Adult Siblings Versus...Episode 91: Spider-Man (2002 Film)

Working our way through the back archive of the Adult Siblings Versus...continues. This episode, we looked at the  the 2002 Spider-Man film and discuss the singe greatest portrayal of a superhero character in film:

J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson.

"Get me pictures...PICTURES OF SUPERMAN!"
".....I mean 'Spider-Man'. Sorry everyone."

More details after the jump.

Beta's Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2023

Today marks fourteen years since my first bog post on Beta is Dead. As has been the custom, I will celebrate by sharing my To Ten Movie list of the past year, in this case 2023.

As usual, take in mind that this is my personal list of favorite movies, not an objective “Top Films of the Year” list, since I didn’t watch every single movie. This is just my personal opinion and, frankly, I’d be interested to hear your favorite movies of the year in the comment section.

Some quick notes about some honorable mentions: I really enjoyed The Marvels and Blue Beetle (especially Blue Beetle) but neither appears on the list because there were just way too many better flicks this year. I still want to make a special note that they were both good and should have done better at the Box Office. Also, Barbie just barely got edged off of the list, and I struggled with this quite a bit. I think it was great, and on any other year it would have made it on here easily. However don’t be surprised if you see the other half of Barbenheimer shortly.

Full Top Ten after the jump.

Review: Spider-Man - Across the Spider-Verse

 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the sequel to the 2018 surprise hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. When I say “surprise hit” I don’t mean that it was a giant box office hit (it did quite well, though it started slow) but that it was a game changing animated film. Since then both Hollywood and Japan have been chasing the style dragon Spider-Verse made famous (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, being the most recent example that I can think of). I did not review the first film, but I did name it #2 of my Favorite Films of 2018. At the time I said I it was probably the best Spider-Man movie, but with the benefit of hindsight I think you can make a strong argument for it being the best superhero movie and the best animated film ever made (even though I liked Black Panther more at the time).

The original film did well enough that a sequel was announced soon afterwards. In fact, it was eventually announced it would have two sequels, making it a trilogy. Unfortunately, it was another Hollywood victim of the pandemic and delayed by quite a few years, no longer able to strike while the iron was hot. Even so, with how much it had influenced the movie industry since its debut, the hype train for the follow-up was still quite strong.

This film was again written by the hitmaker duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who also produced the flick, along with Dave Callaham. This time it was directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson.

Again, this is one of two greenlit sequel with the second, Beyond the Sider-Verse, being produced alongside this one. The idea of a mostly standalone film getting two sequels pushed ahead at the same time is reminiscent of other film trilogies such as Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix.  After five years of waiting, does the Spider-Verse manage to live up to is predecessor, ala The Empire Strikes Back, or is it a giant wet fart that should have stayed in the production truck, ala The Matrix Reloaded?

Full  review after the jump.

Gwen Stacy, Alive and Well

I'm not sure Stan Lee had this in mind...

About ten years ago I wrote an article on this blog where I discussed the Spider-Man supporting character Gwen Stacy. I had recently seen The Amazing Spider-Man and, after being enamored with Emma Stone’s performance and her great chemistry with Andrew Garfield, I wanted to write about how Gwen’s character had been completely compromised due to decades of being martyred as “Spider-Man’s Dead Girlfriend.” So ingrained was this one aspect in the hearts and minds of fans and creators alike, that every new adaptation of the character either always inevitably dies or the creators planned for her to die if they were allow to continue the story the way they wanted (the creators of Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon have said their ideal scenario for the show would have included a TV/Home Video movie where Gwen was killed). No real reason for this is ever given beyond “that’s just what Gwen does; she dies.”

My original article (which you may want to read) very briefly ran through Gwen’s tragically short history and also touched don some reasonings and suggestions on how they could bring her back and give her the opportunity to be an actual character again, something she hadn’t been since the 1960s. But more than that, I challenged the creators of The Amazing Spider-Man to not kill Gwen off in a sequel, and seeing as they had a super talented rising star of an actress in the role I was convinced that they would not.

 Then Amazing Spider-Man 2 came out and completely proved my point by unnecessarily killing Gwen off. Awesome.

Pictured: The preferred version of Gwen, according to the writers

I was pretty convinced at the time that Gwen would remain this nebulous area that were seemed terrified of altering the status quo, regardless of how inherently sexist this concept of turning her into a Spider-Martyr had really become. I resigned myself to it always being the way because too many editors and producers think of Gwen’s death as being too sacred to ever even entertain the idea of bringing the character back.

I was wrong. Marvel Comics did bring Gwen back and they did it in a way I would have never expected: as a superhero in her own right. From the pages of the original Spider-Verse comic, a story where Spider-Man had to team up with variants of himself from across the multiverse, one of the encountered characters was a version of Gwen Stacy who developed spider powers instead of Peter Parker. Almost immediately upon her debut did the character become a breakout hit for most fans both old and new, especially in the cosplay scene. Since then the character lovingly referred to as “Spider-Gwen” has become a major recurring character in the comics, regularly appearing in cartoon shows, and has starred in one of the most celebrated animated films in history and set to return in its sequel later this year.

Today I’m like to talk about Spider-Gwen in detail, partially out of a longing to do a follow-up on my original article, and discuss who and why she is, why she is popular, and why she is extremely important to both the Spider-Man mythos and to the salvation of the decades long wronged character.

 Learn about Spider-Gwen after the jump.

Beta's Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2019

Ten years ago today I started blogging after being inspired by the work of Rob Bricken on the website Topless Robot. The blog began partially as a companion piece to the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show on WDIR and partially to force me to write regularly in order to increase my confidence. While things hadn’t gone quite to plan, and my ability to maintain regular post articles is poor at best, I think it’s still worth celebrating the milestone.

Honestly I’m unsure I have it in me to keep the blog going in any meaningful way at this point in my life but, since 2020 is the ten year anniversary of me starting it, I figure I should try to do my best to put out the many articles I wanted to write but never found time to do it. After that…who knows?

But first, as per tradition, I’ll do my annual Top Ten Favorite Movie List. As always, this is a subjective list that represents the flicks I liked the best, not necessarily the best made. Also, as with last year, I’ll throw up some Panda Reviews scores as well.

But before we get into it, I thought it’d be fun to take a quick look at all the films that topped all previous Favorite Lists.

2010: Scott Pilgrim vs. The Word 
2011: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 
2012: Moonsrise Kingdom 
2013: The Wolf of Wall Street 
2014: The Lego Movie 
2015: The Martian 
2016: 10 Cloverfield Lane 
2017: Get Out 
2018: Black Panther 

 My favorite movies after the jump.

Black Superheroes: Spider-Man (Miles Morales)

So...did they make his costume black to be funny?

Name: Miles Morales

First Appearance: Ultimate Fallout #4 (2011)

History: On an alternate Earth (Earth-1610), Peter Parker is a teenager who has dedicated the last couple of years of his life to fighting crime as the Ultimate Spider-Man. At some point scientists with ill intent recovered some of his blood and were able to recreate the circumstances of that lead to Peter getting his powers; genetically enhanced spiders. However, before they got a chance to do much with them, career criminal Aaron Davis a.k.a. the Prowler stole the formula, not realizing one of the spiders had hitched a ride with him. Later at Davis’ apartment the spider bit his young nephew Miles Morales and the kid gained powers very similar to Spider-Man. Despite this, Miles had no intention to use his new found abilities in the same manner and was rather insistent that he wanted to live a normal live. This changes when Spider-Man is killed fighting the Green Goblin. Believing that he could have helped the hero if he had embraced his powers earlier, Miles makes the guilt-fueled decision to take up Parker’s mantle and become to new Spider-Man.

Beta Says: Created by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli, Miles Morales was likely, with maybe the exception of Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, the highest profile creation of a comic book superhero in the 2010s. Not only was he the first person other than Peter Parker to regularly wear the mantle of Spider-Man in quite a few years, but he was both black and Latino and was created during a time when America was celebrating electing its first black president. Miles ended up becoming very popular in a very short amount of time, partially due to the marketing Marvel Comics applied to him. Today, he is the star of the film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which has only made him even more high profile. Some critics have suggested that the character was merely a big publicity stunt…and they’re at least partially right. Regardless as to how much of Miles' creation came from a good place to better represent the modern world, Marvel Comics were clearly motivated by the buzz of killing off Peter Parker would bring. Hence the reason they gave away the death of Peter before the issue where it occurred came out; to generate reactions from the mainstream media. Miles’ creation was more of a side effect of the publicity stunt, but that did not stop a backlash of negative and confused press decrying Marvel killing off one of its most iconic characters and replacing him based on “Political Correctness.”

Except Marvel didn’t kill off the iconic Spider-Man and, indeed, he was never replaced by Miles Morales and everyone crying about it on the news was being an idiot.

This may take a bit to explain.

The ultimate discussion of Miles Morales after the jump.

Beta's Top Ten Favorite Movies of 2018

I realize that it’s been basically a whole year since my last post, which is bad. In the unlikely event that any of my original readership happen to see this, I sympathize with the radio silence. Here’s the thing; today is the ninth anniversary of the first post I ever made and I figured I might as well throw up my annual Top Ten Favorite Movies list. However, one year from now is the damn ten-year anniversary, which is both hilarious and terrifying. It does seem like I should do something for a milestone that big, but also it feels like it would be very lame to do something for it without having touched the site in years and that there should be content leading up to it. So…food for thought?

Anyway, I somehow managed to watch a decent number of movies this year despite having one of the strangest and most life changing eighteen months of my life. But, as always, I managed to miss several key films over the course of the year, Bad Times at the El Royale being a particularly annoying omission. So if you’re favorite film isn’t on the list then that may be why. Also, this is a subjective list of my personal FAVORITE films, not necessarily the objectively best movies of the year. You may disagree with the list; that’s okay. Your opinion is valid. We’re all friends here. Feel free to post your own list in the comments.

Something a little different this year; I’m going to throw up some Panda Scores as well. For old times sake.

Before I get into the list, let me shout out a few movies that didn’t quite make the list but that I want to give a little love to. First of all, Avengers: Infinity Wars was actually on the original version of this list but was bumped off at the last minute. Still a great movie, especially if you think of Thanos as being the protagonist. Game Night ended up being a better than it had any right to be and is a comedy that worked on just about every level.  The Wife features a killer performance from Glenn Close that may well earn her a well deserved Oscar. And finally, Deadpool 2 in many ways felt like a more complete movie then its predecessor and continues to show that Ryan Reynolds is one of the best actors bringing a comic book superhero to life today. Too bad about its Women in Refrigerators moment.

Sorry, Captain America. Maybe next year...
(Also, I don't feel so good)

Full Top Ten list after the jump.

Review: Ben Reilly - The Scarlet Spider #1

Ben Reilly, aka the Scarlet Spider, is my favorite superhero of all time. I even wrote a song about him once.




 
Due to his being my favorite hero, and the complexity of his comic book history, it would likely require an entire post for me to really explain who this guy is. In order to get to the review ASAP I will try my hardest to be brief here.

The character first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #149, in 1975 as a clone of Peter Parker/Spider-Man created by the Jackal as a weapon against the web slinger. In the end both Spider-Men joined forces to take the villain down but the clone died in the exchange. Nineteen years later (in real time) Marvel Comics decided to revisit the old story by bringing the clone back to shake-up the then kind of off the rails Spider-Man books. Retroactively speaking, the clone actually survived and had spent the past five years (in comic book time) wandering the country until finally returning to New York City. Now calling himself “Ben Reilly” he decides to don a costume and fight crime, dubbed by the press as “the Scarlet Spider.”

This was the beginning of the Clone Saga, one of the most infamous storylines in comic book history. Long story short, Ben is revealed to be the real Spider-Man, Peter retires to have a baby with Mary Jane Watson Parker, Ben becomes Spider-Man for a short while, it turns out it was all an elaborate lie to torture Peter by the long thought dead Green Goblin who kills Ben for good thus paving the way for Pete to emerge as the one true Spider-Man. It’s a messy, messy plot that last for YEARS!

Also, the whole thing was a convoluted way to end the Spider-Marriage
Comics books are ridiculous

Fast forward twenty real-time years later, during the Clone Conspiracy storyline, where the Jackal returns having seemingly brought many dead Spider-Man supporting characters back to life. It was soon revealed that this Jackal was actually a revived Ben Reilly. Having been restored to life shortly after his death by the real Jackal, Ben was killed and resurrected dozens of times over due to MAD SCIENCE and the process ultimately drove him insane. This lead him to essentially become a new supervillain, which kind of bums me out but whatever.

Even before the storyline finished Marvel announced the first solo series starring Ben in twenty years, which is what we’ll be looking at today. Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider #1 is written by Peter David with art by Mark Bagley, with inks by John Dell and colors by Jason Keith. Though I cannot tell you how excited I am for new Scarlet Spider adventures the fact that Ben was reintroduced as a half-crazed supervillain makes me more than a little wary.

 Full, if cautiously optimistic, review after the jump.

Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Let’s take a quick break from X-Men Month, shall we?

In 2012 Sony rebooted the Spider-Man film franchise with a straight face and zero irony. While the film was successful it was critically mixed. I gave it a pretty good review but even I couldn’t ignore the film’s major problems: it was full of plot holes and unforgivably dark for a Spider-Man film. Regardless The Amazing Spider-Man did well enough to warrant a sequel.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 features the return of Marc Webb, who directed the original, but has a completely new writing team (Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner). This flick was already working through some pretty bad mojo since, let's be honestly, pretty much everyone agreed the first one wasn’t great (but to be fair that is likely mostly due to The Avengers also coming out that summer making every other superhero movie look boring and stupid by comparison). Sony did not help their situation any by their marketing strategy of “let’s show Spidey fighting as many villains as possible” as there are clear scenes of the title character fighting Electro, Green Goblin II, and Rhino with obvious visual cues to Doctor Octopus and the Vulture. This implies that Sony learned absolutely nothing from Spider-Man 3. Allow me to break this down: in order to properly develop a villain in a superhero movie you need time and thus the more villains you feature the less time any of them will have and the more shallow they will feel as characters. Half the reason Spider-Man 3 sucked was because it tried to develop Sandman as a sympathetic character, included the ENTIRE Venom origin which is probably too complex for one film, and feature the Harry Osborn “I’ll kill Peter Parker/Actually I lost my memory/I got it back and now I’m a dick again/Just kidding, here’s my redemption scene” plot line that took up way more of the film than it should have.

Of course this is conjecture. We can’t know exactly happens in a movie until we look at it and judging it before that is ridiculous and short sighted. Then again as I write this intro I HAVE seen this movie…so take that how you want.

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: The following review contains HUGE amounts of spoilers so read at your own risk.]

Summer Movie Preview '14

I’m once again doing a Summer Movie Preview. Summer Movie season is a frustrating magical time of the year where Hollywood churns out its loud big blockbusters. I also tend to spend most of my free time in the movie theater during this season. So last year there were a ton of movies I was super excited for and most of them let me down. I think this has affected me as I now find it hard to get all that enthusiastic about this year’s offerings. That’s kind of sad.

Anyway today we’ll be taking quick looks at movies that have come under my radar that will be hitting theaters this summer (I tend to think of May, not April, as Summer Movie Season). If I missed anything or if there’s a film you’re excited about feel to let me know in the comments.

Click below for more.

300th Blog: Review of Civil War (Marvel Comic)

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 300th blog of Beta is Dead. Four years and countless hours of my life have been thrown into this blog and at 300 entries I’m fairly certain I have enough material for multiple novels. As I mentioned in the last blog today I’ll be celebrating this milestone by reviewing one of Marvel Comics' most important modern crossovers Civil War, which began publication in 2006 and ended in 2007. If there’s one huge problem with today’s comics, especially at Marvel, it’s the seemingly constant stream of big comic events and big status quo altering crossovers. Back in the day these types of things were more spread out and they didn’t always “change everything”. Nowadays there’s at least one big storyline a year (sometimes more!) and when it’s over it they’ve made major changes to the canon only to change everything again by the next one. X-Men: Schism is a fantastic example of this. Schism was supposed to be this HUGE deal, a storyline that divided the X-Men into two warring factions but just a year later all of that was tossed out of the window when Avengers vs. X-Men established a totally different dynamic. Why bother changing up the world if you’re going to just change it again before we get used to it?

Anyway Civil War really is the start of this in the 2000s. It was the next chapter of Marvel’s weird ass agenda of pumping out a bunch of events labeled as one big “epic” saga starting with Avengers Disassembled and ending with Siege. But it was Civil War that really got it rolling as it’s ending shattered the basic foundation of the Marvel Universe (of course most things went completely back to normal a few years later, meaning nothing here really mattered in the long term). For the record this book was written by Mark Millar with art by Steve McNiven.

The question is this: was Civil War a good story? It’s a famous story and a historically relevant and is actually pretty controversial but the quality of book itself isn’t guaranteed. Now the Civil War story was made up of seven issues but there were also numerous tie-ins and side story comics. Since I would have to spend a ton of money to buy all that crap we’re just going to stick with the main miniseries. After all the main book alone should have a complete and satisfying story, right? Right?

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: There are spoilers freely written throughout this review but seeing as this is an eight year old comic you should probably get over it]

Nerd Rage #16: Road to Marvel's Civil War

Ever wonder who would win in a fight?
No? Too bad

This is my 299th blog, which means two things: 1) Holy shit, I’ve written 299 blogs and 2) the next blog will be #300. That’s a pretty big milestone and one we cannot ignore. A while back, maybe a few weeks or months after uploading blog #100, which if you recall was a rant/review of Spider-Man: One More Day, I was trying to figure out comics that I’d want to review for future big milestones. I decided Spider-Man: One Moment in Time would be appropriate for the 200th blog but there was a comic that I really wanted to review but that I felt deserved an equal amount of attention as those two heinously terrible Spider-Man stories. Then I remembered Civil War, a major crossover for Marvel Comics in 2006.

What’s so important about Civil War? So important that I would sit on reviewing it for years? Well it was a major game changer for Marvel Comics that set a particularly dubious status quo for Marvel both in narrative and the way they conducted business. The effects of this book, as far as the storyline went, lasted for the rest of the decade up until 2010’s Heroic Age. In my opinion Civil War is likely the most important storyline from Marvel Comics during the 2000s (House of M would be the other logical choice).

So next time I’ll be reviewing the main Civil War book, which was seven issues. However today I’d like to talk about important points that lead up to this crossover so that we are all on the same page when I review it, much like I did with One More Day and X-Men Schism.

More useless information after the jump.

Nerd Rage #11: Gwen Stacy, Dead or Alive

What? A picture of Gwen Stacy alive and without Spider-Man?
What madness is this?!

I imagine that by now most of you have seen The Amazing Spider-Man (at least if you cared about seeing it). The film has gotten mixed reviews but one thing I think we can all agree on is that Emma Stone was a great female lead in the film, especially compared to Kirsten Dunst in the original Spider-Man trilogy. If you’re not a big comic book fan it’s possible that you were surprised by the fact that Peter Parker was eyeing a blonde girl named Gwen Stacy rather than Mary Jane Watson (even Stone admitted she had no idea who the character was before she took the role). Gwen doesn’t show up in adaptations too often, for actually pretty dumb reasons, but the last few years she’s been appearing a bit more. The Spectacular Spider-Man (the TV show) featured her as a main character and I believe is the first cartoon to do that (the only one time I recall ever seeing her was in one episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series and she was way out of character).

Here’s my point: I was so impressed with Emma Stone’s performance (and the pretty darn good characterization) that I started thinking; why is Gwen Stacy not in the comics today. Well short answer is that she’s dead. She died in 1973 after being killed by Spidey’s archenemy the Green Goblin. The death has stuck all this time, nearly forty years; she’s been dead longer than Marvel’s target audience has been alive. Today I want to talk about Gwen, about her character, about why creators are hesitant to use her and whether or not it’s finally time to bring her back into the fold.

Before we get to the good stuff I want to make it clear that I’m still a fan of the Peter/MJ relationship and am far more interested in seeing that restored than anything to do with Gwen. I didn’t grow up with Spider-Man dating Gwen; I grew up with Spider-Man married to Mary Jane. This is just 1) a hypothetical situation that doesn’t mean anything and 2) even if it’s a possibility with the Spider-Marriage looking to be gone for good it would be a bit close minded of me to not revisit this character.

Let’s learn about Gwen Stacy after the jump.

200th Blog: Review of Spider-Man - One Moment in Time

Two hundred blogs. Woooo! The sheer amount of words I’ve written in 199 blogs is actually very staggering to me, as I can’t even seem to finish a writing novel. Still I’m very proud that I’ve managed to stick with the blog this long. To celebrate I wanted to do a follow-up to my 100th post which, if you recall, was a very detailed review of Spider-Man: One More Day, one of the worst comic books I ever had the displeasure of reading and the reason I haven’t bought any new Spider-Man comics since (well, at least until today’s comic).

I talked about One More Day to great degree in both the 100th blog and the prologue in the 99th blog so I don’t want to repeat myself too bad. However if you’re too lazy to check them out basically the comic involved Spider-Man and his wife Mary Jane Watson making a deal with Mephisto, the closest entity Marvel Comics has to Satan, in order to save the life of his dying Aunt May whom was shot because Spidey was stupid enough to reveal his secret identity to the world and then decide to betray Iron Man thus losing any protection his family had received and causing them to become fugitives. The book was really, really poorly written, extremely contrived and rushed, and ultimately an unsatisfying end to Spidey and MJ’s twenty-year marriage for those of us who were fans of it. Not to mention the idea of Spider-Man making a deal with the devil so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his own follies kind of pretty much kills the character’s integrity for me.

The comic concluded with Peter Parker and MJ ‘s marriage never happening (in fact they were broken up, actually), his identity again now a secret, his web shooters restored (the years prior to this he had developed “organic webbing”), and Harry Osborn, long dead son of the Green Goblin and Peter’s best friend, suddenly alive and well. So obviously there were questions that we had with this new status that we all really wanted answers to, including:

-What changes to Spider-Man canon have happened now that the marriage has ben retconed out of existence?

-What happened Spider-Man’s organic webbing? And did the extra powers he gained in The Other storyline hold up?

-How is Harry Osborn still alive? Did he ever become the Green Goblin? And since the Clone Saga turned out to be a(n extremely convoluted) revenge plot by Harry’s father because of his son’s death does this mean that that storyline never actually happened?

Pictured: Peter Parker at the end of One More Day. Probably

In 2010, three years after the taste of One More day had started to wash away, then Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada (the architect of One More Day and outspoken opponent of the Spider-Marriage) decided to release a new Spider-Man story to address questions following the controversial comic. No, not the questions above (though to be fair some of them were answered during the post-OMD Amazing Spider-Man comic) but rather the question of “why did Peter and Mary Jane never get married?” Which is actually really annoying because I’m not sure who the hell wanted that question answered. I mean, people who were pro-marriage were not going to want to relive the crap from OMD and people who were enjoying the Brand New Day storyline (post-OMD Amazing Spider-Man) probably didn’t want to have their regular comic interrupted by rehashing old shit. So, because absolutely no one asked for it, Spider-Man: One Moment in Time hit the stands.

Written by Quesada with art from Paolo Rivera it covers The Amazing Spider-Man #638-641. As a warning this review will likely be pretty a pretty nerdy and passionate rant. It likely won’t be as bad as my One More Day review but if you aren’t really into the whole “Angry Dork” thing you might want to wait until blog #201 comes out.

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: Spoilers abound in this review, as I pretty much stopped giving a crap about five pages into this mess]

Review: The Amazing Spider-Man (Film)

Before we get into this review I want to share with you guys a cool webseries called “Malice”. It’s a horror themed show starring a cute girl who wears a rabbit hat a lot of the time. It’s doing a Kickstarter campaign for a second season. I urge you to check it out here. You’ll find all the info you need and if you like what you see please donate. I’d really like this thing to pull through and right now it ain’t doing so great.

Anyway, let’s move on to the actual blog.

The Amazing Spider-Man is one part movie executive spite and one part morally ambiguous cash cow. It is a reboot to the Spider-Man film franchise despite the film series only being ten years old and the most recent film being five years ago. As I understand it Sam Raimi, director of all three original Spider-Man films, was contracted to make Spider-Man 4 (and possibly also Spider-Man 5, depending on what website you heard it from). However Sony apparently demanded the unreasonable release date of Summer 2011, something that Raimi was simply not able to do. Somewhere in pre-production this issue caused both parties to part ways. Rather than hire a new director to make the planned movie they decided to cut their losses and hired Marc Webb to do a reboot…that would have to come out Summer of 2012 (pretty much rendering the entire damn argument moot).

It does sound pretty bad but to be honest we may have dodged a bullet. What little details we know about Spider-Man 4 make it sounds a bit annoying. The villain was supposed to be The Vulture played by John Malkovich and that would have been awesome except that the logical villain would have been The Lizard since his human identity, Curt Connors (played Dylan Baker), had been a supporting character for the last two movies. Also Anna Hathaway was tagged to play The Black Cat Felicia Hardy, but instead being the more familiar version of the character she would instead be the Vultures’ daughter and become a new character called The Vulturess! Yeah. That’s stupid as hell. (Though I do appreciate the irony that with this film cancellation Hathaway was free to play the extremely similar character of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises) So in the really days of the reboot’s pre-production I repeatedly told people we were better off because Raimi’s movie were clearly going down a weird path.

That is until the trailers started coming out. Pretty much every preview of this film made it look like a poorly produced joyless melodrama. It didn’t help that rumors were floating around that Sony hated the final product and were hiring a new writing team to do the sequel. The Amazing Spider-Man had an extremely uphill battle. Does it succeed as a proper reboot or does it fail to recapture the magic of its predecessor?

Full review after the jump.

Summer Movie Preview

(I forgot to mention earlier but I have a poll on side of the page.  If you haven't yet please take the time to answer it if you would be so inclined.)

For me at least Summer Movie Season starts in May. The summer of 2012 will be a good one of us nerdy folk as there’s a lot of sci-fi and comic book based flicks coming out. Today I decided to compile a list of some films coming out that appeal to my dorky sense and what exactly I think about them at this point. This is just for fun I’m not seriously reviewing these movies right now and I may have missed something. For the most part these are the films that have been on my radar. Notice of all these films the Fantastic Four reboot is missing. Back some time ago a new movie starring the First Family of Marvel was announced around the same time as the Spider-Man reboot and I was actually pretty excited to hear that. I guess while Amazing Spider-Man was fast tracked Fox kind of dropped the ball with the FF.

Click below for more.

Nerd Rage #6b: Review of Spider-Man - One More Day (100th Blog)

This is a little late than I wanted but nevertheless we’ve reached the 100^th blog of Beta is Dead.  I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually reach that many blogs but thankfully things have remained fun for me.  In any case I wanted to do something big for this occasion, thus Spider-Man: One More Day.  What better way to celebrate the current longevity of my blog than to review one of the most controversial comic book storylines this past decade?

If you haven’t done so already make sure you check out the Nerd Rage #6a from earlier this week where I went into detail about the back-story of the comic.  In 2007 Marvel Comics decided to run a storyline in the pages of their three current ongoing Spider-Man titles Amazing Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.  Based on where the comic are now I assume that there were three main goals attached to this storyline: 1) Undo or otherwise downplay all the various and controversial changes to Spider-Man’s nature over the past few years (Including his organic web-shooters and several extra powers he gained).  2) Set up the comics for a new direction and new status quo (i.e. Brand New Day, which also saw the cancellation of the two extra Spider-Man titles while Amazing started running three times a month rather than just monthly). 3) To finally, FINALLY rid the world of that annoying Spider-Marriage that has plagued readers for two decades thus raising the quality of the stories for current and future readers.  How would it do that?  HELL IF I KNOW IT’S MAGIC OR SOMETHING!!!!!!

One More Day was written by J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5 and a familiar face if you’re a regular visitor of this blog, and boy oh boy is that man not a stranger to controversial Spider-Man storylines having written Amazing for the last few years (See: “The Other”, “Sins Past”).  However this comic is the baby of artist and then-Editor-in-chief Joe “We Don’t Have to Explain It” Quesada, a vocal opponent of the marriage who has seemingly made an enemy out of many fans due to some choice words before, during and after One More Day was running.

Anyway its important to remember that this article is not about whether ending the marriage was a good move or not, nor is it about whether the marriage needed to end in the first place.  This article is a review of the comic itself to determine if it was any good not, which is the most important part anyway.  That sad I want to point out that Mary Jane Watson is one of the better female characters in superhero comics and certainly one of my personal favorites but she’s constantly a victim of bad characterization from writers who don’t “get her” and often used as a scapegoat for their own limitations (It’s easier to say “Mary Jane is a bad character” than to admit you can’t properly write women).  Her exile from the comic books, and eventual demotion, means Spider-Man has lost his most important supporting character and hasn’t really offered a decent replacement.   We’re all slightly worse off now.

Anyway enough of that crap.  Its reviewing time!  Click below for the full review.

[WARNING: There’s pretty much nothing but spoilers after the jump.  So if you haven’t read One More Day and would like to you’ll pretty much have everything ruined for you if you click below.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!]

Nerd Rage #6a: Road to One More Day

It's Finally Time...

Look, we all knew this was coming sooner or later.  All those snide remarks about Spider-Man and his (lack of) marriage for the past year; I was going to talk about Spider-Man: One More Day eventually and since it’s such a hot topic even today I figured why not do so when the blog reaches 100 posts.  Of course this isn’t anything new as practically everyone with internet access has voiced an opinion about the comic since it hit stands in 2007 but even so if I went on a rant about Cassandra Cain and no one screamed at me one would think I’d be okay here.  We’ll see.  So later this week (Hopefully) I’ll be posting a review of the graphic novel that collects the infamous four issue storyline.  I can’t claim I won’t be biased , of course, but I’ll at least try to give the book a fair shake .

But there’s a problem.  Superhero comic books are tricky in that non-fans who may be interested in checking them out are often confused by the content due to the fact that there’s decades’ worth of continuity to them.  So what’s common knowledge for me and my buddies won’t necessarily be common knowledge for, let’s say, an anime fan who usually just comes to the blog for anime reviews.  So before we can talk about One More Day we need to talk about what led to it and why it happened.  And, because I know that the review is going to be long as hell, I decided to “pre-blog” here so that you won’t have to read a giant novel worth of text next time.  We’re swimming in pretty nerdy waters, folks, and I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to avoid the site for the next week.

More after the jump, if you dare.

The War of 2012

The cast of Avengers celebrating Ed Norton's firing

Assuming we’re not all killed by a world destroying apocalypse that year it looks like 2012 may be a good year to be a Marvel Comics fan…or a bad one. Obviously I’ve talked about the Avengers movie in great detail in the past but I’ve since learned that, as of right now, reboots of the Spider-Man and Fantastic Four film franchises are scheduled to for a 2012 release meaning that three different studios will release three different movies from Marvel Comics that summer (or so). This is either of good thing or a bad thing, but since we know almost nothing about the reboots themselves, just the upsetting legacies of the franchises themselves, we can’t say a whole lot this early. Now I could write a long essay about how Sony ruined the Spider-Man movies due to their constant meddling in director Sam Raimi’s vision (But to be fair everything I heard Raimi was doing for a third sequel sounded incredibly stupid) or how the FF movies were some of the worst embarrassments to the genre this past decade that failed on almost every conceivable intellectual level…but then I’d be here all day.

Pictured: Popular Well Respected Historically Relevant

In fact let’s ignore Spider-Man because, well, I don’t give a crap about that series. I do find it interesting that we’re looking at an Aevngers VS. Fantastic Four scenario. But like I said we don’t know much about it. There are some rumors, most of which I don’t care about, save the casting of Doctor Doom. I love Doctor Doom; he’s my favorite villain in superhero comics after all. Watching his portrayal in the two previous films was kind of like watching a train wreck where the passengers were all clowns; hilariously morbid, but ultimately only fun to watch if you’re disturbed. The current rumor pegs Stephen Moyer as the man 20^th Century Fox’s choice to play the ruler of Latveria. Moyer is the male lead in the hit show about vampires who are slightly less ridiculous than the ones from Twilight called True Blood. Moyer spends most of the time on that show pretending to be American and graphically boinking Anna Paquin (Vampire celibacy is for wankers).

"Bah! Doom has no time for blogs!"

He’s a good enough actor that I’m not dreading him being cast but not good enough to make me think he’s suited for the role. If anything is finalized we may well see. Anyway the fact is that with three big Marvel films coming out in the same year it’s an understatement to say it’s is something that any good comic geek should be very excited about. I wonder if I’ll be eating those words come the end of summer of that year (See: Ghost Rider, Daredevil, The Spirit, Superman Returns. Or better yet: don’t).

Again this assumes the world isn’t destroyed. We’ll see.