4thletter!

I don’t even need to comment on this joint. Found via Nah Right.

Usually, whenever a big comic book movie comes out, I’m there with a little article about comparing the film to the novelization. After all, the novelizations are based on earlier scripts of the movie and shed some light on what was taken out. Sometimes things are for the better. Sometimes they’re for the worse.

There’s a reason I’m so late with the Dennis O’Neil adaptation of Dark Knight. While the books for Marvel movies come out about a month or so before release, it was decided, for spoiler purposes likely, that Dark Knight would be released as a strict-on-sale title. It came out the same day as the movie, but my Barnes and Noble didn’t receive it until days later. As a fun aside, O’Neil himself came to the store, wondering if we had it yet.

At first I wasn’t even going to bother. Reading the book after seeing the movie didn’t sound like as much fun. That decision changed after seeing what I have to call the best movie of the summer. I picked up a copy and spent the next week or so reading it.

I should point out that this is going to be spoiler-heavy, but this is a comic site and you are a person reading a comic site. If you haven’t seen Dark Knight by now and haven’t at least been spoiled about the scene where David Allen Grier appears as Oswald Cobblepot, then there’s probably something wrong with you.

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Caught the midnight showing of Incredible Hulk tonight. Very fun movie that’s definitely better than the Ang Lee non-prequel. It flows nicely and the action wasn’t too brief, as it sometimes felt in Iron Man. Not to say it’s better than Iron Man, because it isn’t, but there’s no shame in that. Besides, this is the second episode of the Avengers Movie Saga and it does feel right in that respect.

Several weeks back I read the Peter David novelization, as I’m wont to do, so I already had been spoiled in terms of the plot. While there are few surprises, there’s still the interesting experience of seeing stuff that was in the original version of the story that got cut out. I’ve done this before, of course, with Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man. The former was originally a solid story until important chunks of it got cut out. The latter remained good, despite a subplot cut out because of the Air Force’s say so.

With Incredible Hulk, the good outweighed the bad in terms of cuts. God, did it ever. Yes, there was definitely some stuff that should have stayed in there. No doubt. It’s just that a lot of scenes that got ousted had the potential to be really bad. Really bad. I’m talking Superman’s cellophane S projectile bad. I’m talking Matt Murdock fighting Elektra at the playground bad. I’m talking the entirety of Rise of the Silver Surfer bad. It’s cool that I count that movie as one long, horrible scene, right?

Word on the street is that there are 70 minutes of stuff cut. It’ll probably be seen in DVD form. Whether or not that makes for a better movie remains to be seen. The deleted scenes below, filled with spoilers, don’t seem to sum up to 70 minutes, but when it comes to cutting them being a good or bad idea, I’ll let you be the judge.

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Last night I checked out the Iron Man movie. It is just as fantastic as it was meant to be, but that’s just my initial reaction. We’ll see how I feel in a couple days. Ah, hell. I’ll still probably love it.

About a month back, I read through Peter David’s novelization, so I got the gist of how good this would be. Like Spider-Man 3, it was based on an earlier or fuller version of the movie before scenes got cut or, in the case of this movie, replaced. Spider-Man 3 was about character-building scenes getting cut for the sake of time and allowing more focus on Mary Jane’s constant whining. With Iron Man, most of the scenes were cut for time, or in other cases, to totally fuck over Terrance Howard as Jim Rhodes. The poor guy gets devoured by editing. According to interviews, in return for their involvement in the film, the Air Force insisted on having control of the character and refused some of his character actions. That explains that.

It’s also worth noting that director Favreau was into improvisation, which does alter a couple scenes here and there on the dialogue side of things..

This is going to be filled with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know about the scene where Titanium Man beats up an army of ballerinas, go make yourself a sandwich. Or go see the movie. You’d be glad you did.

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I too saw the midnight showing of Spider-Man 3. Fun movie, even if it does have its flaws.

I do like how the crowd I saw it with was totally into it. Stan Lee got a round of applause. Bruce Campbell got a crazy ovation. The initial Venom transformation got a round of applause. Even that one bit at the Jazz Club towards the end where Peter does that thing he immediately regrets got a huge applause despite the fact that it was meant to be serious.

There are some groan-inducing scenes, though. I can understand why people wouldn’t like it.

Keep in mind, with the novelization, I thought it was quite good. It’s just that Raimi decided to cut out a lot of stuff and I’m not sure I agree with what he decided on.

Below is a list of most of the stuff that was either cut out of the movie, or Peter David just snuck into his version of the story. If a lot of this stuff is included in the eventual Spider-Man 3.1, I’ll be sure to pick up a copy. It may not be an improvement the level of Kingdom of Heaven, but I’m sure it would be an overall improvement nonetheless.

Remember, this is spoiler-heavy. So don’t go complaining to me because you accidentally read about the scene where Spider-Man defeats Venom by playing the entire guitar solo from Freebird and the rent-crazed landlord reveals himself to be Dormammu in disguise.

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