Black Adam

Hi Teth Adam!

Mixed feeling about this movie. As usual, if you try to serve many sub-plots in a movie, eventually you’ll get sub-par results. What are the subplots, anyway? Some of them:

  • Kahndaq, an oppressed country, being milked for its uber-rare natural resource since thousand years ago.
  • A tyrant trying to forge a mystical crown to amass super awesome mystical power.
  • A nationalist woman, trying to liberate her country knowing from legend once they had a chamption.
  • The introduction of JSA (Justice Society of America). BTW, why they are such jerks that don’t care about Kahndaq?
  • Some other magical/supernatural folks
  • Etc

Imagine having godly powers, and finally was released after 5000 years of imprisonment. Clueless? Sure. Even worse is he’s still pissed of.

One thing I really like about this movie is how he is such a bad-tempered Superman.

We never see The Big Blue Boyscout do those on the movies. He just swiftly knock the enemies down, as harmless as can be. Adam don’t hesitate to rip them off, on the other side 😀

Even the entire JSA squad isn’t powerful enough to beat Adam, so this guy is obviously an extremely global level threat, hmm hmmm? See the post-credit scene. Waller being Waller has an ace card ready in her pocket :p

P.S 1: some may complained how Adam should have been portrayed by a Middle Eastern guy, with elvish/pointy ears. Me? I don’t really care.

P.S 2: other complained how this movie lack solid world-building. Hard to disagree with that.

P.S 3: Yes, I get the”Middle East colonialisation vibe”. History isn’t really my cup of tea, anyway.

P.S 4: I imagine Shazam meeting his older brother will be hilarious. Or awkward.

Conclusion: definitely will keep watching how the story goes.

Thor: Love and Thunder

I think they got it okay with Thor:Ragnorok. Some amount of swag, added with few fan service-y bad ass moments, and sprinkeld with just an adequate amount of jokes here and there. The result? One helluva fun movie.

Unfortunately, Thor: Love and Thunder felt to keep the pace. I kinda feel they reduced Thor from the mighty god of thunder into some sort miserable jokester. Well more jokes, more stupid moments. And of course they wasted Christian Bale, sadly. Definitely the man of the show.

Aaarrghhhh….

Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

A question that seems simple yet very profound:

“Are you happy”?

Christine Palmer to Stephen Strange

As (ex) Sorcerer Supreme, Doc Strange is arguably one of the most powerful individual on earth. When being confronted with such question, he answered with an uneasy “yes”. Which means he wasn’t, although he didn’t want to give such impression.

Of course he’s not happy, because her relationship with Christine didn’t work thus finally married another man.

Guess for some, power, sense of purpose, or accomplishments (which obviously all of them possesed by Strange) isn’t enough to lead to happiness. Ouch. Poor doc. And I even haven’t start talking about our friend Wanda, who is sharing the same problem…

Batman (2022)

Very interesting Batman movie, inspired by various comics like Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Year One, Batman: Hush, Batman: Ego, etc. This time, you won’t see the Dark Knight fighting against planet buster folks like Superman or Doomsday or anything superheroic involving Justice League, The League of Shadows etc etc. Nope.

Let’s lower the bar just a little bit. If you expect the Bat to swiftly eliminated his opponents here and there ninja-style, you’ll be disappointed. This is the rookie, relatively inexperienced Batman who mostly work using his detective skills (Batman Begins, anyone?). Well not suprisingly, the enemy is Riddler.

The Riddler in Hush. See the resemblance?

Not just Ridler, though. There’s also Penguin. As the Riddler killed certain Gotham citizens, some cryptic clues were left, and it’s up to Batman and Comissioner Gordon to solve the puzzles to hopefully prevent the next victim.

In previous Batman movies, we typically see Alfred as a fatherly figure for Bruce. Not in this movie. We see more dynamics, some clashes/conflicts here and there.

Gordon is depicted as cooperative, thinking cop here, not just simply waiting for clues from the Batman. Nice to see that.

And also it’s nice to know that Catwoman isn’t a mere fancy burglar.

OK, enough with the plot. On the otherside, I think the cinematography is also excellent. The city felt very… real. You see cars and people passing by in the day. And in the night, accompanied by impending music, watch out for shadows. You’ll never know from where “I am vengeance” strikes.

I really like the movie that I watched it 3 times. Hehehe…

Spiderman: No Way Home

From the very beginning (yes, I’m talking about Tobey Maguire’s 2002 movie, back to good old high school days), practically *all* Spiderman movies fall in the “okay-ish” category for me. Not really enjoyable like Guardian of The Galaxy series, but also not that bad like Iron Man 3 (yes, I’m still looking at you).

Gonna make No Way Home (NWH) an exception for a few reasons, though.

First, we see how Peter Parker’s character develop. In the previous 2 Spiderman movies, and also Avenger movies, we say Peter as a young reckless kid with superpower who need mentoring here and there. Now he’s an adult. Or at least in the middle of transition phase from teenager to adult. Adults don’t run away from problems. They think how to solve them. And act. In Peter’s case, Tony Stark, the man he looked up to, was already dead.

Excluding Aunt May and Happy, he’s pretty much alone.

Second: second chance (sorry pun intended). Aunty May got killed by Green Goblin. in his enranged anger, Peter almost delivered the final blow. Nope, didn’t happen. Why? Intervened by another Spiderman (Tobey). He almost killed the man who killed Uncle Ben, but didn’t do it. Simple reasoning: Uncle Ben was dead already and killing the murderer won’t turn him into a better man. So instead he delivered the serum to Goblin, and left the man confused. And there’s another nice touch, a very nice one: MJ almost died from falling, but got saved by… another Spiderman (Andrew). I could imagine he still regret of not being able to save Gwen, and very likely got redempted after saving MJ.

And finally the third one: multiverse is a b*tch.

Doc Strange granted Peter’s wish to make everyone forget he’s Spiderman, except those who already knew him before. Unfortunately, that also includes the bad guys, and somehew Strange’s incantation was screwed up, so multiple universes collided and those bad guys (Doc Oc, Green Goblin, Electro, Lizard, Sandman) suddenly appeared in this particular universe. Umm.. quantum mechanics it not my field, so won’t comment further. But anyway, this reality warping thing is very very annoying: turning time back, moving someone to different place instantly, turning blackholes into butterflies, creating mirror dimension, etc. Being able to do anything, including defying laws of logic seems very very very scary to me. OK, I accept Strange isn’t a high-tier, uber level reality warper like Franklin Richard. He does that, on smaller scale. In this category, sure our Supreme Sorcerer is not alone. There’s also the Scarlett Witch. I wonder what are the other bad things that will happen, though. So Doc Strange, time to undo… I mean fix what you’ve done.

Dune

For brutalist architecture afficionados like me, Dune provides plenty of visual treats.

Damn massive buildings, spaceships, etc. Not sure how you perceive such constructions: perhaps cold? gloomy? inhuman? tolalitarian? As a fan of geometric shapes, I find them to be very aesthetically pleasing.

And seems Mr Villeneuve is a wide angle fans. Just take a look.

Notice how he intentionally make humans looks itty-bitty compared to a massive man-made construction.

And of course: the dune itself.

Man, what’s so interesting about massive sand areas? They are really fascinating. Really. Just ask Edward Weston 🙂

No Time to Die

Kinda shocking.

For the first time, in the history of James Bond movies (the first one, Dr No was released in 1962 and No Time to Die is the 25th), we finally see Bond… dead. Yes… dead. Mmm but did he really… nevermind, just safely assume that way: he’s dead.

One thing I particularly like about this movie is in spite of all the government attempt to build killing operatives, Bond is after all still a human. He still has feelings, which eventually lead us to his legacy…. please enjoy the movie yourself.

Anyway, wonder who will be the next 007. Hmmm….