It's Official: Dragon Ball Will Suck

The Spider-Man teaser poster back in 2001 was a picture of Spider-Man climbing up the side of a skyscraper. The X-Men teaser poster was a picture of the X-Men logo. Every time Superman has had a teaser poster, it's simply the "S" shield. You'd think that it would be a pretty hard to screw that up, right? All you have to do is show something iconic that's related to the upcoming movie. Fans of whatever it is will take one look at it and instantly have to change pants. Generally, the it should be the cheapest poster you have to produce, because you usually only need a symbol of some sort. It's purpose is to excite the fan base, kinda of like having unknown minor-league politicians trash Barack Obama at the Republican National Convention. You're only speaking a language that the die-hards understand.

This is the "Dragon Ball" teaser poster and any fan of "Dragon Ball" can tell you that it evokes more memories of "The Avengers" remake than "Dragon Ball." Allegedly, that's supposed to be Bulma. I guess her trademark blue hair didn't test well with the focus groups.

Believe it or not, I don't go into these things with an instantly negative attitude, but when the first details I get don't even come close to what the original was, it's hard to stay positive. When my first peek at Optimus Prime in "Transformers" only made me believe that a robot could have an eating disorder, I knew then that it wasn't going to end well. When the first word I heard about the script for "Alien vs. Predator" was that it would take place on present day Earth and focus on a bunch of humans, I knew that a disaster was about to take place. The only time I was ever fooled with when "The Hulk" came out. I should have known something was wrong when the producers talked about the movie being a psychological examination of the character, when all they needed to say was how much federal funding the movie's world would need to recover when they finally get the Hulk to change back into Bruce.

And now, with "Dragon Ball," the first look at the movie is a generic photo of a woman who I wouldn't have been able to identify if she hadn't already been labeled by the website i stole the photo from. I swear, it's like the first photos I saw of "Street Fighter" in that issue of GamePro back in 1994. It's like Jean-Claude Van Damme calling himself "Commander Guile" all over again, so I expect this movie to make Vegeta a wisdom dispensing, traveling photographer from the Australia. I'd rather they didn't make a "Dragon Ball" movie at all and they're not exactly striking while the iron's hot. They stopped showing new Dragon Ball Z episodes in, what? 2002? Really, Fox, you don't have to do this for our benefit. We're not looking forward to this at all.

I can only hope that the movie still manages to closely replicate the so-called storytelling method of having a character pose for an entire episode and have everyone stand around him and talk. Maybe I'm just not savvy enough to understand that this show blazed a new method of building tension or maybe it was a great sociological experiment that allowed the producers to see how little animation could be put into a cartoon and still have people continue to watch, much like "Cartoon Planet's" test pattern episode back in 1996. I've got so little faith in the movie now, that I expect them to keep this aspect of the show and discard the brutal fights that made the show famous to begin with.

"Dragon Ball" will be released in 2009, so they've got a little time left to try to make it stop looking like a sequel to "Double Dragon."

Dead Men Don't Sell Movie Tickets

Warner Bros. "The Dark Knight" has brought more money than was wasted making "Waterworld" and "Last Action Hero." It's critically acclaimed and popular, and didn't even need Oscar buzz and a Celine Dion song to get it over the top. But the common line of thinking seems to be that Heath Ledger's overdose is what made everyone go check out "The Dark Knight," which means that basically, for us to see a good movie in droves, we have to be prompted by the same instinct that made people watch "Jackass." And since I now have internet access again, let me shut that down right now. Let me list the REAL reasons why "The Dark Knight" brung in all this cash.

1. Ticket price inflation.
I paid $10 to go see the damn movie. Back in 1989 when I went to go see "Batman," I paid $1.25. I never was good at percentages, but that's like, a 1000% increase, which means the first Batman would have had to sell five times as many tickets just to reach the same level. I think I paid about $5 or $6 to go see "Titanic," the reigning box-office champ, back in 1997. In 11 years, ticket prices have doubled, so it's just a matter of time that a movie blows by that record, because unlike the music industry, they don't count tickets sold. They count the box office. That's why "The Dark Knight" only leads the original "Star Wars" by about $18 million, despite the fact that "Star Wars" came out 31 years ago. Back then, five bucks could get a seven-person family into the movies with change left over for snacks. So when we get to the inevitable point of paying $20 a ticket, probably sometime in 2010, judging by the current rate of inflation, even "Ghost Dad" will be able to top $600 million.

2. It was shown more times, on more screens, than any movie, ever.
It was shown on 4,366 screens, which means that they were counting art house theaters and the really big TVs at celebrities' houses. So even at reasonable ticket prices, if a movie is showing at least four times every three hours in almost 4,400 locations, I'd say it stands a good chance of breaking records. It's like Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals last week. Sure, he won all eight races, but he had eight chances to get eight gold medals. Everyone else only gets a shot at one gold, unless they're in synchronized diving, in which case, they stood no chance against the underage, Chinese man-machines.

3. There wasn't anything else playing.
"Iron Man" and "Indiana Jones" went on first, because they were smart. There wasn't another movie after "The Dark Knight" that stood a chance. I know there were a lot of people who thought that Brendan Fraser was up to the challenge, but there's a reason why no one listens to those people, and it's probably the Down's Syndrome they were afflicted with at birth. As a result, "The Dark Knight" stayed at the top of the charts for four weeks.

4. It wasn't his death, it was his well-received final performance that made people watch. There's a difference.
Because let's face it, I don't remember there being a media blitz for "The Crow" when Brandon Lee died. Or how many of you went to see the Aaliyah's tour de force, "Queen of the Damned?" Now that the three of you have put your hands down, it begins to come clear that it wasn't Heath Ledger's death that made everyone go to the theater. The hype around his performance was already starting before he died. There was a curiosity factor involved, because people wanted to see Heath Ledger completely disappear into this character, not because they thought, "Hey, maybe they'll accidentally leave some death footage in." To further prove my point, how many of you really believe that Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes' deaths are going to up the gross on "Soul Men?" Hey, two of them died...the gross should go up twice as much!

5. It was a good damn movie.
But that couldn't have been a factor, right? Not when the co-star of the movie died. Because a well timed death makes all the difference. It was only a comic book movie so good that calling it a "comic book movie" is really selling it short. It was a good movie, period.

At least the execs at Warner Bros. know that it wasn't Heath Ledger's death that caused the movie's success. Unfortunately for all of us, they believe it was the dark tone of the movie that made it so popular. And with these people being the copycats that they are, they want to apply this dark tone to all of their other comic book properties. Because nothing screams popular like a realistic, dark and brooding Superman. Only this time, when he's stalking Lois in the elevator, he'll have to do it with binoculars from behind the bushes like a real stalker. Here's hoping he gets arrested like a real stalker, too.

I Can't Believe I Rented It - The Punisher

I Can’t Believe I Rented It – The Punisher

Lethal Weapon. Desperado. The Terminator. What do these three movies have in common? They all did “The Punisher” better than “The Punisher” did.

How hard is it to make a movie called “The Punisher?” All he has to do for about an hour and a half is run around and shoot people. It should be a gun lover’s dream. If you like murderous psychopaths running around a metropolitan area with powerful firearms, then you should like “The Punisher.” But director Jonathan Hensleigh thought that instead of a kill-spree, we would prefer a half-assed soap opera between the bad guys and his version of “The Real World: Liberty City,” featuring Fat Neck and The Kid With Too Many Piercings. Watch the hilarity ensue when their homicidal neighbor almost kills a guy right in front of them.

The movie didn’t start off that bad, because almost everything I would have changed was nit-picking, but things took a turn for the stupid when the Punisher, a trained military killing machine, gave up his tactical advantage of being dead by confronting his cop friends in broad daylight, in front of the courthouse, while they were surrounded by hundreds of reporters. As soon as he did that, I turned to my girlfriend and said, “I see why people didn’t like this movie.”

Things were pretty tolerable until he did that, and it was then that I began to wonder, “Didn’t he watch Lethal Weapon?” I stayed in that mode for the rest of the movie, because Martin Riggs was a better Punisher than Frank Castle. This Punisher had buddies and was almost like the wacky fix-it man down the hall. There was no secret about who he was and it didn’t seem to bother anyone that he was a trained killer who was out for revenge. This was Happy Sunshine Punisher, with a lovely day-glo playset because almost everything he did took place during the day. On a positive note, he was completely wasted for most of it.

I started pondering about what a person would really like to see in a Punisher movie. I’d imagine that there would be some creative gunfights, some torture, and I don’t know, an execution of revenge. If someone knocked off my whole family, I’d probably try to get some getback, too. I just hope the narrator to my life wouldn’t think that anything less than bloody massacres and full-scale warfare would be the right way to go.

Eventually, this movie gets to the part where The Punisher screws his balls back on and gets to killing folk, but before you get there, you have to wade through some half-ass friendship with some people whose names I can’t be bothered to remember and some chick who wants to get down, but he can’t because he’s, you know…grieving. This broad is so selfish that she’s trying to get in his pants even though he just watched 40 members of his family die violent deaths just five months ago, and he’s busy trying to drink his way into Heaven to be with them. Personally, I’m glad he turned down the poon, because I’m so tired of people forcing love interests into comic book movies. He’s a one-man revenge squad, but he’s got time to blow this chick’s back out?

I swear, if he had kissed her, I would have turned the movie off right then and there.

Luckily, he didn’t, because I would have missed Big Daddy Cool Diesel coming on screen and beating the crap out of Thomas Jane. The movie had long since lost my attention by this point, because the soap opera had started with Frank tricking the main bad guy into thinking that his best friend was sleeping with his wife, and the bad guys know that Frank is alive, but can’t find him, but suddenly they do, and start sending assassins from around the world to Frank’s house. See, it’s stupid because Frank is supposed to be the assassin shooting up the bad guy’s house. I know he spends most of the movie drunk, but what the fuck’s he waiting on, for the bad guy to get his costume out of the cleaners? He’s supposed to be getting revenge, but he’s at the fucking lunch counter eating soup, watching the assassin come in and sing him a song?

I’m not making that part up. An assassin comes in, pulls out a guitar and serenades The Punisher. He doesn’t even shoot the guy. This sort of thing never happens to El Mariachi.

The movie just kind of goes on like that. It tries to add things like romance and humor and bullshit to a movie and a character that’s naturally dark and violent. The Punisher is not a deep character. It’s a wonder that a character this simple has lasted so long, but he has. And since he has, when a movie is made about him, it should just involve those simple aspects: Guns and killing stuff with those guns. At night. I guess all of it was an effort to try to make the Punisher interesting, but no one wants the Punisher to be interesting. People want the Punisher to kill people.

Obviously, the right people aren’t getting reamed for these movies, because Jonathan Hensleigh should have never been allowed to make this one. Did producer Avi Arad actually have his eyes open when he read the script? Because at some point during the creative process, someone should have read that script and said, “Wait, what? How does a fake love triangle with the bad guy, his wife, and the gay best friend keep people from not walking out on our movie?” From start to finish, there should have been people dying, starting with the Punisher’s family and ending with the person responsible. Having said all of that, I’d like to go ahead and fill out an application for director of the next comic book movie. At least I know my movie wouldn’t piss me off.

Look, no one looks to the Punisher for emotional depth or because they can relate, they’re reading him because this guy is fucked up and he’s going see to it that he isn’t fucked up alone. The movie should be along those same lines. This isn’t Spider-Man. Frank should have been out stapling men’s nuts to their foreheads, not having an awkward Thanksgiving dinner with the rejects that live in his building.

For God's Sake, They're Bringing Back "Knight Rider"

As if you didn't need further evidence that Hollywood has run out of ideas ("The Bionic Woman," The Bratz movie, the Hot Wheels movie, so on and so forth), here comes the latest remake of an old TV show: "Knight Rider." Finally, an excuse to try to make that "whoosh" sound with your mouths again.

For those who weren't self-aware in the 80's, "Knight Rider" was a show about David Hasselhoff and his talking car. The show wasn't about much more than that. It was simply an excuse to show a black Trans Am driving really fast and jumping over stuff, with the help of a "Turbo Boost" button. Allegedly, they were supposed to be solving crimes on the show, but I never once saw David Hasselhoff fight anybody or do anything on the show that didn't involve showing his hairy chest and sleeping with women. He didn't even drive the car most of the time, because KITT was smarter than he was.

I personally believe that it was created solely to capitalize on the popularity of "The Dukes of Hazzard," which was a show about TWO guys in a Dodge Charger drove real fast and jumped over stuff. Whatever their intent was, it worked, because I was glued to my TV every week when Knight Rider came on. I enjoyed this show so much that I even watched "Turbo Teen" to get my "Knight Rider" fix, a cartoon about a kid who turned into a talking car when he got wet.

Because the show was so deep and layered, and because there was such a demand for more Knight Rider after the failed "Knight Rider 2000," "Knight Rider 2010," and "Team Knight Rider" pilots, they've decided to bring it back. Hurrah for us. The lead role (the unnamed son of Michael Knight) is being filled by "All My Children" actor Justin Breuning. The abundance of testosterone in my body won't allow me to know who this person is. David Hasselhoff will be making appearances, because after all, nothing is as good as it could be if David Hasselhoff isn't in it, and this casting alone will make sure that the show has Germany's ever-crucial support.

Thanks to Hollywood's willingness to literally scrape the bottom of the barrel for ideas, we should go ahead and look forward to the following shows to be brought back: "The A-Team," "Airwolf," and "Nightboat, the Crime Solving Boat."

The Reboot Movie

A recent trend has begun to take over the recent trend of making comic book movies: The reboot movie. The reboot movie is what happens when you let your comic book movie get out into the public eye without having kept an eye on your maverick director, who wouldn't sign the contract unless he could create his "vision."

What the director fails to realize is that no one gives a crap about his "vision." What the fans want is someone to slap their comic books on the big screen. Losing sight of this is what led to the celluloid afterbirth known as "Batman and Robin," quite possibly the worst comic book movie ever, and the movie that put the fatal shots in the head of the Batman movie franchise. It took eight years before Warner Bros. put out "Batman Begins," mainly because they wanted to make sure America forgot about the Bat-nipples and Arnold Schwarzenegger's dialogue.

While it worked to let Christopher Nolan go in his room, play with his toys, and bang out a movie without studio executives saying things to him like, "his costume looks too faggy (an actual Jon Peters quote, albeit for Superman)," or "can you add some elves and monsters like in 'Lord of the Rings,' (an actual Jon Peters sentiment)" it completely failed when they let Bryan Singer retreat to his "Fortress of Man Worship," secretly ogle Brandon Routh through a telephoto lens and call it a movie. As a result, the franchise reboot was dead on arrival, after they worked so hard to bring it back to life, having seen it die on that fateful day in 1987 when Mark Pillow walked out of the dressing room dressed as the Nuclear Man.

Now, Superman is one of those evergreen franchises that can always make money for DC, and they know that a good Superman movie can easily bring in $300 million domestic. Why should they have to wait another 20 years to make another Superman movie just because Bryan Singer couldn't resist making Superman a creepy, deadbeat dad? Why not just pretend that the last movie never even happened?

Just because Singer was so distracted by Routh's package that he forgot that Superman was capable of throwing punches in between knocking up Lois and staring at her in the shower doesn't mean that some other, more talented director won't get it right. And apparently, that's the mentality that Warner Bros. is going with...except Singer is still the director. They just won't let him live betwixt Richard Donner's asscheeks in this outing.

It's a trend that's taking place over at Marvel, as well, where they're trying to repair TWO botched franchises. Hopefully, they won't stop with just these two, because Daredevil doesn't have to have Ben Affleck in the costume to make it work.

In 2008, "Punisher: War Zone" will be released, starring Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle. Ray Stevenson replaces Thomas Jane in the title role and Lee Alexander replaces Jonathan Heinsleigh as a director who's actually familiar with The Punisher. This isn't the first time that a Punisher movie has been made, but if "Punisher: War Zone" turns out to be good it'll be the first time they didn't screw it up. I still fail to see what's so hard about making a movie where the hero is a deranged killer with a van full of guns who drives around town shooting criminals. I used to believe that not even Dolph Lundgren could screw that up, but I was wrong.

Also, in 2008, "The Incredible Hulk" will be released, starring, and apparently, written by, Ed Norton. That might have been too many commas, but what really matters is that this movie needed to be made because the first one was so bad that people at Marvel have felt the need to reassure the public that this one won't suck. Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios' President of Production, said and I quote, "The Hulk movie will be different from this one because this one will be good." The sound you just heard was Feige slapping Ang Lee across the face.

Even the last James Bond movie, "Casino Royale," is considered a reboot. "Star Trek" has a reboot coming sometime down the road. Rumor has it that "Street Fighter" is getting a do-over. Sometimes, this is the best thing you can do for a franchise. You know, just make a movie and hope that no one remembers how badly you screwed up the last one. Maybe the producers of "Resident Evil" or "The Mummy" will read this and take notes. It's never too late to correct your horrible, rage-inducing mistakes.

"Superman Returns" writers shown the door

The world is going to be shocked to discover that Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, the writers who tanked the Superman franchise before it even got off the ground by forgetting to write action and excitement into "Superman Returns," have opted not to write the sequel to 2006's historically bad celluloid turd, according to Variety. They also reported dancing in the streets, or at least in comic book stores, before ambulances were called to provide oxygen for the out-of-shape shut-ins who frequent these establishments.

The word is that Warner Bros. wants to start fresh with the next movie anyway, expressing complete surprise that fans didn't accept Superman being a baby daddy, not throwing a single punch, not doing anything "super," being portrayed as a stalker, and Lex Luthor not being a threat to anyone. Bryan Singer was reportedly pleased with how the movie turned out because Brandon Routh was "delicious."

Here's hoping this leads to a cleaning of house, starting with Bryan Singer, and followed by Kate Bosworth and Kevin Spacey, having their roles as Lois Lane and Lex Luthor being filled by actors who actually possess the qualities to perform those roles.

Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Nuff said.

Jackie Chan and Jet Li are going to be in a movie together. If you have any follow up comments to that, I couldn't hear them over the sound of my own pleasure moans.

Apparently, this is old news, but since I was killing myself with work back in April (when IGN first reported the name of this project, it must have slipped by me. Working 18 hours days can do that to a guy.

At any rate, the movie is called "The Forbidden Kingdom," but it doesn't matter what it's called, because I'm gonna see it regardless. They could call this movie "The World's Most Funniest Prison Rape Scenes" and I would still go see it. I'd walk right up to the box-office window and in my loudest voice, say "One ticket for the bloody asshole movie."

And if that wasn't enough, the movie's fight scenes are being choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping, the guy who made Keanu Reeves a man in "The Matrix," and the guy who contributed to my ongoing love affair with Ziyi Zhang. He also made Donnie Yen slightly more famous than Rongguang Yu, but much less famous than Chow Yun-Fat.

The only problem I can foresee is this "family film" label, which can be the kiss of death for something like this. I'm already actively boycotting the "PG-13 comedy," but can being family friendly hurt this movie that much? I can't imagine anyone even wanting to see a movie with Jackie Chan and Jet Li if they weren't going to throw down and I'm sure the studio knows this.

No one goes to see their movies to see their layered performances. Jet Li almost thought they did, but word must have gotten back to him that his movie career was going to end right after "Fearless" if he didn't go back to kicking guys through walls. The word will travel fast if these two guys don't deliver what we want to see: Both of them, beating the pure crap out of each other.

"The Forbidden Kingdom" will be released in September 2008.