Quit Your Day Job

One of the aspects of the Iron Man character that I quite like is the evolution of the armour.  To be completely honest I probably prefer what is known in some circles as the ‘classic armour’ that appeared throughout the 80s, even over the movie version (although I don’t think that classic armour would’ve worked even half as well on the screen).

Unlike a lot of the other characters Iron Man isn’t really stuck with what he’s got.  Spider-Man for instance was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained the proportional strength of a spider (though some science types argue this point), agility, stickiness..?  That’s it though, apart from his home built web shooters he has his base powers and he can’t really improve upon them.  If they aren’t good enough then it’s tough.  He has to make do with what he’s got.

Tony Stark on the other hand can take an absolute beating from someone and use that experience to build a bigger stick (as it were).

A really popular armour (according to my extensive research) is the Hulkbuster armour, it was a figurine, appeared on trading cards and is one of the armours in the Super Squad Iron Man edition.  What is interesting (in at least my mind and the one other Iron Man fan still reading this to see where I actually go with it) is that the armour only appeared ever in two actual issues and one of those was for one page!

The cool thing about the armour apart from looking cool is that Stark had faced the Hulk before and rebuilt the armour modules to make the challenge he was about to face.  Superman can’t ‘get more strong’, Mr Fantastic can’t ‘get more stretchy’ and Aquaman can’t get more… um… fishy?

Stark can upgrade his powers and it doesn’t mess with the character, in fact we expect it!  Costume changes for him are a given.

Think about the times they try changing Spider-Mans costumes, only once in my opinion was that a good thing (Black-suit Spidey).  Iron Spider-MAn was wrong, the clone ‘hoody’ costume was very wrong and now dated!  I’m not even really a fan of the new Captain America costume.  But with Iron Man I can’t wait to see the next generation of armour and if I don’t care for it I just have to wait for Iron Man classic to return!

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Saw this on Cellobella’s site and thought it was hilarious enough to share with you guys. I’m thinking of following her lead and pissing my Facebook account off.  You should check out her post on removing your Facebook account because it has some interesting links regarding the difficulties associated with deleting your account.

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You know how it is, you enter the cinema, settle down in your chair and silently pray to the great pumpkin of the universe: “please let this film be good, please!”

And it isn’t.

Sometimes it surprises you, you’re shocked that a film you thought was an easy home run turns out to be a dog.  Here are my top five let downs:

1. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - I was so excited to see this, it was going to be awesome.  How could it not be brilliant with such wonderfully rich source material?  Well Sean Connery (who is brilliant don’t get me wrong) was completely miscast as the opium addicted Alan Quatermaine.  He should have been some gaunt weathered guy that has had the weight of the world burn him out.  Sean just wasn’t the guy to be the League’s Quatermaine, but it isn’t just on him though, the film lacked any great suspense and joy.  It wasn’t clever like the comic book and the threat never seemed to be any great menace.
2. The Matrix Revolutions - I’m one of the few who really liked the second Matrix film despite the ‘rave scene’ and I was desperate for Revolutions to make up for any shortcomings and bring the trilogy home with a winner!  Angry film gods punished me for some unknown reason and gave me the mess that was Revolutions.  There was a lot of pointless in that film and the ending was just such a let down!
3. Tenacious D The Pick of Destiny - OMFG what happened here?  I can pretty much watch anything done by the D but this movie had two jokes and they were buried pretty deep.  The HBO series of shorts are so much funnier.
4. Judge Dredd - gritty, violent, hilarious are words often used to describe the 2000AD series Judge Dredd they are not words that are associated with the movie Judge Dredd.  It is a perfect example of a film that doesn’t understand its source material.  Looks fantastic and Stallone was perfectly cast as Dredd, except he thought that comic book meant funny or silly and couldn’t understand why the director kept trying to make a serious dark film.  Rob Schneider was in it.  He shouldn’t have been.
5. Van Helsing - a movie with a bunch of Universal monsters getting hunted down by post-Wolverine Hugh Jackman and made by the guy who did The Mummy.  Ummm yes please.  How did this go so wrong?  It all feels wrong, the dialogue, the effects, the acting and above all the monsters!!!  I just really dislike this film and that may be just a personal thing.  But my advice if you haven’t seen it is to avoid it at all costs and go get The Monster Squad instead!

You know that this list could have been so much longer, more so if I was a little more honest with some films.  Other worthy nominations would be Star Wars prequels, Robocop 3, Trancers 5 onwards, The Punisher (first one without the skull), Ghostbusters 2,  Batman and Robin, Superman 4 (mind you I knew some of these were going to suck beforehand).  So go on, let rip, what are your big let downs?

Next week the Top five ways to get your superpowers!

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After the success of Iron Man Marvel has announced that Captain America is now on the cards and Cinema Blend is reporting that the front runner to play Cap is Matthew McConaughey.

I can live with that.

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Ok I couldn’t resist running the title of the piece through a LOLcats translator!  That site cracks me up on a daily basis.

Once again this stems from an idea I had floating around in my head - there are a couple of variations in there as well so this may not be the end of the Juggernaut and the cat series.

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Ok when the Matrix came out everyone wanted a Nokia 8110, not the clunky alternative version but the sleek, slide out black phone as seen in the film.  I had Matrix sunglasses and yes I had a Nokia 8110 imported from Korea.

It was a great phone actually, comfortable size, light and looked fantastic.

Of course I want Tony Stark’s phone from the Iron Man film!  I mean why wouldn’t I want one!?!  If it is good enough for Iron Man then it’s good enough for me.

The only thing though is that the Iron Man phone isn’t the one which is featured in the movie and frankly there is no way in the world that I would take the thing out of the house!  You see it is an LG Shine in the colours of Iron Man and the gold is actual 18k gold and is worth about two thousand US dollars.

Chances are I probably won’t get one considering there are very few in existence, twenty or so.

But what about the actual phone that is used in the film?

Apparently it is a slightly modified (I don’t know in what way, maybe it’s the exact same) LG VX9400 and now I want one.

I think it’s a bloody CDMA phone though so no love here!

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Last week for my birthday my team at work took me over to Krispie Kreme which is quite a novelty and new here in Brisbane.  We actually had to wait in line for doughnuts!

So it essentially blew my blood sugars into the ceiling, beyond the ceiling.  Which it should be noted that I had complete and utter fore warning about.  They were kind enough to ask if it was OK before we went and I was just happy for the thought that I decided that I can take a hit for a day (never again I might add but it was a nice farewell to sugary doughnut land).

Well it was one of the guy’s birthdays today and rather than give me an instant sugary heart attack I suggested we go to the video game arcade in town and blow some shiny coins.

Instantly we were assaulted with dance machines, drum machines and guitar machines.  We ventured deeper into the arcade cave and saw the token counter.  We’ll put in ten bucks each and get a bunch of tokens, hand the nice man the two ten dollar notes and he hands us back a twenty..?  Ummm that’s nice and certainly not as much fun as we thought it may be.

Oh.

A token machine?

Why bother with the token counter?

Fine pop the twenty in the machine and…

Oh great there are fifty-four tokens spilling out onto the ground.  Three grown men go scrambling for shiny tokens whilst arcade regulars regard us with scorn.

Um apart from the drum and dance machines are there any new games?  Capcom vs Marvel, well that’s been out since I was a young man.  Iron Man has his 90s armour on?

First game we go to is a shooter with four rifles so we can all play.

It’s kind of like Call of Duty, kind of, except that the enemy appears to be skeletons, there is a red button that does nothing on the side of my rifle and I can hide behind a metal thing when reloading.  We pumped quite a few tokens through that before I realise that I have no idea what’s going on and I don’t really have a grudge against these skeleton fellows so I holster my gun and look around for the next machine.

Oh there’s Time Crisis… One?  It has a cracked screen and the guns look like faded versions of themselves.  Daytona looks good.

Ahhhh Daytona the standard of the arcade, we can all race against each other!  In go our tokens and…

Hang on why has your race already started?  Oh good mine has and the third race has yet to begin.  So now we’re all running in different races.  I can’t reach the peddles, my legs are short.

There is tape covering all the wheel.

Ohhhh hang on, maybe these buttons all needed to be on the one setting?  We’ll try again but I’m getting in a different car.  Oh great now I’ve started in my own individual race I notice there is no sound and the screen is a bit rubbish.  Whatever.

So is the humble arcade of our childhoods a thing of the past?  I didn’t see any new games in there and the existing ones all seem to be old and in disrepair.

Still had an awesome lunch hour though and hopefully it was a nice nostalgic birthday treat!!

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Here is the colour version that I ran through Photoshop and played around with the watercolour brushes, not as extreme as I’ve done before.

I’m considering selling some of my drawings online as well, right now they’re little more than ink line on not so fantastic paper but they may look alright once put in a frame on the wall.  The shop will be linked to from above so keep an eye out for it.

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Apparently when you change timeslots six times, and put a show on two unexplained hiatuses with no information forthcoming about its return it doesn’t help the ratings!?

I’m shocked by this revelation in television programming 101.  Who would have thought that by making a show extraordinarily hard to actually see it would lead to poor ratings and thus eventual cancellation?

A lot of vocal people seem to love Men in Trees, I like the show, I don’t love it, but I like the familiarity of it, the inoffensive story arcs and delightful scenery.  We generally save up a few episodes and then watch them in one hit (which is my preferred method of watching a lot of shows, except of course things that easily get spoilt such as BSG etc).  It’s one of those light shows that you get used to watching.  But no more as it is being cancelled as reported by TV Guide.

Because we generally visit “cousin Larry” to obtain our episodes we haven’t had too much trouble keeping track of the show, timeslots mean very little to us, unexpected long breaks with no end in sight do however throw us out.

It’s a real shame I think that they’ve mistreated this show so much, as various channels have with other shows in the past.  I remember a little show called Firefly that was shown out of order, in non-recurring timeslots without all the episodes shown.  It didn’t seem to be a bad show after all?

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I had this idea kicking around my head for several days, it was one of those drawings that if I don’t get it out of my head then it will invade everything I do until I kill it.  Fortunately I feel it was well worth the effort.

When we lived in Canberra we got a chance to go and see the Rodin exhibition and it was inspiring.  I’m struck by the power in his sculptures, especially the hands, there was a piece that was just hands and they exhibited such amazing power and heaviness.

Of course when I think of Rodin’s work I immediately imagine characters such as the Incredible Hulk so I could not get this out of my head:

Let me know what you think, colour one is sitting on my hard drive so I’ll post it either tonight or tomorrow morning.  Also posting on my DeviantART profile.

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