Friday, January 5, 2024

DCEU Blu-ray catch up (and other stuff)


Got these today.
Just finished up tonight.
I'm all caught up to the DCEU now.
..until I can get out to see Aquaman 2 in the theaters sometime.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)


AKA Shazam 2.
Gotta say I liked this best of the lot.
It's definitely a helluva lot better than "Black Adam".

It couldn't recapture the perfect magical recipe of the first one, but that didn't make it suck.
I thought it was a lot of fun.
As usual, critics were unfair.
I think spoiled babies are making the "superhero fatigue" horseshit a self-fulfilling prophecy by negative willpower.
If this had dropped just 1-2 years after Shazam 1, people would have loved it.
There would have been mumbled nitpicking from the few usual sourpusses, but not full-blown whining.

I think it's great. I would genuinely recommend this one.
It's no "Guardians Of The Galaxy 1" or "Avengers" or "Ragnarok" but it's fun as Hell.
Give it a whirl.


Blue Beetle (2023)


A lot of fun; still better than "Black Adam", but I liked Shazam 2 (above) a smidge more.

It's a frappe of a lot of influences; Iron Man, The Guyver, Venom, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Cronos, we've seen all of this before.
Well..."we" meaning movie addicts like me.
Casual movie viewers won't notice.
Even as a human encyclopedia, I still found the specific mixture and the supporting cast to be fun.
But, I seem to be a mutant among human encyclopedias.
Most of them get pissy.
Anyway!
If you can see both, give them both a shot. If you can see only one, see Shazam 2.

And now, the aforementioned other stuff....


Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts (2023)


Better than, worse than, good as Bumblebee?
Apples and oranges.
This has a different style.
Pete Davidson as Mirage is the core hero Autobot of this one, and having a jokey verbal 'bot instead of 'Bee gives it a different energy.
That, and it being the 90's instead of 80's, and having a huger globetrotting James Bond scale rather than the small character story that was the first one.
I liked it well enough. Runs a bit long, you'll be watching the clock for the last half hour, but overall, it's a satisfying Transformers story.
I mean, Transformers was never Shakespeare, but they never pretended to be.
The robot characters are pretty much themselves, and the human characters aren't punchable.
If you grew up on the shows, and/or the comics, you'll be happy.
IMHO.

Better than Bayformers?
Oh, fuck yeah.

Better than, worse than, good as Transformers '86?
Now THAT's hard to rank!
Pete Davidson is no Ryan Reynolds, but he's a shitload funnier than fuckin' Wheelie!
Peter Dinklage as Scourge I swear sounds like the announcer/narrator for the old cartoon.
Colman Domingo is a pretty good Unicron, but his lines aren't as juicy as what Orson Welles got.
Colman could have delivered the goods, we've seen him be deliciously evil on FTWD, he just needed punchier writing for this.
The soldier baddies are all pretty good, but we don't get anything as eerily creepy as the Quintessons.
I'll take Noah's little brother over Danny Witwicky any day.
I'll take Noah over Danny or Spike.
Elena has no analog in the Transformers universe, but...she's basically Velma.
Yep, we get Velma in this movie.

Yeah, as with ranking against Bumblebee, apples and oranges.


And, Amazon did indeed fuck up, I got SNW on DVD instead of Blu-ray, and had to swap it out.

And, that's all of it!


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