Quick Review: Guardians of the Galaxy

I really need to see more movies. (That would cost money, which I can't really spare in large amounts for movies right now. Help.) Almost half of the movies I've managed to see this year involve Marvel Comics characters. The most recent, Guardians of the Galaxy, presented a dilemma  It's one thing for me to see movies featuring Spider-Man, X-Men and Captain America. I'm at least somewhat familiar with the characters, even if I didn't read their comics. The Guardians of the Galaxy, on the other hand? Never heard of them. And I wasn't that impressed by the trailers.

Fortunately, it was a good movie. Solid, not especially brilliant, mainly due to a pedestrian story that, despite its characters being quite different than typical superheroes, still fits neatly into the Marvel movie formula. However, Chris Pratt was a great fit for the role of Peter "Star-Lord" Quill, abducted from Earth as a child who eventually ends up as head Guardian. And, as we're all aware by now, he buffed up for the role. I can never disapprove of that. My grade: B.

Quick Review: What's Your Number

In "What's Your Number" Anna Faris is a woman who is horrified when she reads an article in a women's magazine stating that a woman who's had 20 lovers will most likely never marry. After all, she'd been with 19 men -- and then ends up having a drunken one-nighter with her ex-boss, a d-bag played by Joel McHale (speaking of whom, I really like "Community" even though I didn't begin watching it until Season 2), hitting the not-so-magical 20 plateau. She decides that one of her old boyfriends must be "the one" and, with the help of her hot neighbor, who has many one-night stands of his own (but no magazine cares whether a man has too many lovers), starts tracking them down. But it's a mostly predictable plot and we all know who ends up together at the end, don't we? But I love Anna Faris in almost anything. And Chris Evans, as the neighbor/man-slut, isn't quite as wooden as he's been in the past (plus, I assumed he filmed this after "Captain America" because his chest hair was starting to grow back in). My grade: C-plus.

Quick Reviews: Captain America, Friends With Benefits

And without further ado, here are the two films I saw most recently...

Captain America: The First Avenger: A little better than "Thor" and "X-Men: First Class," definitely better than "Green Lantern" on the Summer Superhero Scoreboard. Chris Evans is not a great actor, which actually makes him well-suited to play this particular hero. Hate that his chest was shaved/waxed to within an inch of its life. My grade: B-plus.

Friends with Benefits: Not a remake of, and better than, "No Strings Attached." Funny, though a little predictable (aren't all romantic comedies?). Good chemistry between Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. And quite a bit of Justin's butt. Woody Harrelson plays a gay sports editor (co-worker of Timberlake's character), which normally might be refreshing. But my friend Kurt felt the character was too much of a stereotype, while I was more put off by Harrelson's overacting. My grade: B-plus.

My Week In Comics 6-29-11

I haven't posted anything in a few days. I find myself once again in a bit of a rut with this whole blogging thing -- but at least I'm not backed up with movies to write about. (What, you think I'm going to see that Transformers crap?) I do plan to post about how I spent the 4th of July. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you already have an idea. For now, though...

Flashpoint: Lois Lane and the Resistance 1 (of 3)
Flashpoint: Project Superman 1 (of 3): The Lois Lane book was actually released a week earlier but I skipped it. After taking another glance at it I decided to try it. Since everything in this Flashpoint universe is changed, these two books aren't actually related. Lois is still a Daily Planet reporter, but to her disgust she's stuck covering Fashion Week in Paris instead of hard news (along with Jimmy Olsen). Then fate intervenes, in the form of Emperor Aquaman's flooding of western Europe as part of the Atlantean hostilities against Wonder Woman and the Amazons. Olsen is killed but Lois survives and is taken by the Amazons to New Themyscira (the former Great Britain), where she ends up (thanks to her possession of Jimmy's camera) joining the resistance movement. Meanwhile, the Project Superman book takes place in flashbacks, starting 30 years ago, when a U.S. soldier arrives at a secret underground facility in Metropolis (with a certain General Sam Lane in charge), having volunteered to undergo treatments that would give him superpowers. Ummmm...isn't this more of a Marvel thing? Anyway, the goal is to have a powerful hero who can also present himself as normal-looking to the world -- all the better for the good old USA. But things don't quite go as planned, and a few years later our super-soldier is kept locked up in the facility, until meteors crash into Metropolis, and on the last page we see that one of the meteors is actually...you guessed it...a rocket carrying a baby. Which brings up a question: how would the changes in Earth's timeline caused by the Reverse-Flash cause the ship from Krypton to crash-land in Metropolis instead of on the Kent farm in Smallville? This seems more like a random change done for plot purposes, unless the coming DC Universe reboot in September is even more drastic than I imagine.

Batman, Incorporated 7:  Meanwhile, in the unchanged (for now) DC universe, we have a story that doesn't have a lot of Batman. It centers around one of those he inspired, Man-of-Bats, who fights crime on his reservation along with his son, who's called Raven. But unlike Bruce Wayne, Man-of-Bats doesn't have unlimited resources, and the Leviathan criminal outfit is making things on the reservation much tougher.