Friday, April 10, 2015

All The Things I Did: 11th April 2015

Ugh, writing this bit at the start is what I hate the most.  Anyway, here are all the things I did.  The worst one's at the top, the best one's at the bottom, the rest are in the middle.  I wish I could just leave this bit blank.

WORST: Penguins of Madagascar: At the risk of sounding like a bitter old man, I have to say that this movies exemplifies the worst excesses of the Dreamworks style.  The plot jerks from set piece to set piece with no regard for logic, and though the jokes fly thick and fast the movie is neither funny enough nor charming enough to outweigh the irritatingly spasmodic pace.   I should also say that I hate the "references for adults" that Dreamworks throws into their movies.  They should really forget about that rubbish and focus more on telling a solid story.  So yeah, Penguins sucked.  My son loved it, but alas for this film, he ain't writing the review.  Now get the hell off my lawn, you young punks.

WWF Madison Square Garden on 23/1/1984: It another plodding wrestling event from the early 1980s, but this one is historically significant as the first WWF Heavyweight Championship win for Hulk Hogan.  Most of the matches are dull, but the nuclear crowd in the Hogan match carries it, and "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff puts in the performance of the night.

WWE Smackdown episode 817: The WWE put on some top-notch programming last week, but now it's back to business as usual.  That said, there are always things to enjoy even in the most mediocre of wrestling shows.  Adrian Neville continues to impress with his crisp acrobatics, I liked that Bray Wyatt tried to give some meaning to his match with former teammate Erick Rowan, and I thought that the Mix/Sandow fued got back on track after a poor outing on Raw.  Too bad the rest of the show was so middling.

WWE Raw episode 1141: This was a show that started well, but it became all too apparent that they were working with a restricted roster, with several wrestlers pulling double duty.  The match between WWE Champion Seth Rollins and rookie Adrian Neville was a cracker, with both guys coming out the other end looking really good.  I'm also enjoying John Cena's open challenge, and he had a great match against Stardust.  The rest of the show, alas, was inconsequential filler.

WWE NXT episode 272: Okay, I think I'm starting to get it.  This wasn't a regular episode of NXT, but a flashback to the tournament they did in the lead-up to Wrestlemania 31.  The wrestlers in the tournament were competing to appear on Mania, and the three matches shown here were excellent, especially Adrian Nevilla vs. Hideo Itami.  Itami won the tournament, and the show had been good to that point, but from there it became mini-documentary about Itami's Wrestlemania experience, and it was pretty great. 

Avengers (2013) #1-14, written by Jonathan Hickman, drawn by Jerome Opena and others: The all-important Secret Wars event is coming soon, so I decided that I had better read the comics leading directly into it.  I should have done so sooner, because Hickman's Avengers is everything I want from a super-hero book: epic stakes, an intricate and multi-layered plot, and great art.  I've heard people describe it as overly cerebral, and that's fair, but I happen to like my comics on the cerebral side.  It's amazing that such smart work is appearing in the most mainstream title in comics.

BEST: New Avengers (2013) #1-7, written by Jonathan Hickman, drawn by Steve Epting: The companion book to Hickman's Avengers, New Avengers is one of the best things Marvel is doing right now.  And unlike Avengers, it has a great central hook: what do the heroes do when they have to destroy a world to save their own?  What do they do when faced with this choice over, and over, and over again?  Hickman does a good job of presenting a desperate situation that the big brains of the Marvel Universe can't find a neat solution for, and ratcheting up the tension as they exhaust their options one by one.  It's very good, and I have high hopes for Secret Wars.

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