Hi, I'm a Marvel . . .and I'm a DC

There are about 27 of these little bits of business about Marvel and DC and how many movies they each have in the works and who is better. Batman is still bitter about Adam West and George Clooney. Iron Man is pretty happy, but still can't resist zapping Spiderman. Superman is bummed out that he isn't what he used to be. Lex Luther thinks too much. The Hulk is a bit confused about his new remake-sequel-reboot-whatever. And DC just doesn't seem to have as much going on as Marvel.

These are all fun little films-especially for all the nerds like myself who grew up reading comic books and already knows all the bloody back stories. The films all have enough holes and errors and oddities to make fun of.

These parodies of the I'm a Mac and I'm a PC commercials are great stuff. Funny and silly and sharp as a tack. It doesn't really matter if your a fan of Marvel Comics or DC Comics as the tide seems to flow both ways. Take a few minutes and watch a couple.

Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull

Ok, I know the title is Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but really, they could have just called it Indiana Jones. This was a good movie and it was fun-and there were all kinds of tips of the hat to older Lucas projects.

In the original Raiders of The Lost Ark the opening credits featured a mountain with stars around it replacing the normal Paramount mountain in the corporate logo-that trick is repeated. Followed quickly by a group of 1950s teens very reminiscent of American Graffiti-which starred a very young Harrison Ford. Old Indiana Jones mentions in passing his time with Pancho Villa-which happened in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. That whole chase sequence in the jungle is taken straight out of the Disney Ride. And yes, that is the warehouse in Area 51 where the Ark is safely crated up.

In short, the few original bits in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull slip from the mind amid all the deja vu. There were plenty of times when there were too many CGIs-as will all George Lucas works since oh, 1980 or so. The villains are Russians, not Nazis-but otherwise this is the same movie we have seen three times already. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Indiana Jones has always been more grave robber than archaeologist-but it still bugs me when he rips through long lost, historically significant finds and shrugs when they disintegrate in the open air. And the solution of the mystery of the Crystal Skull is much like the solution of Lost Ark-out of sight, out of mind.

In one of the more bizarre scenes, Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. He then stands on a small ridge that appears to be a mile or less from Ground Zero as the mushroom cloud glows above him. I know that the 1950s were all about irradiated the Earth's atmosphere-but I am not sure Indy would have shrugged off trans-lethal doses of radiation.

It's good and fun and I laughed a few times-but it isn't Raiders of The Lost Ark. There are no surprises, no shocks, no worries that anything even remotely bad will happen to our heroes. Hell, bad things barely happen to the bad guys-Cate Blanchett really should have said Moose and Squirrel at least once.

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was good, but it could have been better.

Woman Gets Naked After Being Whistled At

She said she had thought 'Bugger them, I'll show them what I've got,'"

Police say an Israeli tourist felt harassed after she was wolf whistled at by New Zealand road workers-her response? She stripped naked while she used an ATM. While I have never been big on whistling at girls myself, I am now giving the idea a few second thoughts.

Workmen in the small town of Kerikeri were repairing the town's main street when the young woman tourist took offense at their attention. Whistling at girls as they walk by is something you see a lot on TV, I guess it never occurred to me that this was much of a real world problem.

The Israeli tourist calmly stripped naked to use an ATM machine, then put her clothes back on and walked away. Sgt Peter Masters said the woman told police she did not take kindly to the men's wolf whistles. And so, what better way to discourage this kind of rude behavior than getting naked in front of them? I haven't seen any reports on what the workmen did at this point-maybe a bit of stunned silence, maybe a few cheers replaced the wolf whistles.

Mr Masters said the woman was taken back to the police station where she was told her actions were "inappropriate".

Two Commercials

There are a number of commercials that go out of their way to leave the product they are supposed to be selling a bit of a mystery. I like the Garmin commercial where a car appears to be driving itself through the streets of France. We discovered that we couldn't see the driver because it was Napoleon-and he found the army because he was using his Garmin.






Not being a beer drinker, the Heineken Share the Good ad could be for anything that comes in a bottle. The song is It's Love by Chris Knox. Just the kind of silly song they use for beer commercials. I like the ad, but it could just as easily be for Coke or Fuji water.

Jumper-Can't Tell The Players Without a Scorecard

Jumper is a visual stunning film-so much so that it is only after you leave the theater that you stop and ask yourself what it was about. We have a hero who can instantly transport to anywhere on earth-so long as he has been there before.

Or at least, that seems to be the way it works in Jumper. Or maybe he can jump anywhere he sees a photo of. Or maybe he can jump to Oz if he gets a really good image of The Emerald City. No, it seems that he has to travel to the locales that he will later jump to. It is never really made clear, though it does seem to be a bit important to the story.

Our hero is a Jumper, who made his first jump when he was either five or fifteen years old. He is either a hero or a criminal with no conscious. His mother is either a Jumper or a member of the Paladins who have sworn to kill all Jumpers. There are a lot of really cool special effects in Jumper-so try not to worry too much about the story not making any damned sense at all.

Our Hero leaves notes in the banks he robs that says he will pay them back someday, but then there doesn't seem to be any real world use for instantaneous travel. If you can see into the future, you can make money in the stock market. If you can turn base metal into gold you can sell it, at least until the bottom falls out of the gold market. If you can make it rain, you can get paid to travel to places with droughts. But traveling really fast-nothing really springs to mind as to how you would make legal money with this trick. Unless he started his own UPS or FedEx-but that seems a bit too much work for our boy. It was a very good looking movie.

We only see three Jumpers, and hear the tale of one more-with the exception of his mother, who may or may not be a Jumper. She shows up in Rome when she has no business that we know of being in Rome. There are a lot of Paladins, or at least, they tell us there are a lot of Paladins. We are also told that they have been killing Jumpers for a few hundred years and that they hate them for what they can do-and that they all turn bad in the end. In short, we are left with nothing but questions from the storyline.

But damn, this was a good looking film.