THE AVENGERS REVIEW

Avengers was on my most awaited films of 2012 list.
So, does it disappoint? Of course NOT. I never doubted you, my dear Whedon. 

There are tons of reviews out there, and you can pick any one of them up and read them and it won’t change the fact that you’ll be watching this film (unless you’re an idiot, in which case, get back to your made-for-TV romcoms). So why read this? Because it’s a review by a comicbook fan for a movie for comicbook fans (and others) directed by THE comicbook fan of our era.
And Avengers is (arguably) the greatest most perfect comicbook adaptation ever.
Now, I’m not saying it’s the greatest comicbook movie ever (Batman Begins/Dark Knight still holds that position) but it is the best adaptation of a comicbook ever. Dark Knight doesn’t feel like a comicbook, but it is a better movie. But this one, it feels so much like a comicbook. And I think that’s because of Joss Whedon, who’s got quite a lot of experience writing comics (Astonishing X-Men, Runaways, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and he’s marvelous here. HE’S THE REAL STAR. Nobody else could have done it better. He handles the characters amazingly well, and gives each character their time to shine. A character like Hawkeye or Coulson is given as much importance as Iron Man or Thor. And Hulk…he’ll have you cheering and screaming and laughing, because this is the best interpretation of the Hulk so far.

A lot of twitter reactions say that Iron Man overshadows every other character in the movie. Those reactions are absolutely wrong and possibly written by RDJtards. Nobody overshadows anybody. They stand together in the movie. Side by side. As a team. As. They. Should. And I absolutely applaud Whedon for that. I had some fears that Iron Man would serve as the leader-type given his current popularity, but that isn’t the case. Captain America LEADS the Avengers, and Whedon gives us good reason why he SHOULD lead them and why everyone else is listening. But since Whedon has to appease Robert Downey Jr’s ginormous ever-expanding ego, he does something really cool with Iron Man, but handles it so that it doesn’t overshadow other characters.  To get these guys together and to do such justice to them… Whedon accomplishes an absolutely impossible feat and I congratulate him for that.

Hiddleston is amazing as Loki. It also helps that he looks so much like the Loki of the comicbooks. When he gives you that maniacal grin, you know that they couldn’t have gotten anyone better for it.
I love the Avengers. I love how they were handled and I love how they are treated with such respect.

What I didn’t love in the movie is Nick Fury. Whedon writes him as a manipulative General who’ll do anything in his power to save the world and it isn’t his fault that Fury doesn’t shine. It’s Samuel L Jackson’s. A person’s badassocity can only carry a character till so much, and I feel SLJ isn’t fit to play Fury. Sure, Fury’s shrewd and manipulative, but he’s also noble. And that’s where SLJ fails. He just didn’t shine like the rest of the cast, and it wasn’t because he was underwritten or anything… SLJ just couldn’t pull it off. And I’m saying that as a huge Samuel L Jackson fan who keeps on using his dialogues in real life situations, mind you.
Another thing I didn’t like was the story. It felt as if someone handed Whedon an outline of the Ultimates comicbook and told him to write a screenplay off that. I feel Marvel didn’t really trust him enough to come up with a marvelous story. So the story as a whole is lackluster. But you’ve got some great dialogue and some magnificent action sequences, so all is forgiven. Avengers could have been a much better movie, in my opinion, if they let Joss Whedon off the chains and let him do whatever he wanted. Maybe he’ll get more freedom while doing the sequel (which is very likely given the Nerdgasm-inducing mid-credits scene.)

And then there’s the Chitauri (AKA Skrulls) (it isn't a spoiler, they're namedropped five seconds into the movie) who look nothing like Skrulls and behave more like Random Alien Army. But that isn’t a problem because the last hour or so of Avengers is absolute carnage. But within this carnage is drama. These aren’t just a few cool scenes that show off CGI unlike the Bayflicks. You do get the sense of something happening. You care about the characters. You want them to win. And you’re most probably cheering for them and you don’t even know it.
The dialogue is amazing and smart and all kinds of awesome and it is an absolute act of sin to not listen to it. Do yourself a favour: if anyone’s talking in the theater, tell him/her to shut the fuck up and if they don’t listen throw a tub full of popcorn on their head (as I did). Whedon is a maestro of dialogue, and every bit of it in this movie is nothing short of brilliant. And most of it will make you laugh out loud. I guarantee.
Avengers is a movie made by people who love the characters, and it shows, because that love kind of crosses over to you from beyond the screen. And I love that. This is how movies should be made. Out of love and a little bit of respect, and not out of formulas or magic potions or whatnot the industry believes in.
8/10
Avengers opens on 4th May in the United States. It is currently running in European and Indian theaters. 

On Django Unchained. And why I can't bloody wait.

Quentin Tarantio.
Heard of him? He's done a few good movies with a few good actors and wrote a few good scripts for movies like KILL BILL, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and PULP FICTION.
Educate yourself.
Done?
So here we go, if you are a Tarantino fan you will very well be aware that this guy's a sucker for Westerns. He's a sucker for that Sergio Leone music and that wide shot panning across a desert landscape, and a Tarantino western has been a long time coming.Yeah, Kill Bill had some western tones, but it wasn't a full-on guns-a-blazin' horse ridin' western worthy of someone as awesome as Tarantino.
So here we get Django Unchained; the story of a freed slave who sets out on a quest to rescue his wife who is held captive by a plantation owner in Southern America, starring Christoph Waltz as Doctor King Schultz and some other people in various roles here (but that really doesn't matter, it's Christoph's movie). And yes, the script got leaked. And yes, Miramax tried getting rid of it, but what the hell, it's the goddamn internet. You can't get rid of stuff from the Internet. That's where I got the goddamn Thor screenplay a good three months before it released.
The first time I read the script, I didn't like it that much. It just seemed like a wrong choice for Tarantino and felt like a mere Oscar vehicle for Christoph Waltz's bounty-hunter/doctor. Yes, there were awesome bits, there were funny bits, but cohesively, it wasn't very good for me. But that was the first time. When I reread it, I finally got it. This wasn't a bad script with a few good moments anymore; it was a BRILLIANT script with very few bad moments. It's actually very, very good. It may not be Tarantino's best movie yet, but I'll be damned if it doesn't turn out to be a freaking brilliant film and an amazing western.
What I really like about this film is that tackles an aspect of American history that no one has the balls to tackle: the rapes, the torture and the slavery. Tarantino gets to use his favorite N-word a lot given the period of the film and the subject matter it deals with and he handles it in style.
Boy, is this script violent. There's just a lot of blood. It's fucking bloodier than Kill Bill and more brutal on the senses than that BDSM scene from Pulp Fiction. If this movie gets made the way its written on the script, expect this to be Tarantino's most brutal film yet.
It's fucking violent. But what stops it from turning into a gorefest are two things : the humor and the story. This is by far, the funniest script Tarantino has ever or will ever write. It's just ripe with humor, from making fun of bumbling Hillbillies to slaves who gape at Django's ubercoolness. And it also hits the right emotional beats as expected of a Tarantino movie. The best thing about this script is that it's got a message, and how it will be delivered to the audience is brilliant. On the surface, it's an out and out Western that shocks and entertains, but what it wants the audience to remember is the message.
 It's a history lesson, people, and it's history rewritten by Tarantino himself.
And I can't fucking wait.

\m/

13 simple steps for making a successful Bengali TV serial.

I am from India. Yes...ugh... Yup. Now that you have finished retching and...no I don't live in slums...no I haven't met Jamal (I don't think he exists)...no, Shahrukh Khan sucks...OKAY LET ME SPEAK! See, since I am from India, I have my grandparents living with me. And what do Bengali grandparents watch? Bengali TV show. Bengali TV show has flourished into a multimillion rupee industry, sprawling of rehashes of old tv shows, with each season longer than the entire run of the Simpsons, and not even half as funny. These shows are so bad that you can't even laugh at them. Each episode is like a shortened version of Twilight minus the entire Vampire-Human-Werewolf love triangle thing. Well, its worse. But hey, its a multimillion rupee industry and even YOU can make it big in there. All you need to do is follow these instructions:

1. If you are making a drama, it HAS to be set in olden times.

2. If you are not making a drama then it HAS to be set in modern times.

3. If the drama is set in modern times, everything HAS to look as if its olden times, with huts and straw houses, but all the characters need to have iPhones or some cellphone that runs on Android OS. And the only cars that are to be shown are yellow cabs. But the iPhones are more important. Even the slum dwellers who can't afford clothes should have iPhones.

4. In the drama, if there is a villain, the villain HAS to talk in english with the most pathetic accent possible while the others will speak in bengali only

5. The story has to be shit. Or cow shit. All dialogues should comprise mostly of monologues in which the character will mock other characters.

6. If the serial is not a drama, it should be a copy of CSI, House, Dexter or an extended Slumdog Millionaire.

7. Every serial MUST use the Dark Knight soundtrack and/or the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack without obtaining the rights. 

8. The Dark Knight soundtrack MUST be played at inappropriate moments.

9. At least one character should have a spoilerific psychic premonition, which makes almost every other bengali dude psychic. 

10. The people watching the show must NOT be entertained. They should be tortured.

11. God should be a character in it.

12. The twists should be un-fucking-believable.

13. No sex. Not even the slightest mention of Sex. 

Congratulations, now you can be a part of the multimillion rupee industry that is Bengali TV!! 

Do NOT forget the Dark Knight soundtrack. You HAVE to HAVE it.

COMIC BOOK TRAILER DISSECTION....

So a bunch of Comic Book movie trailers released in the past few days. I had waited for EACH of them eagerly, with bated breath, and look what I got; a shitsap, a lotr wannabe and CGI animated nerdgasm.
Let me start with the shitsap AKA the Green Lantern Trailer.

I know RIGHT! What the fucking hell was that? Green Lantern isn't supposed to be Iron Man. He ain't some pampered billionaire playboy who gets fucked by almost every girl he passses by, the Lantern is an interplanetary cop who relies on willpower and faith to power the ring. What I just saw felt like the fucking Iron Man. FUCK IRON MAN! The Dark Knight was the way to go, but no, we got a fucking Iron Man'd Green Lantern and an apocalyptic letdown that was liked by AICN's HEADGEEK and those pathetic shitsaps at ComicBookMovie.com. And just look at Ryan fucking Renolds, he'd be a shitty Deadpool too. But he is an extremely shitty Green Lantern. And with the mask on he looks just fucking dreadful. They could have cast Ben Stiller for all I know.


"I know, RIGHT!!!" Fuck you.




Up next, something watchable. THOR

Looks epic, right. Nope. It won't be. Coz you've been "a bad and greedy boy." Are you fucking serious? This shit wouldn't have worked even on a little kid's picture book. But hey, Thor does look great. Just look at the Destroyer kicking some ass. Loki is spot on. But I'm worried about Odin. He just doesn't seem right. But it's Anthony Hopkins, so it has to be good, right. I so hope it doesn't suck. FUCK YOU, MARTIN CAMPBELL for ruining GL.



Next comes gold. And this one isn't a movie trailer. It's a trailer for the upcoming ARKHAM CITY.

Don't be surprised if you just jizzed your pants. That was my reaction too. HUGO FUCKING STRANGE! Just look at that guy, did you ever think he was gonna BE THIS BADASS?! And the CGI, I think its safe to say that we have crossed the uncanny valley. Just look at that cop's reactions to the injections, BATMAN FIGHTING. It all fits, it all makes complete sense. And it looks fucking epic. SO BRING ON ARKHAM CITY!

Vampires suck, they really do.

VAMPIRES have been an object of fantasy ever since this object of fantasy was thought about. The vampire frenzy started with Count Dracula and the Nosferatu, two classics which fail to diminish from our culture. Over the years the concept of Vampires has been fucked about, molested and totally raped by Hollywood into a pathetic mess of chick flicks and action thrillers like the somewhat tolerable exploits of the sexy vampire Selene in Underworld to the downright annoying Stephanie Meyer shitsap that is Twilight. Oh, don't get me started about Twilight. It's the only thing that annoys me more than the comedy in the Harry Pothead flicks. Twilight has totally raped the horror and wonder of the Vampire lore into a pathetic movie with a sick sense of romance. And the people love it. It is beyond me why people INDULGE in Twilight, which is primarily a movie about a bitch who bitches about things who falls in love with a vampire who fights a werewolf who looks like Sharkboy and has to take his shirt off every five minutes or so for no reason whatsoever. I hate Twilight fans. If you are a Twilight fan, my only message to you will be "fuck off". And because of Twilight fans, vampirism has entered the world of comics and that ain't a good thing.

X-MEN v/s VAMPIRES. I know, I know, what the fuck does that even mean. Apparently the X-Men, Namor and Blade are now fighting the supernatural. Whoa. Wow. I am so excited. NOT. So, I picked up X-Men #1 hesitantly and read through it. Believe me, it sucked. But for some misplaced loyalty to X-Men, I started picking up every subsequent issue. But hey, the writing is good and it's way better than shit called Twilight. But the overall story feels stupid and a mere ploy to get Vampire fans to get a hold of this comic. And its not only the mutants who have to fight the Vampire menace, in the Ultimate Universe, the newly formed black ops team Avengers have to face off against these supernatural forces as well. And this one sucks balls. Any comic written by Mark Millar is expected to be classy, but this one is downright boring and bullshit and only keeps us hooked to it because of the crazy twists in the story. Its like a Nolan film without the amazing dialogues, without any tension and definitely without ANY emotion and thats not a compliment. The first two volumes of Ultimate Avengers were amazing. Volume two had supernatural elements but was done amazingly well and it remains one of my favorite Millar comics of all time. But everything gets screwed up with Volume three, coz the vampire storyline doesnt pick up much heat, and the artwork is not as edgy as a Millar comic deserves. So it totally sucks. 

VAMPIRES aren't meant to be screwed with. The folklore should not be tweaked and reduced to chick flick material. Vampires should be what they were meant to be : brooding, dark creatures of the night who can scare the living hell out of you and suck you dry; not the eight pack abbed shit we have reduced them to.