone else’s; I’ve been pecking away at that little project for a while now, and setting aside the fact that it takes, you know, time to write a novel, it’d be for the best if I had something to show for my efforts besides empty hype.  And now that I have finished (in a sense) that little project, I’d say it’s time to switch gears.  I’d like to see how far I’ve come, if at all -- and I’m hoping that this “pulling back the veil” is entertaining for those of you reading this. 

If not?  Uhhhhhhh…well, I don’t know.  I’ll just double-up on the funny JPEGs, I guess.

So How Good is The Dark Knight Trilogy, Really?

Oh, WOW.  This is going to make me a popular guy.  Or a Cool Guy.  Whichever comes first.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: A Post-World Primer

The first thing I noticed about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is that its opening sequence is eerily identical to the opening sequence of The Last of Us.

If you know how I feel about that game, then you know that it didn’t exactly get me hyped for the hours to come.  I mean, it’s like I was playing through it all over again.  Reports and news broadcasts over mostly-black graphics; talk of a spreading disease/virus/world-ending thingamajig; the info growing progressively direr as time goes on; the last broadcast effectively signaling the end of the world; it’s all there.  I pretty much went “Oh, great.  It’s one of these stories.”  It wasn’t, thankfully, but the fear was still there at the outset. 

In all honesty, it feels like a lot of the time I get too ahead of myself.  Like, I’m pretty sure there have been posts where I’ve said that certain models -- certain storytelling conceits and frameworks -- are “broken”, and need to take at least a break from the public consciousness.  Even then, I’m certain that my…distaste for “gritty” stories is well-documented.  So once again, let me make one thing clear: I don’t hate dark or gritty stories because they’re dark.  I hate them (and not even all of them) if/when they betray their central premises and quality just to give the people what they think they want.  And speaking in terms of stuff like The Last of Us and AMC’s The Walking Dead, the post-apocalypse is something that needs a lot more work and attention than it’s gotten…yet those two “bastions” haven’t delivered.  At least to me.

But this latest Apes movie has.  And now I’ll show you why.

As you can guess, there are going to be plenty of spoilers for Dawn, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, and probably more.  So get ready for that hotness.

Also, as a side note: I tried the Destiny beta.  You can PROBABLY guess how I feel about that.  Post incoming (maybe), but in the meantime?  Just watch this and substitute “Transformers” with “Destiny”, “Michael Bay” with “Activision”, and “robots” with “guns”.  Well, just to start.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (and Gary Oldman)

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer takes a break from helping Moe with insurance fraud to watch Hail to the Chimp in a drive-in theater.  It’s pretty much exactly how it sounds: a monkey is now the president -- no context needed for that, natch -- and apparently by the climax the monkey president has to dive out of a plane while wearing a parachute.  And a suit.  The president has to look good, after all.

I can’t help but think back to that when it comes to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  “Apes with machine guns” is, for me, the closest thing to a deal-breaker you can imagine.  You can’t have something like that unless you play it as a farce, and certainly can’t work that into a serious story and expect to keep a straight face.  So when I hear that the very same thing is in this latest movie, my hype meter pretty much hit the floor. 

Imagine my surprise, then, when I find out for myself that the movie is irresponsibly fantastic.  That probably has something to do with the movie keeping the simian gunslingers to a minimum…but you didn’t hear that from me.

GET READY FOR THE NEXT SPOILERS.

Ha.  Bet you thought this spoiler warning would have something to do with apes, didn’t you?  Well, too bad.  Tekken 7’s been officially announced, so look forward to that Death Fist goodness.

Also, how ‘bout that EVO 2K14?