Daily Archives: August 29, 2012

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Best of the Genre: Biggest Badasses – Westerns (Part 2)

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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.

#5.) The Stranger (High Plains Drifter)

WesternsOnly 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.

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TV

ABC Orders Up Marvel & Joss Whedon’s S.H.I.E.L.D. Pilot

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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.