I’ve been watching movies and reading comics a lot this week, two of my favorite pastimes. Let’s chat about that, shall we?

Wednesday was comic book day, so The Pickytarian and I went to Midtown Comics at lunch. It was a good week, and after leaving empty-handed 2 weeks running, I picked up a pretty big stack.

Then I put a lot of it back, because bathroom remodeling ain’t cheap.

As I’ve mentioned before, Marvel comics and I are in a love-hate, make-up/break-up relationship. For all Marvel’s MANY faults, when it comes to comics, my heart is always goign to be stuck in New York City, circa 1987, with superheroes and villains everwhere. The X-men are Storm (with a mohawk), Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue, and Colossus. Dr. Strange has a townhouse in Greenwich Village, there’s an Avengers West Coast team, and Spider-man wears black and is dating the hyper-sexy Black Cat. Black Cat won the SHNWMLTF (Super-Heroine Nerds Would Most Like TO Fuck) contest every year in the 80’s.

So I was excited for the current issue of Spider-Man/Human Torch #4.

Spider-Man/Human Torch relates the friendship of these two characters through the years. Each issue is based in another decade, with the appropriate background.

This issue is set in the mid-eighties, my heyday (hayday?). In it, the Black Cat, an ex-jewel thief, tries to get Spider-man to join her on a heist. When Spidey refuses, the Human Torch is more than willing to move in on Spidey’s sexy woman and help her out. The Cat, with her typical skill, plays both of them against each other with grace and style, and comes out getting what she wants as the expense of both.

I’ve skipped buying the other issues in this series (I’ll wait for the trade), but this one was irresistable. Alien black costume Spider-man? The Black Cat? She-hulk in a French Maid’s costume? It was like coming home for a weekend. I was so engrossed reading this book that I missed my subway stop and was late(r) for work.

I also picked up the 4th issue of the always-late Samurai Executioner. What is with the production of this book, anyway? The series was originally published in Japan in the 70’s, so it’s not like the creators are holding it up. It’s produced in the original format, more or less, so there’s not a lot of re-design work to do. And Dark Horse comics has been hyping it for over a year, so you’d think the translations would be done. Why the constant delays? It’s predecessor, Lone Wolf & Cub, came out every month like clockwork.

Feh.

Like every issue of Samurai Executioner, though, this one was worth the wait. God diggety damn, I can’t even express how much I love this book! It’s by far the best comic on the market today.

Samurai Executioner is a meticulously researched and accurate representation of Edo-period Japan, as the samurai class is still in power, but failing before the rising power of commerce and the peasant merchant class.

The book is about the life and experiences of Yamada Asaemon, the shogun’s sword tester and the executioner of the shogunate. It is his job to execute criminals, a job at which he excells. But he is a good man. A moral man. And writer Kazuo Koike tests him continually with sympathetic criminals. Decapitator Asaemon is constantly torn between his beliefs, pulled by the needs of society, honor, tradition, and himself.

Despite all this, the execution is always performed. It’s not about the criminal getting off, as it would be in American stories of the type. It’s about WHY they must die, and whether they do so with honor. There are few surprises in this book regarding the condemned.

Read it anyway.

Wednesday night, Fink waited on line for like 14 hours and got us tickets to the midnight opening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

I could talk about this movie all day, but I’ll try to be brief. I’ve waited a little while to give all the good nerds time to see it, but if you still haven’t gotten around to it, beware! I’m not going to fret over spoilers.

So. Sith. It sucked.

It didn’t HAVE to suck. Really. It had all the elements it needed to be a great movie. The story was solid. The actors were all notable, and all have impressive work under their belts. The special effects were top-notch, and the costumes excellent. Even the score was good. Any failings I blame squarely on Lucas.

George Lucas promised when he started this whole ‘first three episodes’ nonsense that he would only direct ONE movie (if any), and that would be the first one. After The Phantom Menace sucked, he should have kept his word. I would have forgiven him. He was a great man.

But out of hubris or greed or some other nebulous reason, ol’ George reneged on his word. And while he may have an incredible imagination and wonderful ability at creating special effects, the man has got to be one of the worst directors under the sun.

For starters, the man can’t edit for shit. There wasn’t a single shot that lasted for more than 9 seconds, and when the action heated up, you could trim that in half. He’s lucky half of America didn’t have an epileptic seizure watching this movie. It was so choppy that half the time, you couldn’t even follow what was going on. You knew who was fighting, usually, and who won, but the moves? The moves that fight choreographers and wire teams, and the actors and CGI animators spent countless hours on? Lost.

I know Americans have a dwindling attention span. I get it. US Weekly and MTV have done that. But come on! I’m watching a kickass lightsaber fight, reach for my popcorn, and suddenly I’m like “What happened? Why are they surfing on lava? What the heck did I miss that caused such a HUGE scenery shift?”

The acting in the movie was the worst. With the exception of Emperor Palpatine and Yoda, there wasn’t a good bit of acting in the whole movie. Everyone is a piece of wood. REALLY emotional scenes are going on, and the actors are cardboard cut-outs.

I completely blame the director. All Lucas seems interested in is getting the shot and giving it to the special effects people. One take. It’s like he had the actors read the script for the first time off a teleprompter on-set while they were in costume and the cameras were rolling. He’d yell “Cut!” and start taking the film out of the camera to ship it to the CGI people, and I imagine the actors saying “Hey, I think I could do that better…” To which George replies “It’s fine. No one goes to see Star Wars for the dialogue.”

There is some cool shit in this movie, and you should go see it just because it is a cultural phenomenon, but it ain’t no Lord of the Rings. The betrayal and execution of the jedi is portrayed coldly, almost lazily, taking something that could have been amazingly powerful and making it almost dull. The same goes with Anakin’s turn to the dark side. The motivations for the change are weak at best, and Hayden Christensen doesn’t sell it at all.

On Friday I went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I didn’t expect to like it. I read the book in college, and while it amused me, I didn’t think it was anywhere NEAR the work of genius all my friends promoted it as. More than 10 years later, I barely remember it, anyway.

Believe it or not, this movie was GREAT! You could tell that the producers really respected the source material, and treated it as a canon to love and honor, not a mine for a few ideas that could be worked into a standard Hollywood story skeleton.

I knew right from the “So long and thanks for all the fish!” musical interlude at the beginning (complete with dolphins I still don’t know were real or CGI), that I was in for a treat.

Douglas Adams’ overly witty writing can be tiring sometimes, like watching Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, but it’s well worth the effort. Alan Rickman does an incredible job as a depressed robot (prototype personality program), and that guy from Charlie’s Angels is amazing as the politician who has had half his brain removed to make him the perfect PC figurehead. It even has Mos Def.

This movie is a delight.

I also recorded The Rundown on TiVo recently. Don’t ask me why. It was a whim. I’m certainly no fan of the Rock, but my wife thinks Stiffler (Sean William Scott) is funny, and it has Christopher Walken in it, so why not?

The Rundown? Not half bad. I was actually pretty shocked. When the Rock backs off from fighting the football team in the beginning, and then you realize it was because they had a shot at the superbowl and he didn’t want to hurt them, it started to dawn that I might have stumbled onto a gem. Sure, it had some Hollywood nonsense, like people walking calmly away from explosions, but whatever. No messy love interests, just lighthearted action, adventure, and fun.

Maybe the Rock can be a movie star, after all. I tell you, I had my doubts…

Therein lies the lesson. You can often judge a book by its cover, but not always.