What Joss Whedon has done is quite spectacular. He’s managed to take what could have been a complete clusterfuck of a movie and compacted every single hero and their mythos within two and a half hours, while also being able to introduce new heroes we can root for in the process. “The Avengers” is a true accomplishment of not only studio ambition but comic book cinema, a true masterpiece of the fantasy genre that piles together Marvel’s greatest heroes for a film many comic book fans have dreamed of having for decades. “The Avengers” incidentally is one of the many variations of Akira Kurosawa’s unparalleled masterpiece “Seven Samurai.” In “The Avengers” much like Kurosawa’s masterpiece, a thuggish villain rears his ugly head prepared to take down a land of innocent people for their own selfish purposes. Only when seven mismatched and unique heroes join forces and put aside their egos to defend the land does the villain meet his match. Ultimately while “The Avengers” is in fact an ambitious project that’s been planned from the get go, the film feels very meticulously crafted.
My main weakness ever since I acquired the internet in 2000 is fan films. I can’t get enough of them, no matter how good or bad they are. The good thing about them is that if they’re good, they show us that some properties have potential to really shine as great movies. Director Olan Rogers proves that with his fantastic adaptation of “Megaman X.”
As the Nickelodeon network’s most sophisticated and probably most brilliant animated series of all time, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” set a standard for modern animated series and raised the bar. Pseudo-anime it surely was, but it didn’t pretend to be anything more than an American animated series with Eastern influences. As a surefire landmark in children’s entertainment for the US network, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a remarkable fantasy series that is sprawling and absolutely mesmerizing. So it was only a matter of time until Nickelodeon in America would attempt to duplicate the success and branch off with a brand new spin off of the original series. Fans were almost expecting it. Nickelodeon has to be respected for having the guts to try and catch lightning in a bottle twice.