I just got back from seeing the media preview for AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR in Nashville, TN. It’s a massive cosmic comic book opera. It’s as psychedelic as DOCTOR STRANGE if not more so. It’s also an amazing culmination of stories since the MCU launched with the first IRON MAN film.

I suggest you see all the Marvel movies before seeing this one. If you’ve missed a few take a sec to fill in the blanks. You can enjoy this film as long as you’ve seen most of the MCU films, but I can’t imagine a better time or a better reason to catch up.

Not only do all the stories add up here, but everything these films have taught us about bringing these comics to the big screen really comes together in this epic which gives the MCU its THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.

Here’s my review…

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So I saw the new Spider-Man film at a preview in Nashville tonight. I’m not sure when the review embargo gets lifted, but I’m not going to offer any judgments or spoilers here. If you saw Tom Holland’s turn as the web-slinger in his extended cameo in Captain America: Civil War you’ve got a good sense of what to expect from this Marvel Studios summer tentpole. If you liked the new Spidey in the Civil War flick you’ll love the new Spider-Man movie. If this new take on Spidey turned you off in the last Captain America outing you’ll really hate the new Spider-Man movie.

The new flick doubles-down on the notion of Spider-Man as a young teenager and it’s a fun and fresh take — the original Peter Parker was introduced to the world as a 17 year old, but in the current Marvel universe, Parker was bit by the spider that changed his life at the age of 15, and this latest iteration begins shortly after that fateful sting and the events in Civil War. But the thing I liked best about the new Spider-Man is how it shouted out the animated series from 1967, and how it felt like a love letter to the gritty New York City that those old cartoons captured so well: the classic cartoon theme song is quoted in the opening credits and the phrase “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” had me recalling the title sequence from the old cartoon which is also quoted in the lyrics of the theme song. The film also highlights music from the Ramones, and spotlights old school NYC icons like the Staten Island Ferry and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island — all icons of pre-Giuliani Gotham when New York stood for gritty toughness instead of bundled derivatives and the effete pleasures of locally-sourced, artisanal, small batch conspicuous consumption.

Check out old school Spidey in old school New York with this playlist of a ton of episodes from the 1967 animated series that even predates me. Even if you don’t have the time to watch this right now, just leave it on in the background to dig the flat-out jams that accompanied this funkiest-ever Spider-Man…

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Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the Captain America film premiered? No, I’m not talking about the latest pair of franchise-within-a-franchise films in Marvel’s contemporary cinematic empire. I’m talking about a direct-to-video version of the Steve Rogers story that took liberties with the shield-slinger’s legend to deliver an environmental message back in the days of grunge. Here’s the Wiki…

The film was given very negative reviews, holding a 9% ‘rotten’ rating on the film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 11 critics (all of whom wrote reviews a decade after release).

In one of the few contemporaneous reviews, Entertainment Weekly critic Frank Lovece wrote, “The movie isn’t merely wrong for kids — it opens in pre-war Italy with a sequence in Italian with subtitles, and a machine-gun slaughter — it’s just all wrong”, and decried the “shapeless blob of a plot” in grading the film an F.

A Blu-ray of the film was released by Shout! Factory on May 21, 2013 as a Collector’s Edition which features a widescreen HD presentation and brand new interviews with director Pyun and star Salinger.

I don’t want to give away plot points, but suffice to say that fans of the hero’s origin story will find this version to be just familiar enough to be baffled by all of the other choices that get made here. As the Shout! Factory release implies, the end results are a trainwreck but not one without its charms, and definitely not anything that could stop our Cap’n! Here’s Captain America (1990)…

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Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all sorts of books, films and art through a countercultural lens to dazzling effect. The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989 to 1994. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

As established through a comic-strip montage opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes disturbed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides he must escape. He broadcasts his show each week from an orbiting space station. The show’s presentation was fully wrapped in its quirky premise, featuring on-screen graphics and background sounds to simulate a space station atmosphere, “using active, innovative cinematography to ease the visual boredom that often accompanies interviews with talking head(s).”

The week’s topic was introduced with a few opening thoughts before launching into various interview clips. In each episode, Rick would interview a number of authors and artists, along with filmmakers, animators, and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: censorship, superheroes, humour, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex… Episodes were 30 minutes in length (having no commercial breaks on public television) and typically showcased six to fourteen interviewed creators alongside bridging commentary from Rick. Roughly six-hundred interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show’s run came to an end.

Prisoners has its own YouTube channel and this playlist is a bit chaotic so you’ll need to bounce around a bit to follow episode to episode. I’ve set the video in this post to start with the first segment of an episode that deals with racism because it dovetails so nicely with the recent news about Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film. Here’s a bit about that from The Guardian…

The newly announced films are two-part Avengers sequel Infinity War and a Captain America movie called Civil War, alongside new film outings for Doctor Strange and – most interestingly – Black Panther.

The latter will be Marvel’s first lead black superhero, and it’s a breakthrough moment. The positioning of this ethnic minority as heroic – however tortured that heroism may likely be – is a valuable statement in this most high profile of US pop cultural products, in a year when the dominant media image of black men has been as subordinated to (often white) police.

My favorite thrill with this show comes at the beginning of every episode when it seems like a program called Second Nature goes to static and is “interrupted” by the program — so retro-meta I wanna roll around in back issues of Mondo 2000. Enjoy Prisoners of Gravity…

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