TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT

A lot of times I'll tell people about all the fun stuff I do with my friends—all of whom are in their late 20s or early 30s—and I'm met with blank stares. They think about it for a few seconds and say something like, "Aren't you guys a little old to be doing stuff like that?"

This is what I always say to them.

ARCHIVE REVIVAL - "THE GANG HAS THE BEST IDEA EVER"

I was searching the archive out of boredom this morning and realized that there are a lot of pretty awesome things stored back there. So I decided that a new feature on here would be called "Archive Revival" and I'd randomly roll out old things that I feel deserve to be reposted every once in a while. There will be no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted or how often this feature will occur. It'll basically be whenever I find something that I want more people to see or see again. I can do that. It's my website.

First up is this video I made for what might have been one of the best, most entertaining nights my friends and I have had in a long, long time. It was originally posted on 2/2/11.

"The Gang Has The Best Idea Ever"

Enjoy.

THE WISDOM OF BOBBY FINSTOCK

"Let me give you a little bit of advice. There's three rules I live by. Never get less than twelve hours of sleep, never play cards with a guy who’s got the same first name as a city and never go near a lady who's got a tattoo of a dagger on her body.

 Now you stick with that and everything else is cream cheese."

ADVENTURES IN SPACE - PT. 2

See? It's a real thing. And it's getting closer and closer.

OH HOLLYWOOD

So THE AVENGERS just ended. You're sitting in the theater, happy about what you just saw and now the credits are rolling. Of course you're staying through the credits, because it's a Marvel movie and you always stay through the credits.

The credits fade to black and the mysterious figure that supplied Loki with his army is talking to someone. He cryptically says, "To attack Earth would be to court death."

That someone turns around and smiles. The credits roll again.

Seventy Five percent of the theater goes, "Who the fuck was that?"

Fifteen percent of the theater freaks out then and there.

The other ten percent, guys like me and my friend Casey, look at each other and go, "Oh, that guy. What's that guy's name again? I've gotta look that up real quick."

My guess is that most of the people reading this are either in the first group or the last group. By now, you've figured out that the guy is Thanos, the Mad Titan and he's a little bit nuts. I'm not going to give you a breakdown of who he is or what this might mean for the future of the Marvel movieverse—there are plenty of great posts that do just that—but I am going to give you a little insight as to why Marvel went with Thanos as the big bad of their biggest franchise.

Short answer: Their options were kind of limited.

Right now, Marvel is riding the wave of THE AVENGERS and its record breaking couple of weeks and just two years ago, the company was purchased by Disney for around four billion dollars. They're not exactly hurting for money right now, but that wasn't always the case.

Back in the 90s, Marvel comics kind of sucked, they were going broke and had to find ways to stay afloat. The easiest way to do that was to sell the rights to certain characters to studios to be made into a movie. DC Comics is owned by Warner Brothers, so all of their characters have always been housed under one roof for films. Marvel, on the other hand, created their own studio so they'd at least have a hand in the development, but since they had no real money, the bigger studios had most of the pull because they were the ones footing the bill.

This led to different studios all over Hollywood getting the rights to different characters. Fox bought up the biggest chunk, getting X-MEN (which means any and all characters described as a mutant), FANTASTIC FOUR, DAREDEVIL, ELEKTRA and SILVER SURFER and Columbia Pictures (Sony) owns SPIDER-MAN and GHOST RIDER. Universal owned the rights to THE HULK but had no interest in doing another one because the box office for Ang Lee's film was so bad that the rights reverted back to Marvel—who made their own version that was almost as bad. Universal also owned NAMOR at one point, but that might not be the case anymore. New Line used to own BLADE, but those have reverted back to Marvel and the same goes for Lionsgate and THE PUNISHER.

A few years ago, Marvel Studios scrounged up enough money to start independently financing their own movies and only needed the bigger studios for distribution. They used the 10 characters they still owned as a starting point to get the money they needed and went from there. Slowly, they started reacquiring the rights to characters that hadn't been adapted for films yet, starting with IRON MAN, then THOR then BLACK WIDOW until they had THE AVENGERS assembled.

Having spent so much time building towards THE AVENGERS, they didn't want to shoehorn in any old villain, so the logical move was to just put Loki at the forefront. No one really had a problem with that and it worked out pretty well. But at the same time, they wanted to set the tone for the next wave of Marvel movies, so they inserted the bad guy at the end that was probably the easiest to build up over the next few years even if he wasn't as well known as some had hoped.

Thanos works just fine in this regard but he's not even the best AVENGERS villain, let alone the biggest bad guy in the Marvel Universe. That title belongs to none other than Doctor Doom, but unfortunately, he comes with the FANTASTIC FOUR along with another great Marvel villain Galactus—who is much cooler than a fucking cloud, Tim Story (though to be fair, Warren Ellis kind of made him a cloud in the Ultimate Universe and did a much, much better job of it).

It seems that by consensus, the top two AVENGERS villains from the comics are Ultron and Kang. They couldn't use Ultron because he's a robot built by Hank Pym, a character that hasn't been introduced yet. That may change soon though, if Edgar Wright's proposed ANT MAN movie ever finally gets going. Kang is another that they would have loved but probably wanted to avoid because everyone is terrified of making time travel movies and Kang is a scientist and scholar from an alternate version of earth in the 30th century. And that kind of thing confuses people that just want to watch stuff blow up.

Other notable AVENGERS villains include the Kree/Skrull (which is what everyone originally thought the aliens were going to be), Baron Zemo (a Captain America nemesis), and the Scarlet Witch.

The last one is an interesting choice because the Scarlet Witch (and her brother Quicksilver) are the children of Magneto and Marvel president Kevin Feige has stated that both those characters are available to Marvel and Fox.

This is where it gets tricky but weirdly optimistic.

Hollywood is a stupid, stupid place and the people in charge only care about one thing and strangely, it doesn't involve making good movies. Studio executives only care about not looking like an idiot. The way these rights usually work is that if there's not a film in active development at a certain date, the rights revert back to the previous owner. That's why we keep seeing crappy GHOST RIDER movies popping up, it's why SPIDER-MAN all of a sudden started over and why they keep hiring people to write and develop new DAREDEVIL, FANTASTIC FOUR and X-MEN movies. To be fair, I loved X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, though.

The people at Fox would rather waste money "developing" a FANTASTIC FOUR movie that they have no intention of releasing rather than see the rights go back to Marvel and have them make one that fits in to their shared universe and be potentially great and a box office success. That's really all there is to it—no one wants to be known as the guy that got rid of a potentially huge movie just because he didn't know how to make it himself. It's the most frustrating thing in the world because how great would it have been to see Tony Stark mention Latveria or Wolverine stroll into the Shwarma place at the end of AVENGERS? You know Hugh Jackman would have paid his own way to NYC to do just that.

That's why the Scarlet Witch being usable by both Marvel and Fox is so intriguing. It could potentially heal a bit of a rift between Fox and Marvel which could pave the way for Reed Richards hanging out and talking science with Tony Stark or Matt Murdock showing up somewhere for a chat with Steve Rogers.

So there's always a chance, however slim it may be. It's possible that good business decisions and giving fans what they want will trump massive egos and blatant selfishness, but this is Hollywood we're talking about, so on the other hand, it probably won't.

Sources: Screenrant, BadAss Digest, Newsarama

P.S. I don't have an editor or a fact checker so I'm doing my best here. Don't rip my head off if things aren't 100% accurate. Also, it's a blog.

MY FRIENDS OVER YOU - ANDY CARTER AND PANGEA SPEED

I've known Andy for a while now, probably going all the way back to when we all spending the majority of our time at HC shows and doing hoodrat shit with our friends. He moved to California for a bit, and when he came back he put all his time and effort into starting a custom motorcycle parts company called Pangea Speed.

Slowly but surely he's been building (awful, awful pun intended) a pretty solid fan base and getting a lot of recognition. He's been asked to build a custom bike for this year's BORN FREE festival in California (which I may or not be attending) and a friend of his helped him make a little teaser video about his process and what building motorcycles means to him. It turned out really great and I'm stoked he's getting more and more popular in the bike community, because that's a pretty big deal for a straight edge kid building bikes in an airport hangar in Bountiful.

Andy keeps a great blog if you're interested in the kinds of things he's doing and even if you're not, you should still check it out to see what you're missing.

Pangea Speed - Professional Metal Masher

JACK KIRBY'S SCIENCE FICTION LAND

Now that you've all seen the trailer for ARGO and read the Wired Magazine piece about it, let's talk about the absolute best part of the article—Jack Kirby's Science Fiction Land.

If you don't know who he is, Jack Kirby was the artist responsible for co-creating the majority of the Marvel Universe as we know it today. There's been a lot of talk recently (notably here and here) about how unfairly Kirby was treated when he obviously shouldered a lot of the load right alongside Stan Lee, but was never recognized to the extent that Lee was/is.

There are people that feel so passionate about the subject that they won't even see THE AVENGERS (which I'll get to eventually with a Half-Assed Review) because Kirby isn't given the credit he deserves. It's an ongoing debate that will never, ever be settled.

But that subject aside, Kirby was an awesome genius. Some of his creations were completely off the wall and bizarre, but they were also so incredibly creative that you couldn't help but admire them. In that Wired article there's the bit about the fake movie they're using and how it was actually a real, in-the-works film that got the plug pulled. Kirby had been hired to do concept drawings and along the way, the producer came up with the idea for a theme park called Science Fiction Land based on Kirby's drawings.

According to the article, "it would include a 300-foot-tall Ferris wheel, voice-operated mag-lev cars, a 'planetary control room' staffed by robots, and a heated dome almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building."

Sounds amazing, right? Unfortunately, the reason that the CIA was able to use the script and concept drawings for ARGO to bolster their fake production for the rescue of American hostages was because the men behind the original film/theme park were complete crooks.

In an article on the Denver Westworld website earlier this year, Melanie Asmar relates the story of their embezzlement and crooked dealings in her story about Colorado's new tourist incentives. Stuntman Jerry Schafer and writer Barry Ira Gellar ended up being charged with 11 felonies and brought down a few government employees as well.

It's a real shame it never came to be. It would no doubt be laughably but lovably out of date by now, the same way Disney's Tomorrowland is, but still amazing at the same time. Yesterday's vision of the future is one of my favorite things of all time and this fits in perfectly. I can't believe I didn't know about this before today, either.

These are a few of the headlines from the Rocky Mountain News from the time all this was going on. You can see a few more at the Denver Westworld link above.

ARGO

Ben Affleck has reinvigorated his career over the past few years, and it's largely because of his foray behind the camera. I still haven't seen GONE BABY GONE, for no good reason, but I loved THE TOWN. I thought it was just so-so the first time I saw it, but I've watched it a few times since and it gets better each and every time. It also has this scene, which I absolutely love.

His newest, ARGO, was one of my most anticipated of 2012 even before I saw the trailer. Now that I've seen the trailer, I'm even more excited.

I knew the basic story, but I'd never bothered to find out more about it until today when I ran across the Wired Magazine article that lays it out so well. If you've got a few minutes, you should really read it. It's a great story and will make for a fantastic movie. Plus, John Goodman, Bryan Cranston and Kyle Chandler are all in it, so there's almost no possible way it can be bad.

MR. ROGERS HAS SOMETHING TO SAY TO YOU

This is probably 100% out of context, but it doesn't matter.

FAN UP

The facade is over. I don't think we should be allowed to talk about how we're the best fans in the world anymore. We're not. At all.

You know how I know? I went to the game last night. It was game 4 of the first round, the Jazz were down three games to none and on the brink of elimination. That's when those so called "fans" need to step up. They didn't. Tip off was at 6 PM, which is a little early, but the game was nationally televised on TNT and they had to fit two west coast games in last night. So it was a little earlier than the usual 7 PM start, but that's of little matter.

It's a playoff game and when tickets went on sale last week for games three and four, lower bowl seats were around $140 a piece. I bought a lower bowl seat yesterday afternoon for $40. Season ticket holders were having a hard time GIVING these seats away.

I've said some harsh things about the Jazz (CJ Miles and Raja Bell in particular) this year, but that's because I love the team and want to see them succeed. I made it a point to be at the game and in my seats for the opening tip-off and I was. I couldn't say the same for most of the rest of Energy Solutions Arena, though.

Best fans in the league.

I took this picture with 7:10 left in the first quarter. How pathetic does that look? The arena is barely 1/2 full, if that. About midway through the second quarter, the place was a little more full but still not at capacity. The game went on and the Jazz kept it close for a bit, but then towards the end of the third quarter, the Spurs went on a run and before anyone knew it, we were down by 20. A few people grabbed their stuff and headed for the exits.

Then things started happening. DeMare Carroll started playing hard (and pretty much gave them a spark they needed), Favors, Millsap and Jefferson all got back into it and suddenly, we were on a little bit of a run and just as quickly as we got behind big, we were right back within 4. Less than a minute left and only down by 4. It's still a long ways away from winning the 4 straight games we needed to advance, but at least it looked like we might not get swept and embarrassed completely.

The problem was, that a lot of people were gone already and more people were leaving every second. There was a long delay while the refs looked at a replay that would give the Jazz the ball back for a chance to pull within two. While that was going on, more and more people were leaving. The jazz got the ball back, but immediately squandered the opportunity and Manu Ginobili hit a wide open, fast break layup to put the Spurs back up by six with 18 seconds left.

That's when the whole building emptied out. With 18 seconds left.

You're telling me that we're the best fans in the world and we love this team and all that but we can't sit in our seats for 18 more seconds? Are you kidding me?

When time ran out and we'd been swept out of the playoffs we weren't even supposed to be in, against a team that is probably the heavy favorite to win the NBA title, some fans started booing. They were booing their own team, for the second time in as many games (because that happened at the end of game 3, too).

Best fans in the world? Please.

You can't bother to show up on time or stay for an entire playoff game. Stop kidding yourselves.

RANDOM JAZZ NOTES

• Raja Bell is pissed because he didn't play the entire postseason and barely played at all the second half of the year. Raja Bell also thinks he's still the same great player he was the last time he was on the Jazz and the first few years he was in Phoenix. He's not. He also said he was willing to do whatever the Jazz organization asked of him and be professional about it. Corbin basically asked him to sit on the bench and not do anything. Then any time Bell was asked about it, he complained and said he didn't want to play for the Jazz anymore but in the same breath said he wouldn't ask for a trade, but kept heavily insisting on it. Really glad we gave him that 3 year contract. I bet we can get a lot for him in the offseason.
• The CJ Miles era (hopefully) ended last night. He said this morning that Corbin did a poor job communicating with him and he never knew what was expected of him this year. I don't play professional basketball, so I can't exactly speak for the coach, but my guess would be that pretty much all that was expected of CJ Miles was to play hard, not take dumb shots, actually play defense and maybe try to live up to some of that "potential" we've been hearing about for the past six years. Since he did none of that, Corbin put in people (like Alec Burks and DeMare Carroll) that did the things they were supposed to do—probably without having to be specifically instructed to do so like Miles apparently needed.
• I love Paul Millsap, but I hate that he's fantastic for about 2.5 quarters and totally replaceable for the other quarter and a half. With the way Favors played during the playoffs and the 15 million Jefferson is owed next year, Millsap will either have to learn a few new moves and shift to small forward (where he'll have to play like/guard Melo and LeBron) or he'll be gone when the season starts. I love him to death, but I can't decide which is a better option.
• I have no idea what we're supposed to do with Devin Harris. Neither does Devin Harris.
• I'm afraid that Gordon Hayward is becoming the new CJ Miles. I hope that's not the case, but the evidence is there—one or two great games followed by one or two really, really bad ones.
• DeMare Carroll said that the Jazz are picking up his option for next season. I'm totally okay with this.
• I hated the idea of Jamaal Tinsley on the team, but now I really like it. I think he'd be great to have as the number two PG. But that also means I'm okay with getting rid of Earl Watson, which I think I am.
• Josh Howard is in the same boat as Devin Harris.
• Enes Kanter and Alec Burks will be really good. I just hope they're both still on this team when that time comes.
• Corbin also said that Sloan has had enough time off that he'll reach out and see if he wants to be involved with the Jazz in some capacity. I say we give him Kevin O'Connor's job. Unless Vinny Del Negro or Scott Brooks gets fired after next round and Sloan takes either of those jobs. Because then I'll be a full fledged Clippers or Thunder fan.

And with that, we'll see you next year.

Also, I've still got a few LONG LIVE SLOAN shirts left in case you still wanted to get in on that.

INSTAGRAM

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@trevorhale

Even Jon Bon Jovi Jr. needs financial assistance every so often.

I actually think you're an asshole.

Karl Malone

Surveillance Cam Parties.

You're required to Instagram any and all sporting events you attend.

HALF-ASSED REVIEW - APRIL

Remember when I wrote that I had a bunch of posts written and stored up? That way I could save time, and write when I had the chance and still be able to post something each day?

Well, I got too comfortable with that and just started relying on the stuff I'd already written. Also, I re-watched THE WIRE. I was just going to do an episode a day and stretch it out for a while, but I forgot how good it is and ended up burning through all five seasons pretty quickly at a pace of two or three a day.

Also, I saw a whole bunch of movies in April and thought I'd let you know what I think. I'm sure you're all dying to know.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN - I really like both Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor, but I don't care at all about fishing. There wasn't anything inherently wrong with this movie, because Blunt and McGregor were both great in it, but it was just really, really boring. Also, I've never been in a movie theater as cold as this one in my entire life. Most theaters are always a little cold, I think, but this one was like it didn't have a roof on it and there was a draft the entire time. I couldn't get comfortable. That lessened my enjoyment of the movie, because I'm a 70 year old woman.

THIN ICE - Greg Kinnear, Alan Arkin and Billy Crudup had a little Coen Brothers-esque thing going for them. It wasn't great, but I was intrigued once things started moving along. The third act kicked in and it seemed like things were really going to ramp up and we'd start seeing some payoffs. Then the projector broke and the house lights came on. The lady at the Broadway came in and said it would be ten minutes before they could get things back up and running. Ten minutes later, she came back and said it would be more like an hour. We all decided that was too long, so we were all given a free pass to come back another day and went home. That following Friday, when all the new movies came out, THIN ICE was gone. I never saw how it ended, and while I'm not incredibly heartbroken, I'm still a little curious. I probably won't ever go out of my way to catch the end of it, but hopefully someday it'll pop up on HBO one night and I'll be able to finish it. Now if that's not a glowing review, I don't know what is.

CABIN IN THE WOODS - I've written before about how I'm always weary of movies that take forever to actually get made, how there has to be something wrong with them for it to languish in development hell for so long before finally getting underway. I'm usually right, too. So the fact that CABIN IN THE WOODS was written, shot, edited and finished nearly three years ago and has been sitting on the shelf collecting dust was a real red flag. So I went in skeptical.

As it turns out, there were a number of factors in why CABIN IN THE WOODS was so delayed. First, was the financial problems of the studio that originally produced it, MGM. Second, and more understandable than the confusion of the MGM fiasco, was the fact that no one was really sure how to market it. Third, once it had been put off for that long, what was another few months to give it a little extra push. Joss Whedon, the guy that wrote and produced CABIN IN THE WOODS and one of its stars, Chris Hemsworth, have another little movie opening at the beginning of May called THE AVENGERS. Why not put it out close to that and ride some extra publicity since those two are already going to be on the press path. Smart move.

I don't want to say too much about CABIN IN THE WOODS, because the less you know, the better. I will say this though. I loved it. However, if you don't have a sense of humor and a little bit of smarts, you probably won't. It's definitely a movie that you have to "get" and there were a few people that didn't that ended up hating it. I am not one of them. It was fantastic.

THE RAID: REDEMPTION - This movie has been getting a lot of attention on the festival circuit this year and with good reason. It. Was. Awesome. ( I write really well-crafted, thought-provoking reviews here, don't I?) Action packed from beginning to end, it had heart to go along with it. It also had plot points you could telegraph from a mile away, but still. When I was younger, I never cared much for martial arts movies, but they've gotten better and more inventive over the years and I've come around. This might not make its way on to my year end, best-of list, but it won't be too far removed from it either.

JEFF WHO LIVES AT HOME - The Duplass Brothers have turned mumblecore into an art form. Granted, I'm the guy that doesn't "get" a lot of art forms, so to me, mumblecore is just another bullshit genre that I don't much care about. Having said that, JEFF WHO LIVES AT HOME was a step above their last movie, CYRUS. Both movies have casts that I loved, but this time around they signed up Jason Segel and Ed Helms. Both of those guys are great comedic actors, and it seems like this time, Mark and Jay Duplass just kind of left them alone. In CYRUS, it seemed like they tried too hard to subdue John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill which didn't really work. Here, they just let it ride and they got a more enjoyable movie out of it.

LOCKOUT - I didn't really want to see this, but I really wanted to see it. Luc Besson has had his hands in some terrible, terrible movies over the past few years, but I'm always hoping for another TAKEN. Haven't gotten it yet. Guy Pearce is too good of an actor for this and for some reason, everything in the space prison that he and Maggie Grace are stuck on is made of thin aluminum that can be torn apart with bare hands. Also, it's 2079 and technology is super advanced, but they're still working with guns that need to be reloaded and no one has any inkling of how to hit a target. Also, the thin metal walls that can be ripped apart with hands? Totally not susceptible to bullets. They just bounce off. It was bad. And not bad in an entertaining way, either. Just plain bad.

ADVENTURES IN SPACE

This is Jake Jackson. Or at least I think it is. It might be. It probably is.

Stay tuned.