Scandinavian god-prince Thor (Chris Hemsworth of Cabin in the Woods) with his four friends (including Tadanobu Asano, the crazy slit-mouthed star of Ichi the Killer) and prankster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston of The Deep Blue Sea) piss off the ice creatures from another world, so Thor’s dad Sir Anthony Hopkins tells Idris Elba to banish Thor to Earth without his powers or hammer. Sam Jackson’s SHIELD quarantines the hammer while Thor proves irresistible (initially loutish, but learns earth-manners quickly) to storm-chaser Natalie Portman. She hangs out with comic-relief Kat Dennings (Norah of the Infinite Playlist) and science-buddy Stellan Skarsgard, who is fortunately Scandinavian and so knows what Thor is about. When Loki turns traitor, Thor manages to revive the hammer and save his homeland, leaving Portman lonely back on earth until the sequel (since I don’t think she’s in Avengers).

Rainn Wilson plays sort of a comic-book version of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, pushed to the breaking point by a dissolving marriage and life’s constant irritations. He becomes superpowerless superhero Crimson Bolt, armed mainly with a pipe wrench, and sets out to defeat wife-snatching drug-dealer Kevin Bacon, plus people who butt in line at the movies.

An extremely dark comedy, hilarious and truly horrible, which manages to hold onto its heart through Rainn Wilson’s sheer lovability and the exceptional script. It’s possibly better than Gunn’s great Slither. Can’t compare it to other fake-superhero movies like Special, Defendor and Kick-Ass since I haven’t watched those, but now I’m afraid to. This one set the bar too high. Can you tell I’m excited?

A glum Koichi, being forced at gunpoint to watch this movie:

This is part of a trilogy including Stray Dog and Jin-Roh – I have no memory of watching Jin-Roh but IMDB says I rated it a 6. I also don’t much remember watching Oshii’s CG-blur Avalon, which also is supposed to have Chris Marker references.

The most La Jetee-like image I could find:

In a prologue, Koichi (the lead actors are all best known for voice acting in cartoon series – Koichi is a 22-year vet of Dragonball) and his red-spectacled elite government “Kerberos” soldiers Midori and Ao/Soichiroh have gone rogue. K escapes, promising to return for the others. Either three or six years later, he’s back, trying to find his friends and figure out who’s still on his side, but mostly bumbling it. There’s some long-winded business about fast-food noodle joints being banned because too many spies used them as meeting spots. Toilet humor follows. An army of mimes is slain. And Koichi is put on the trail of his former comrades.

He’s captured by some pudgy government fellow, escapes, is captured again, escapes. He meets Ao, then Midori, finds out they’ve sold out and turned against him, but then they save his life, but then they turn on him again, etc. The final scene implies that the armor and weapons Koichi escaped with were more important than his own life – a smiling Midori slowly regains her color saturation, so I guess she’s got the weapons. Co-written with the guy who wrote the 1990′s Gamera trilogy

Oh, where to begin? The Governor of Tokyo (Guadalcanal Taka of Beat Takeshi’s Boiling Point and Zatoichi) has renamed it Zebra City and instituted the “Zebra Time” policy, by which for ten minutes a day, nothing is illegal (cue amusing montage of violence), and the Zebra Police walk the streets in poor neighborhoods killing everyone they see.

Where has Zebraman been all this time? He was in a centrifuge run by the governor’s mad midget doctor. After years of spinning, they succeed in separating black from white. So he is mostly white, and his dark side became the governor’s “daughter,” the Zebra Queen (Riisa Naka), who is also incidentally a pop star.

And what of the alien infestation from the first film? Well, the only remaining alien presence is inside a ten-year-old girl – actually she’s twenty-five, but the force required to imprison the alien has kept her from growing. Eventually she’s sent to the centrifuge and the alien is released to terrorize Tokyo again – part of the Zebra Queen’s plan to displace Zebraman as the legendary hero by saving the city.

Where does Asano fit in? Asano (Masahiro Inoue, star of a series called Kamen Rider) and his buddy Ichiba (Naoki Tanaka) help out victims of Zebra Time, are accumulating an army of the injured to overthrow the governor. Ichiba is a Zebraman obsessive (not Asano, strangely) and once played the title character in a revival of the show. Also there’s a dark fellow with bad-boy bangs named Nimi (Tsuyoshi Abe of Initial D) who’s in love with the Zebra Queen.

Action! The Z Queen kills her rival in the pop charts and her “father” during successive Zebra Times, but can’t defeat the giant alien. She also sort of kills Nimi, and he finishes himself off. Zebraman isn’t sure what to do about the giant alien, but Ichiba remembers the final episode of the rebooted series, instructs Z to eat the alien – which he does before floating balloon-like into space.

Weird movie, then. More nutso fun than the first one, with all subtlety out the window. We get a couple Zebra Queen music videos, clips from fake TV episodes, and a “Stop AIDS” advertisement.

There was a forty-minute direct-to-video spin-off called Vengeful Zebra Miniskirt Police – why oh why wasn’t it included on the blu-ray?

Buy from Amazon:
Zebraman 2 Blu-ray/DVD

Sho Aikawa (Scars of the Sun, Gozu) is unappreciated at home (especially by his young son, who’s bullied since his dad is the schoolteacher) and not too respected at work either, but he can escape into his hobby, which is watching the seven episodes of a quickly-cancelled TV series from his youth and making his own Zebraman costume.

TV’s original Zebraman:

A weird bit of animation:

Sho meets a mother (Kyoka Suzuki of Bullet Ballet) with a wheelchair-bound son, and bonds with the son over Zebraman. Meanwhile, a series of villains in funny costumes that seem straight out of the old episodes arrive in town. Whenever Sho faces one of them, he turns from a sad man in a silly suit into an actual superhero, culminating in a big fight against a green-slime alien overlord during which Sho can fly and briefly transforms into a pegasus zebra with a laser cannon.

Sho imagines Kyoka Suzuki as his sidekick Zebra Nurse:

Evil crab man:

Besides the long, drawn-out scenes where Sho connects with either the wheelchair kid or his own son, the movie pads its runtime with a couple of underequipped cops sent to track down the source of the alien invasion (I think they are Atsuro Watabe of Three Extremes and Koen Kondo of 13 Assassins), and a school principal (prof. Kyoto) who’s aware of the aliens and of the Zebraman connection, has copies of unfilmed show scripts that correspond to recent (and future) events.

Professor Kyoto:

Some cops:

From the writer of Ping Pong. The same year, Miike made Izo, part of Three Extremes (which I can’t remember at all) and a TV-movie sequel. Nice comic references to Ring (Zebraman fights the backflipping, well-dwelling Ring ghost in an episode) and Pulse (the principal tries to contain the aliens by sealing doors with red tape).

Buy from Amazon:
Zebraman DVD

Agent Jason Bateman’s secret is that he’s Paul’s friend, was trying to get to him in order to help, which is why he’s a dick to agents Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio. The movie’s secret is that Sigourney Weaver plays the big boss, but she talks on the radio often enough that I figured it out from her voice. A defiantly anti-Christian movie, announcing its pro-evolution message early on (and repeatedly) then expanding that to a straight-up “god doesn’t exist” message. References most of Spielberg’s early movies. Maybe it’s because I watched on my little TV, but Paul may be the first CG creation that I accepted as a character instead of always thinking of it as an effect.

Buy from Amazon:
Paul (Blu-ray/DVD)

Anyway, I’m more interested in Crumb now than I was in college, and it’s a worthwhile doc. You have to wonder about the parents that produced these three sons: a bed-of-nails-sitting street beggar, an unemployable avid reader who barely leaves his room, and the world’s most acclaimed sexually perverse underground comic artist.

Buy from Amazon:
Crumb (Criterion Blu-ray)

Weirdness: this was written by Justin Theroux of Mulholland Dr. He and Favreau (who cast himself as comic relief) must not have a thing for comic superhero names, since I didn’t know that Mickey Rourke was supposed to be called Whiplash (or Don Cheadle “War Machine” or Scarlett Johansson “Black Widow”) until IMDB told me. A post-credits scene sets up THOR, which we’ll watch some weekday night as soon as it’s free.

Buy from Amazon:
Iron Man 2

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, Stephen Sommers)
Ah, what’s happening?! General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) looks concerned. A stealth bomber was shot with green smokey special effects and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) escaped alive. People are referring to “joes” and their “hoo-rah” when they get excited is of course “yo joe!”. Maybe they should’ve gotten rid of those parts. Cobra Commander and Destro (I never thought of him as Scottish) are off doing creepy villain stuff and saying lines like “you and what army?” The visuals look slick as shit, though. Why is Duke (Channing Tatum of Public Enemies) so young? Mild sequel set-up, Jonathan Pryce-as-president coda, and it looks like I missed all the Storm Shadow scenes. Movie looks totally bearable overall. In a few years I look forward to G.I. Joe: The Wrath of Golobulus then G.I. Joe: Beyond Thunderdrome.

Horsemen (2009, Jonas Akerlund)
Why is General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) putting Zhang Ziyi in prison, and what does it have to do with the apocalypse? Oh of course baddies are after his family and are luring him to an abandoned building… that is way more boring than the apocalypse. Quaid’s son (Lou “Thumbsucker” Pucci) is hanging Ichi The Killer/Hellraiser style over a stage saying some boringness about neglectful parenting while Quaid is chained up watching. And every Saw sequel said the same thing. Why don’t our parents worry about us? Why don’t our parents worry about us? From the director of nothing and the writer of Doom.

Supernova (2000, Walter Hill)
James Spader in a Leviathan diving suit fought a badass white guy who I don’t recognize until rescued by Angela Bassett. The ship’s computer warns us about “ninth-dimensional matter.
Karl gets extremely blown up, but I wouldn’t call it a supernova. I don’t think Angela Basset has a shirt on. Ah there’s the supernova – neato. After going warp-speed while nude and hugging, Basset-Spader have gone all The Fly and swapped eye colors and now she’s pregnant – that never happens when people beam up together on Star Trek. Interesting pedigree, this movie – from pseudonymed director Walter “The Warriors” Hill with uncredited help by Francis Ford Coppola.

John Q (2002, Nick Cassavetes)
Denzel… shoots himself in the head! But the safety was on. Transplant heart for Denzel’s insurance-less dying child is arriving. The police arrest a False Denzel while the real one sneaks around in hospital scrubs, but Robert Duvall is on to the plot. Is this really what heart transplants look like? So simple and clean, like the Operation game. Montage of people telling us America may have a national health-care problem. A blatant message movie, then. Look, James Woods! I thought it didn’t seem terrible overall until a cringey final shot.

Hollow Man 2 (2006, Claudio Fäh)
Was Hollow Man even successful? Invisible Christian Slater (the poor man’s Invisible Kevin Bacon) indirectly kills a suited guy who’s tracking him via infrared scanner. Oh wait, dialogue tells me that was actually Invisible Peter Facinelli of the Twilight series… Slater is now trying to murder Laura Regan until Facinelli shows up. Invisible Man fight in the rain ends with a shovel stuck into Slater. From the writer of all sorts of unnecessary sequels, from Hellraiser: Hellworld to Dracula 2000, from Pulse 3 to Prophecy 5.

Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow)
Short movie. Evil James Cromwell, inventor of the surrogate system, surprises Bruce Willis with a gun. Ooh, in the future we have light-up staircases. Crom “uploaded a virus into the system” to kill all the surrogates, but a fat guy excitedly shouts some key commands at a blonde chick, then shots are fired and all the robot surrogates in the world fall down. So whoever she was (Bruce’s wife?) she saved all of humanity from a life of surrogate slavery, waking them from, one might say, the Matrix in which they lived. From the director of sad sequel Terminator 3.

Somehow the Michael Cera thing hasn’t worn off on me yet. Good to see Kieran Culkin as his sarcastic gay roommate, Anna Kendrick of Up In The Air as his sister, and Brandon Routh of Superman Returns as a baddie who gains his powers from eating vegan. I want to say it’s good to see Jason Schwartzman, but his thing has fully worn off, sorry. Had no idea that the main hair-dyed love interest (Mary Winstead) was in Death Proof, that Cera’s band’s drummer played Milk’s campaign manager, that the action-movie-star ex-boyfriend was Human Torch from Fantastic Four, or that Thomas “Dreamcatcher/The Punisher” Jane was a vegan policeman.

Feel like I should have something more to say, but I really didn’t say anything about Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead either.