The trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane is pretty bananas. It is like they are mashing up a horror/hostage movie and a monster movie all in one! What is even more bananas is that it comes out in two months and this is the first we have seen of it! I am intrigued. If nothing else it has John Goodman in it so it will be well acted! What do you think?
We Finally Know How To Buy The New Hitman Game!
When they announced Hitman, they were talking about an ‘all digital’ release with continuing content, but then you could buy it all at the end. Which sounded a lot like episodic distribution, but they were hesitant to confirm that was the case. Well now we know it is indeed being released in episodes. For $15 your get the Prolog and Paris, and then for the next five months you can buy each new location for $10. Bringing the grand total to $65, or you can spend $60 up front and get the whole thing as it comes out. What they are not telling you, is that I am sure at the end of it all it will come out on a disk for $60 as well.
This model should work well for Hitman. The story doesn’t matter much in these games, so just getting new locations added on is perfect. What I am hoping is that this game will be successful enough to continue releasing episodes/locations after the first five are completed. A season two if you will. It would be great to have a game that just kept releasing good content for a couple of years!
Superman Is Not Fond Of Batman!
Superman is a scary dude in this clip from Batman V Superman that made its debut on Conan last night! I don’t think I have ever seen Superman be more threating. We will see if he is playing it up to scare Batman, or if he is really playing the villain.
This Conan interview of Zack Snyder also gave us some insights in to the new Batmobile. Not as good as a clip from the movie, but still good!
DC Is Trying To Make You Forget About The Jonah Hex Movie!
According to Entertainment Weekly the CW is adding another superhero to the Legends of Tomorrow lineup, the scarred antihero cowboy Jonah Hex. Jonah was last seen in a terrible movie staring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox, so the move to TV makes sense. Maybe the CW show can scrub the thought of that film out of the audience’s collective memory. Though I am more interested in the bigger implications. If they are adding in Hex, what other heroes might we see along the way? I hope they find ways to sneak in a lot of the lesser DC heroes. If they can’t make it on the big screen it would be fun to see them on the small one!
The Hateful Eight Were Just A Little Too Hateful!
The Hateful Eight was just a too much Quentin Tarantino: It was too long; It was too wordy, and too gory. It went out of its way to offend to me with Quentin’s signature wink and smile. I am not saying it was all bad. As a mater of fact I liked quite a lot of it, but Tarantino needs just needs someone to tell him, “enough”.
The Hateful Eight kicks off with bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) getting a lift out of a blizzard from fellow bounty hunter John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth (Kurt Russell) who is transporting an outlaw (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock, Wyoming to hang. They are forced to wait out the storm in Minnie’s Haberdashery with five other unsavory characters, and all sorts of unpleasantness takes place.
This is a classic Tarantino setup. You get a great cast of characters in a tight spot and then let them chew on Tarantino’s crazy dialog. The problem is that this movie is three hours long, and the whole plot is that one or more of these fellas is more of a dirt-bag than he is letting on. That is a lot of dialog. So to spice things up Quentin tries to shock you with moments of gratuitous violence or hateful speech. I am not saying there isn’t a time and place for people using the ‘n’ word, but in the Hateful Eight it is said almost gleefully. It is clearly being used for effect and not for historical accuracy.
The actors for the most part are all Tarantino alums. They are all in the Hateful Eight because they know how to deliver Quentin’s lines the way he wants them delivered. They also are what makes this film at all watchable. If it was anyone else in this movie, I may have been tempted to walk out. This cast knows how to not only read the script but let you know that they are in on Tarantino’s long dirty joke. They say their lines with that perfect half-smile that keeps this film from being overly grim.
Quentin Tarantino is great at making his characters talk around in whimsical little vile circles, but he needs to know when to stop. At some point the movie needs to stop circling and move forward. If the Hateful Eight would have been two hours long it probably would have been one of his best films, but as it stands now it ranks among his worst. Which is still a pretty good pile to be on the bottom of. If you really like Quentin Tarantino, you will probably find a lot to enjoy with the Hateful Eight. If not, this is probably not the movie for you.