Avengers 2 - Ultron's Movie treatment

Cleaning up some old drafts where I want to think I made some good points, this was from early last summer. ---
I've now seen Avengers 2 twice, once on the regular screen, then again on Imax 3D.
It holds up.

One thing I noticed in the first showing, in the first scene, the CGI seemed almost purposely ridiculously bad until they got to the compound, did not show up in my second viewing.

What is very clear is that the producer and writer of this are all on the same page. The dialogue is real, the graphics perfect, and the mild work done with the subject matter is done well, with respect to those that are invested in these characters.

Someone gets it.

A voice I never heard from Ultron as I read comics with him in them, James Spader, brought something genuine to the tired, is it pre- or post- Terminator 2 type storyline. Acknowledging that the Ultron saga began far before Terminator, otherwise I think it's a lot of trade offs.

Now, my take on Avengers 2 after initial impressions have faded and or taken hold.

It hasn't held up as well as Avengers 1 or Captain America 2, but I still appreciate it despite using Ultron as the subject matter, and that is because of James Spader, who DID nail it, and yeah the Director gets it all, but Ultron is the most tired of the Marvel themes.

I am very excited about the upcoming Civil War, and many of the other Marvel Projects, hopefully, I will blog about them.

The Emergence of Netflix and other streaming content

Haven't dropped off the planet, even though there haven't been posts here lately, and I haven't failed to notice that the landscape of entertainment has changed drastically, even in the time since my last post.

The relevance of the networks is dropping of the cliff, HBO is the old hand in the game now, and is getting challenged by a company that was busy mailing us videos around the time I started this blog and web entities like Amazon and Hulu that are making surprising pushes themselves.

I'm enjoying it. I was waiting for this fight back in 2008 or so, as network scripting stagnated and nobody was quite sure how to use the new mediums we had. I have an off/on relationship with Netflix over the years, but now watch a lot of it, and still find gems in the forms of series that I can binge watch and maybe later catch in Real time on whatever network they originally started on.

I also realize that Blogs themselves have kind of slipped out of relevance, but for my own use, I plan on making one more run at it with them. Ideas I've had for articles over the last couple years, I've just swallowed, but for the next few weeks or months or until it's again tiring, I will start putting them here again.

Arrow - The Episode where Slade kills Moira

Sorry if you googled this and I spoiled it for you, but the episode is 3 days old, and I have some questions about this whole plot stream. While the flashbacks throughout this series have allowed for what seems to be displayed insight so far, this latest episode seemed thrown together, and I sniffed some continuity issues.

Now, I'm really not one of those fans that pays close attention to each detail and harps over it, I don't have time for that, and can suspend disbelief pretty well. I have written about this before though. Sometimes, the writers will completely disregard any precedents set. I'm wondering if Arrow didn't get close to that this last week.

It was a good episode all around, with Roy going ballistic because of the mirakuru, and Slade now making his next move to continue destroying Oliver. Within the episode, Oliver's mom begins making 180 degree turns, she wants to drop out of the mayoral race to try and bring back Thea, then doesn't after Oliver talks to her and explains that maybe if she showed that she was ready to do good, Thea would come back. They also show flashbacks about Oliver getting some anonymous girl pregnant, and how Moira gave her $2 million to go away and tell Oliver that she lost the baby. (Yes, watch out for 7 year old baby Oliver to appear soon).

She also tells Oliver that she knows his secret, never really laid out, but truly implying that she knew he was the Arrow. He asked her when she knew, and she said something like, "For some time now, I think I knew.."

But hey, did she know when Diggle kidnapped her as the Arrow and threatened to kill Oliver if she didn't reveal her plans with Malcom? That wasn't too long ago, and that was a big plot swing.

This is the continuity of which I speak. It could have all been wrapped up with a line, " I was even willing to play along with your charade with diggle..", but of course there was no time for that, because by the end of the show, she gets skewered by Slade.

I can let it all go, it's fine. Her character had sort of run her course, but it wreaks of desperate on-the-ratings-bubble plot twists. In one episode, a main character flips, dies, and a phantom child is revealed. AS far as I know, this is a safely renewed, and supported, show.