Brain Dead and Loving it!

  I was 13 years old when I saw SUPERMAN THE MOVIE for the first time. It was opening at a theatre roughly 15 minutes away from home, on the South Shore of Montreal. (I now live less than 2 minutes away from the same venue). I remember a long line outside, snaking its way into a room that was so overfull, people were sitting in the stairs leading down to the screen (this was most likely before those pesky fire department regulations). From the first notes of John Williams's powerful score, I was hooked for life. I now know every notes of that soundtrack, and every lines of that dialogue. Its reverential grasp of traditionally ridiculed pulpish source material was a breath of fresh air, and conferred a proper dramatic weight to a character that had been until then treated in a rather puerile way in plethora of movie serials , some gorgeous cartoons and a popular TV show . All of a sudden, it was treated with respect, starring beloved actors like Gene Hackman and Marlon Br...

I have to set this straight right out: I never was a fan of the Punisher, neither in the comics or the movies. When the character first appeared in Spider-man # 129 in 1974, he basically was more or less a costumed version of Charles Bronson from Michael Winner's DEATH WISH which was a huge hit that very same year.  As comic books would get grittier and grittier over the following decades, the Punisher found himself not only more at home in a progressively more violent environment, but his morale code would at times get rather vague, pushing the boundaries of his decency to unpleasantly bloody extremes. In the meantime, the character got the attention of movie producers, who tried their hands many times to translate the character to film, to rather disappointing effect. 1989 saw Dolph Lundgren take on the name, if not the skull adorned mantle of the Punisher, in a forgettable but goofily entertaining low-budget effort. It was Marvel's second effort to ...

  The very first scene of JUSTICE LEAGUE pretty much sums up the film in a way. Superman had just finished a rescue mission, and kids are doing an interview with him for their blog. The point of view is from a shaky phone camera. The kids giddily ask the polite hero what's his favourite thing about Earth.  He turns his head and thinks for a few seconds. He frowns. The answer should be easy, but it's not. He then smiles and turns back to the camera. He starts to speak and his words are cut short as the scene brutally ends. It's probably my favourite scene of the film, showing a certain sense of poignancy in Henry Cavill's acting, and in the symbolic way the scene is cut short, the same way his life was in the unjustly maligned BATMAN V SUPERMAN . It has a charming sense of ''reality'' that has been lacking in a lot of the DC Films and translate well the inherent goodness of the Man of Steel as well as the admiration children may have ...

 The year is 1992. With a few friends, I leave Montreal in the early hours of the morning to take the plane that will bring us to San Diego, California. The goal of the journey is to partake in the Grand Mass of Geekdom that is Comic-Con. From humble beginnings in 1970 with an attendance of roughly 300 visitors, the Convention had grown into a multi media behemoth by 1992, being crowded by over 22,000 proud nerds, either on a quest for that rare comic book, or hoping to rub elbows with revered artists and has been actors. By this point, Comic-Con had started attracting the attention of Studios, who had rightfully noticed that an event attracting tens of thousands of voracious popular culture fanatics could be a good platform to promote their future nerd-friendly productions. Thus it came to be that after getting an autograph from Bruce Campbell, I sat in a large amphitheatre where Francis Ford Coppola was presenting exclusive scenes from his upcoming DRACULA. I had be...