Okay, yesterday saw the first PDR/Kiiip teamup in apparently forever. We saw the Avengers. I will talk about it now.

First I will talk about the fact that we saw it in 3-D. I have never before seen a 3-D movie, but we would have had to wait about two hours to get a proper viewing. Here is my thoughts: 3-D works a lot better than I was expecting it to. I won’t go so far as to say it was a big improvement on the movie or that it was necessary to the enjoyment of the thing, but the technology works better than I expected from what I had pictured after hearing about it all this time. So, I guess, good job to the people whose job it is to carve movies into three dimensions or whatever.

As to the movie itself, I thought it was quite good. I don’t even know what else to say. This is, pretty much, how superhero movies have to be if they’re really going to stick around. And, I can’t say this for sure, but I don’t think any of the other Marvel Studios flicks were set in New York, so having a superhero adventure set there, where they belong, was just correct. I doubt anyone cares, but I’m not going to go into details of the movie here. Just let me be one of the last people on the Internet, probably, to say, “Yeah, that’s a good movie.”

I left the theatre just thinking of all the other Marvel properties that ought to get moviefied and I must say is that if we don’t have a Damage Control movie at least in the works by five years from now, something is definitely wrong.

Okay, so I lost my wallet today. Marq and I had gone to see Cabin in the Woods (my second viewing, it being an excellent film) and as we got up to leave I said “I feel like I’m missing something,” but apparently I did not investigate hard enough because after Marq headed off on his way home I realized I had a new wallet-sized amount of air in my pocket. Sucks for me!

The staff of the theatre have taken my number and will call me if it is found (and I checked the ground between the cinema and the bus stop twice), but I’ve already had to cancel credit cards. This is a hassle and I am right now going to remind myself: When you get the new credit card, PDR, make sure to update all the things, including this site, which are paid for by that card. Do not lose this site.

Haiku!

Wallets hold money.
This is their primary use.
They can also sing.

My wallet (one of the non-singing variety) did not have much money in it, but apart from the aforementioned cards it did have my health card, a id card for work, and a Subway gift card with like 16 bucks on it. I hope it is found.

I lost a wallet once before, years ago, and have a mildly interesting story I might as well put on the Internet: I had found and returned a purse a few weeks earlier and been given a twenty dollar bill as a reward even though I didn’t want to take it. I had pinned that twenty to my bulletin board intent on not spending it. So when my wallet went missing (evidently falling out of my pants while I was skateboarding. This is why I prefer to keep my wallet in my trenchcoat pockets. These have yet to let me down, as my wallet had also been in my pants today. Pants are stupid), I got a call from some nice guy who had found it and I decided to give the very same twenty I had got to this guy. I choose to believe the same bill went on to be passed from person to person as a reward for things to this day, but this is unlikely. But still, it would be nice.

For more than a year now, I think, I’ve had something of a mission around my apartment, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here. I’ve been trying to get rid of as much of my accumulated stuff as I can. It was easy at first, I left about a third of my clothes in some of those donation boxes, and I just discarded my busted up dresser and this one chair I had. But as time goes on, it is getting harder to find things I can be so easily rid of.

Then I found a bag of disposable razors that I must have got somewhere. It had been quite a few years since I last bothered to go fully cleanshaven, I’ve instead been just using an electric trimmer at its lowest setting to give myself short stubble. But the possibility of using up the razors (and a can of shaving cream as well, for that matter) overcame my laziness and so I have been shaving this month for real.

Of course, I’m not all that good at it.

Not a great picture, but I’m confident that you can tell I’ve been butchering my face.

At any rate, it is getting to the point where my collections of comics, books, and DVDs are really showing how big they are. While I was able to rid myself of a handful of books, I really don’t want to part with most of these things. But there is also a not-insubstantial collection of VHS tapes I’ve collected. Years ago someone was leaving their collection in the laundry room of the building each with three movies taped from a movie network or something like that. I’m now working my way through these, getting rid of them as I go. Many of them are old movies I’ve either seen or never heard of and hopefully, as I get through them, I’ll work up the energy to offer my thoughts on the Internet, since that was my justification for taking the tapes in the first place.

Anyway, my ultimate goal is to have way less stuff. So far, it is going well.

I’m going to take a moment to talk about some superhero movies. The Avengers movie will be coming out soon, so this is a topical discussion, but the thing I am speaking about today probably isn’t going to be a factor in that movie. (But while I bring up the Avengers, there is an Avengers Handbook coming out sometime this month, I believe, that I did some work on, but I couldn’t find the solicitation on Marvel’s website, so I didn’t do my usual announcement post)

What I’m talking about is superheroes meeting their friends. There are a lot of superhero movies I haven’t seen, but something I’ve noticed in the Iron Man, Captain America, and Spider-Man films is that they all include a close bond between the hero and another character that I thought interesting in how it differed from the same relationship in the comics:

In Iron Man we are given the friendship between Tony Stark, Iron Man, and Jim Rhodes, his friend in the military who goes on to become War Machine. When the movie begins these two guys are already friends even before the whole Iron Man thing happens. Not so in the comics where Tony didn’t meet Rhodey until after his origin in a war zone and he needed to find a way home. The two became friends then. We never see how they meet.

In Captain America, Steve Rogers and James “Bucky” Barnes have been friends since childhood, then Steve goes on to become Captain America and Bucky becomes his ally in the art of punchin’ Nazis. Again, this differs from the comics, wherein, Captain America didn’t meet the orphan Bucky until after he became a super soldier. Like Tony/Rhodey, we’ve got a pair of friends established before we even get there.

And the one that bugs me the most even though I care the least, Spider-Man. In the movie we meet Peter Parker and the girl he has loved for all his life, Mary Jane Watson. As before this is different from the books. In the original stories it went like this: Peter (already Spider-Man by this point) had a ton of complications, one of which was his Aunt’s constant attempts to fix him up with her friend Anna Watson’s niece. Peter, who had never met Anna Watson’s niece, assumed the worst of her and was blown away when he met her. And even then the two didn’t become a couple right away. But in the movie, they went with the much more trite Girl He Always Loved idea, even though the comic version is much more interesting and new. (I understand the Spider-Man movies are being rebooted soon, so I don’t know how things’ll go there)

I can see a bit of why this is. In a movie you’ve only got so much time where you can story in there. To an extent, especially the first two examples, you’re just giving your character friends from way back who we’ll understand as being friends from way back and be able to relate. But there’s something the comics can do, as an ongoing medium, that the movies can’t. They can show us the start of a friendship, and its growth, and get us more invested into it. Obviously the comics also manage to mess this up plenty of ways (not least of which being contrived plot twists), but it is still a thing we can get from the books that we can’t in the movies. And when it comes to a romantic interest, I think this is especially important.

So, I guess, the way to meet a superhero, in the movies at least, is just to already know a superhero. I guess I’ve run out of rant on this topic now. Good night.

Man, I could really go for a good loiter tonight, but everywhere you look there’s a No Loitering sign. Friggin’ police state we have running around over here. Sheeeeeeeooooot.

Haiku!

Bustin’ some dope rhymes,
the rapper laid a smack down.
Took them all to school.

What is new everybody? Me? Not much. Just sitting back drawing and watching Coming to America. Probably the best day this week, so I’ll refrain from complaining about anything (beyond No Loitering signs). I’ll still hate everything just the same as usual, but I won’t complain about it.

Meanwhile, I hope none of you are being punched in the neck while you read this.