See if this film synopsis rings a bell with you…
The time is the future, 17 years after the war. What war you ask? It’s never revealed but that’s not important to the plot. America is now a prison camp with an Artificial Intelligence running the show. Cyborgs do the day-to-day bidding of the A.I (in this film however only one cyborg is ever shown).
Continue reading GB’s VHS Vault: American Cyborg: Steel Warrior
Out of the thousands of Metal Gear fans in the world, I’m probably one of the few hundred or so that thinks the entire series is a brilliant masterpiece. The series, while popular, has gained notoriety and fame for being infamously convoluted, while still having gripping set pieces, unique characters, and of course, lengthy cut scenes. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots, was probably 2/3 cut scenes in its entirety, and is probably one of the few games where the cut scenes out number the length of all the game play by that 2 to 1 ratio. However, having played the Metal Gear series since I was a youngster, I’ve always been fond of Snake and his adventures, and the universe of intrigue, paranoia, espionage, and occasional batshit insanity that makes up the Metal Gear Solid franchise.
One of my favorite past times for the last 12 years has been playing “Cast the Metal Gear Movie” with my friends, but it was always in vain, because for the longest time Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear’s creator, never seemed interested in a movie, or at the very least, was wary of making one, or letting one be made. Well no longer! At the 25th Anniversary Metal Gear Solid Event, plans were announced for a movie to be made.
Believe it or not, Hideo Kojima is nearly 50 years old. There must be something in the water in Japan.
While there is no direct quote from Kojima himself, Avi Arad, CEO of Marvel Comics, looks to be included in the project, possibly in a producer role. Avi Arad is behind a multitude of comics movies that you’re no doubt familiar with, and one look at his body of work goes to show the guy knows how to get projects off the ground and running. He even had this to say about the Metal Gear movie:
“For many years I fought to bring comics to theaters. Comic books are now the biggest genre in cinema. Videogames are the comic books of today…We will take our time and tell the story with all the nuances, ideology, cautionary tales needed.”
Via [Examiner]
I appreciate the guy’s enthusiasm, I really do, but when you’re responsible for turds like Man-Thing, or the more recent, The Amazing Spider-Man, it makes me worry. However, his work on the very successful and well made Marvel Avengers franchise lays some of that worry to bed. Mostly, I’m just excited to see some of my favorite video games characters finally realized on-screen. Way back when, I remember sitting through the very cinematic end credits of Metal Gear Solid, for the PS1, and thinking about how great a movie it would make. Now that there’s at least 4 games that tell the main story, not counting any of the spinoffs or side stories, it’s a story so epically long in length and depth, you’d need at least 3 movies to accurately adapt the entire series. What with every movie now being legally required to be three movies long, there’s a possibility somebody could actually adapt a story that suits the format of being made into a superfluous trilogy. Either way, unless you focused on one particular game, you’d end up with a really confusing film on your hands.
Metal Gear? Confusing? Never!
My suggestion, if I was producing, would be to plan for one movie, and a prequel. You adapt Metal Gear Solid, try to keep it as faithful as possible, because that story is near perfect. Perhaps you add in a subplot and role that plays up Big Boss’ part, (Played by Sean Connery, of course), and then make a prequel movie, that’s an adaptation of the truly perfect Metal Gear Solid 3. While MGS4 has the best action set pieces that would actually adapt into a movie perfectly, it’s almost completely made of up plot threads and characters who were previously introduced, and it’s story would be so lost and muddled by trying to be condensed, with its 9+ hour running time of cut scenes.
Well, no matter what, I’ll be looking forward to hearing more about the project, and I’ll finally get back to realistically speculating who would play Snake in a movie.
Michael Fassbender perhaps?
On Monday we counted down numbers 10-6, and now we’re rounding out the final five. Now we’re getting into some more familiar faces, but a few may surprise you.
Only Clint Eastwood could make getting bathed by a midget look totally badass.
Clint has played a lot of men with no names, but two in particular really stand out (The other one we’ll get to later). The Stranger is the quintessential *mysterious* man with no name, because he literally appears out of nowhere from the heat wave off in the distance. Sure, it could just be an optical illusion, but he does look mighty familiar. The people in the town of Lago can’t seem to put their finger on why he’s so recognizable, but deep down, they know exactly why… The plot of the movie aside, lets talk badassery. One of the first things dude does is walk into town, get a shave and a bath, and avoids getting shot at point-blank, by simply sinking into his bath water. His presence is seemingly supernaturally shielded from the gunfire by being obscured alone. Once the local folks find out some bandits with a vendetta against the town are coming, they ask him to help them. So what does the Stranger do? Well first, he fires the Sheriff, and makes the town midget Sheriff in his place. If you ask me, anybody who gives midgets free license to be lawmaker of a town, is sure as hell a badass guy. Because as we all know, midgets are awesome, as well as hilarious! So he and the midget Sheriff team up, drink lots of booze and hallucinate about being whipped to death in front of the entire town. Well, something like that anyway. Don’t wanna spoil it for you too much. Stranger starts requesting weirder and weirder things, eventually asking the townspeople to acquire 200 gallons of red paint. He then paints the entire town red, (literally), and renames the town “Hell”. When the bandits arrive, he attacks them with help from the towns people, and the fallout from the whole thing begins to spell things out about who this mysterious stranger is. Throughout the whole movie, you’re wondering what his motive exactly is, and after he’s played the entire town against each other, burned it to the ground, gotten laid a few times and whipped a few dudes to death, he disappears back into the heat wave, same way as he came. Bad. Ass.
Continue reading Best of the Genre: Biggest Badasses – Westerns (Part 2)
Hey, remember my one article on how Joss Whedon decided to be awesome and got signed to oversee Marvel Studio’s ‘Phase Two’ of movies, capped off with how he was going to produce a show in the Marvel Universe? Also, how I predicted in said article that it had to be a show based off of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Boom. I just gave myself a pat on the back. According to Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, and SuperHeroHype, ABC has officially ordered the pilot for S.H.I.E.L.D. It will be written by Joss Whedon, as well as his brother Jed Whedon and his wife, Maurissa Tanchareon. Joss is also scheduled to direct the pilot, as long as his extremely busy schedule permits.
Of course, we have to start thinking that this had to be in the works for awhile so the big question is who’s the central character tying this all together? Obviously, one would think that Nick Fury has to show up and while Samuel L. Jackson is slated to be in every movie that contains a vowel in its title, I can’t imagine he’d give it all up for a regular TV series gig other than to show up the obligatory appearance on the pilot. How about Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill character? Well, they haven’t found the mother yet on her show so I doubt CBS would let her go to a rival network before that whole thing is resolved. Regardless, I assume it’s still in the early writing stage so I’m sure something will get resolved and we’ll have more details for everyone out there when they announce them. Let’s face the main fact: Joss Whedon is coming back to TV and that’s reason enough to celebrate. How about we get Felicia Day in on some Marvel/Joss Whedon TV action so everyone can gush about it more?
Speaking of Cobie Smulders, Yahoo! movies also released a new featurette from The Avengers Blu-Ray that shows an alternate opening to the movie. It’s a lot more Debbie Downer actually so I’ll let you view it before I make snarky comments below. This is the link because the stupid Yahoo! site’s embed code is busted it so it’ll have to do until they get it fixed. Let me know when you watched it, I’ll be waiting for you in the next paragraph.
Soooo yeah, that would’ve killed the whole mood of the movie. It’s interesting though because it shows direct conflict between Maria Hill and Nick Fury, which never really showed itself in the final movie. Hell, it kinda shows that the Avengers…failed? I mean, who’s to say what really happened after a quick peek into this alternate opening but crap man, if we saw this open the movie, I would’ve just looked in the movie for the moment where they all screwed the pooch and been distracted the whole time so I guess good on trashing that opening scene.
Since this whole thing ends on a weird note, I just threw in a Debbie Downer sketch after this paragraph to bring your spirits back up. Unless you don’t live in North America. Then you can’t watch it. Or if you hate ads. Because there’s one in the beginning. So yeah, it might infuriate you more. My bad.
According to Kotaku via Gamespot, the Wii U launch date has been announced! Problem is, no one was supposed to know about it. Oops. During a meeting with GameStop Managers in Texas, accessory maker PDP was making their fall lineup pitch and at the end, concluded to the managers that the Wii U accessories will be out before the Wii U launch date of November 18th. It didn’t take long for that to go viral. 
According to a couple of anonymous people (people who don’t want to get fired naturally, like the PDP representative guy I’m sure), they have confirmed this statement that someone dropped this bomb. Naturally, as with anyone realizing that they just gave away confidential information, they quickly changed the subject once they crapped their pants (that’s my assumption). The Kotaku article has a great he said/she said deal going on but I won’t bore you with those details as we dissect the true intent of this article in the next paragraph. 
Does anyone really care? For a new system launching, and perhaps it’s my old and outdated self because I haven’t been hip to the buzz in the video game world as much as I used to be, but it seems that there is a lack of excitement for this console. Don’t get me wrong, I want it like how a fat kid wants cake, but it is almost just out of loyalty to Nintendo. In my mind, there is no real killer app. Yeah, I’m going to enjoy Lego Undercover, the New Super Mario Bros. U, and Rayman Legends games but none of this is revolutionary. In fact, the last revolutionary game Nintendo has had a launch was Super Mario 64. I think the problem is that there is such a clamor for new technology that Nintendo has gotten away from the real charm of it’s brand: the first party games and innovation. It has gotten way too gimmicky, and while I love the potential of the tablet screen, I have yet to find a game that tells me this is why you need to buy this system. Especially since most of the launch gamesare just ‘upgraded’ versions of PS3 or Xbox 360 games I’ve beaten a year ago.
Seriously, why the hell is this game NOT a launch title. Look how pretty…
Time will tell, I will still always have faith in Nintendo and what they do but I do believe this is a critical crossroads for them. I guess we’ll find out what they are made of on November 18th. Which also sucks because I’ll be in the Philippines during launch. You’ve no idea how disappointed I am to miss the opportunity to brag about the Wii U during the first week of launch only to never be mentioned again after the novelty wears off.
Grizzly Bomb 