CGI

CGI technology has been used excessively in films for quite some time. CGI is very expensive and takes a lot of manpower to implement. Seems like producers sink most of any given film's capital into special effects instead of character development, plot, script, etc. What's even more upsetting is when they follow this formula and the CGI/special effects aren't even that impressive. Case and point: Superman Returns and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Superman Returns was a completely unnecessary film and did not add anything of value to the Superman mythos. It was just a way of getting Bryan Singer's name on the movie (pissing off a lot of X-Men fans in the process because he couldn't work on X-Men 3)

In the Nightmare remake, Freddy Kreuger, a horror icon, was reduced to a CGI burn victim who looked more deformed than burned and scarred. In the original Nightmare on Elm Street series, all that was used was make up and ratty clothing to create his signature and memorable look.

Even the original Star Wars Trilogy used make-up, not CGI. CGI didn't even exist in 1977 when A New Hope was released. Plus, the shots of the rebel and imperial ships in the hangars were cardboard cutouts to save money. And Star Wars is freaking amazing. Filmmakers should use CGI when they have to, not just because its expected.

I Love Comic Books Again

Image via Wikipedia

When I was I kid I was into comics. I collected the action figures, watched the saturday morning cartoons, and read the comic books. This was in the early 90's when the X-Men cartoon was on Fox, so naturally I was a Marvel guy. The first comic I bought was Venom #1 and my friend who was with me at the time bought The Death of Superman, which I also read and which remains timeless despite his subsequent resurrection. Meanwhile, Venom #1 is slightly outdated.

Years passed and I stopped reading, collecting, and watching. With the new boom of comic book movies that started with Blade (which at the time I didn't even know was a comic book character) I got back into reading comics to see what had changed and where these movies were getting their inspiration from as most of them were quite good.

When Batman Begins came out in the theater I enjoyed it so much that I started reading Batman comics even though I had never gotten into DC Comics before. I liked the comics so much so that I started reading other DC titles such as Superman and JLA. Then I found DC's Vertigo Comics and got into Fables, Watchmen, and Transmetropolitan. Most recently I have started reading Wildstorm's Ex Machina.

In terms of reading the comics, I collect them in trade paperback form for the most part, which can become quite costly. The best thing to happen to negate this effect was the CD/DVD-ROM collections that Marvel used to put out, but recently stopped. I hve alway wished that DC would do something similar and allow me to read their entire archives for $50-$60

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