This week we have even more Captain America. At this point you should know the history of Cap so I'm going to keep it short. James Buchanan started life as Cap's sidekick and while it was originally thought he was little more than a sidekick it turned out that Bucky was there to do all the dark and dirty things Cap couldn't do to maintain his iconic reputation. Eventually Bucky was thought dead when he couldn't free himself from a Nazi missile. It turned out Bucky was found by the Russians, fitted with a cyber arm and then brainwashed into the Winter Soldier where he did Commie black ops for the better part of a half century. Eventually the Winter Soldier came up against Cap and had his memory jogged. Eventually Bucky took on the role of Captain America to help usher in the Heroic Age.
The Bucky costume is good, comic accurate, he has the right body type and a Tommy gun which is both period accurate and what came with the action figure. He looks the part, he's dressed the part and the costume is solid.
Below that we have 2 versions of Captain America and a Cappette (the the lack of a better term). The costumes are well made and everyone showed up in shape ready to play. Well done everyone.
This week is a quickie. This weeks has been busy at work and I'm dealing with health stuff but this year my goal is to not miss a feature or at least miss as few as possible. So this week is the result of a compromise, I picked something short.
But, just like I say to the ladies, don't let it's length fool you, it's just as good as something longer and will still leave you satisfied.
This week I picked something from Blinky500 to show support for the Deadpool Webseries as well as the Save One to Save Many campaign. So we get one of my most favorite teams ever in Blue and Gold (Blue Beetle and Booster Gold) giving a PSA about smoking. I can't really find who's playing Booster but Beetle is played by Chris .R. Notarile and they both do a great job. Even though it's just over a minute long they have great back and forth, the script is good and you get a couple of great character moments. Even the kids do a pretty decent job with their thick Jersey accents. I don't have much to say about this because it is so short other than this is why we need fan films. This is made by a person who is passionate about the characters, comics and film making and that is obvious in everything done by Blinky. This takes characters that will never see the light of day in pretty much anything other than the comics and puts them on a bigger stage and does it very well in the process.
This week is a double two-fer. First up is Black Widow and Lady Deadpool. Natasha Romanov is Black Widow a secret agent of undetermined alliance acting for an ambiguous origin country. But currently she's a double agent working for SHIELD. She's a bit of a badass. Lady Deadpool is an alternate version of Deadpool, when she and Deadpool first met they shared a passionate kiss that made them both feel weird. She was also a major part of the Deadpool Corps, a group of alternate Deadpools teaming together to kick ass across the cosmos.
Young Billy Batson was given The Wisdom of Soloman, The Strength of Hercules, The Stamina of Atlas, The Power of Zeus, The Courage of Achilles and The Speed of Mercury by the wizard Shazam. When saying the old wizards name Billy Batson turns into Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel Jr. was given a portion of the old wizards power by Captain Marvel so when Freddie Freeman gains a portion of all of Captain Marvels attributes as Captain Marvel Jr.
You know I usually go into why the costumes are good but I find myself repeating things a lot. If I post them here they're good, they're well made, the costumes look good and the people wearing them look good so let's just take that for granted. Both set's of people did a great job.
This week is a twofer as we stay in the world of Red, White and Blue or in the case of one of these entrants Red, White & Black. First up, on the right, is Isaiah Bradley the OTHER Captain America detailed in the awesome mini series Truth: Red, White and Black. Isaiah was a part of an experiment to recreate the Super Soldier formula after the success of Steve Rogers. One of 5 survivors they performed black op field missions. I suggest reading the mini series as it's quite good. The art is wonky but the story is good. On the left is American Dream, for reals this time as that's a pretty comic accurate costume. Since I detailed the origins of one Sharron Carter from MC2, member of A-Next, previously I won't go into to much detail. I will note the smaller shields on her forearm as her other method of disposing evil doers as they act as stun disks.
The player on the left has a well made costume with lots of detail and is comic accurate, she showed up in shape and looks good. The player on the right has a good mask, from what I can see a comic accurate appearance and possibly a photoshopped shield. It doesn't look right and I don't know if it's because it's a paper decal attached to a light weight shield or a photoshop but the face of the shield doesn't look like it belongs in our world, however there is a nice hard outline which makes me think SOMETHING is actually there. But again, the costume is relatively simple but what makes a world of difference is the build of the person wearing it. This guy has the build of Isaiah Bradley and that really sells the costume.
For those of you who don't know Marvel took down the Blinky Deadpool Webseries. I started writing about the series from the first time I saw the trailer because the trailer LOOKED awesome and I knew with Chris .R. Notarile at the helm it WOULD BE awesome because he has made some of the best fan films I've ever seen, many of which are reviewed here and will continue to be reviewed here. But when I did my "gritty reboot" I thought I would expand to fan films as a whole because I started watching fan films made by people other than Blinky Productions and I was amazed at the variety out there. Some of it excellent, some of it not but all of it necessary. Liking something is totally subjective, I may not like something but that doesn't devalue it, no matter how I, or anyone else, may criticize it because a fan film generates interest in the character. Good or bad it makes a person aware of that character and may cause that person to seek out other examples of that character. That may include other fan films or the comics or big budget productions, the point is that someone out there found this thing that is awesome and now shares a passion for it. The best part of a fan film is that it's made by fans, fans who may have a better understanding of the character and even with zero budget produce something as good as any big budget production and the fact is that because they aren't beholden to any commercial interest they don't have to make compromises.
So I've been mulling over how to best support this cause and thinking about what I could write and post to help. Then this video was posted and it says things better and more succinctly than I could in any post that I could have written. So check it out, below the video are the petition you can sign, links to the Facebook group you can "like" and a link to the video and the IMDB page where you can leave a review.
I want to make something clear though, we as a community cannot get anything done by simply yelling, name calling and feces throwing. As I have said previously, it's up to us to take the high route and elevate the discourse. So please stay classy, don't antagonize Marvel, don't name call, don't be rude and/or crude, we're trying to do something constructive and we have to act in a constructive manner in order to do it. So help save this fan film and make a stand for all the other fan films because good or bad they are all worth saving.
Rating: 2 out of 5 Totally Unqualified Voice Actors
Not At All Associated With The Original Work
Plot
Synopsis: Does it really
matter? I guess there’s Blade and he
does a whole lotta shit that he doesn't do in the movie which includes blowing
up cars and motorcycles, destroying security terminals and shotgunning computer
monitors.
I don't know what to say about this really. I'm not going to credit anybody because I didn't like it and I don't want to sully any ones name with my opinion. If people want to Google search the people involved with this I don't want them stumbling across my negative review. So no one is getting credited and they'll probably thank me for that later.
Where to start. Well, they made Elektra a scientist. She's a scientist ninja. A scientist ninja working with Iron Fist. I don't recall Elektra every working with Iron Fist. They're both sort of periphery characters of Daredevil, that's sort of the person they have in common. Daredevil would hang out with both of these people but I don't know of any time they hung out together let alone one doing SCIENCE for the other. Just generic SCIENCE, nothing specific, just vague, lab coat wearing SCIENCE.
There is no plot. Zero, none at all. For all I know this is a home movie of shit just happening. You could argue that there is also no acting. There are flashes of acting by the mysterious appearing/disappearing antagonist and Dr. Elektra M.D. Doctor of SCIENCE. But this is basically a vast desert of acting talent and with no plot to prop them up it falls completely flat.
They sure as shit can kung-fu though. Iron Fist definitely can kung fu. The rest not so much. The ninjas a little bit and Unbreakable Dragon can hold his own. Elektra and White Lotus look like they've never even seen a punch in real life. So they know kung fu but what about the fight scene? Those must be good right? Nope. Not at all actually. Filmed at half speed and no contact the fights have no impact what so ever. There are some eye catching flourishes but nothing looks like it connects with any force. This is the most embarrassingly apparent when Iron Fists uses The Fist on Unbreakable Dragon, the chi of the undying dragon looks to have the force of a "good game" slap on the chest that you'd see on a basketball court.
This is longest 8 minutes I've had to endure in a long, long time. It was painful for me. Looking at the comments a lot of people loved it, there are a lot of positive comments. The uploader responded to one of them saying that it was a zero budget movie but the credits seems to boast a full cast & most of a crew. It has a producer for gods sake and a director who isn't the star. A producer who isn't also the Director/Writer/Star/Editor. Like a separate dude got a producer credit, like a real producer would get. It essentially looks like 2 guys in Tai Kwon Do class got together a bunch of friends and filmed it in an empty warehouse for a weekend but some poor asshole got suckered into producing it.
Alright, alright, the positives. Clearly the main knows martial arts and doesn't flail too much in the making of the kung fu. The costume is pretty good but the mask looks like it keeps losing the actors eyes in the opening scene but it's competently made. The dragon tattoo looks good, it must be either magic marker or make up but it always looks crisp and clean. Ummmm...the title screen is pretty okay. The main is in shape... I think that's about all that's positive about this. I think the short would have been best if they could have found a real fight coordinator, they can't be too hard to expensive to find. Other zero budget short films have great fight scenes using if not a real fight or stunt coordinator at least by rehearsing it a couple of times. It looks like they filmed the rehearsal with how stiff and slow everything is. Also the music on this, while good songs individually, don't match anything going on as if they scored it using the shuffle option on their iPod.
Anyway, I'm just going to rail on this so I'm going to wrap it up. Take a look...I guess? Maybe you'll find something I didn't or maybe you just want to subject yourself to the same pain I did.
Since you can't have Iron Fist without Power Man and since you can't have the bad without the good here's the opposite of the Iron Fist feature. A brief fan trailer that showcases Eric Thomas Wilson as Luke Cage. Well shot, well acted, the effects are good the guy playing Cage looks, talks and acts the part. There's even a Sweet Christmas. Why couldn't they turn this into an 8 minute film? Hell, why couldn't they turn this into a feature film.
