The Punisher (Season 1) review

09 Saturday Dec 2017

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Maybe you should just shoot him!

by Thom Yee

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The Punisher images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, and Netflix

“Sure, I use a lot of automatic weapons and they have their place in combat.  But I also have gone into my share of combat with a pump shotgun.  The U.S. Marines use a Remington Model 870.  I made great use of several in Vietnam, where I kept a cut-down shotgun close to me at all times.  We’d cut down the barrel to, like 10” and load it up with 00 buckshot.  Because, when ambushed, you might get the piece pointed in the general direction before you pulled the trigger.  But, sometimes that was all that would be needed.  Rapid-fire shot loads have the same effect as machine-gun fire, especially when there’s more than one shotgun.” Continue reading →

Justice League review

25 Saturday Nov 2017

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Meanwhile, in the universe formerly known as the DCEU

by Thom Yee

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Justice League images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

If you had told me back in 2007 — just one year after the disastrous X-Men:  The Last Stand stalled that franchise to the point of needing a soft reboot and just one year before Robert Downey Jr.’s debut as Iron Man would kick off Marvel’s own Cinematic Universe — that the next ten years in movies would be dominated by superheroes, I’d have thought you were joking.  And yet, here we are, a full ten years later and a full five years of reviewing them here at GOO Reviews (yesterday in fact marked our fifth anniversary), and superhero movies have gone from rarity to occasional hit to the driving force behind Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.  It’s superhero movies that make most of the money in Hollywood these days, it’s superhero (and superhero-like) movies that executives want most to produce and fanboys want most to see, and it’s superhero movies that, as of 2017 with the release of Logan, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man:  Homecoming, Thor:  Ragnarok, and the subject of this review, are now coming out at a rate of at least six per year (and that’s not even counting tangential 2017 superhero releases like LEGO Batman or Power Rangers). Continue reading →

Thor: Ragnarok review

11 Saturday Nov 2017

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That was… a lot…

by Thom Yee

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Thor: Ragnarok images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

If it feels like it’s been a while since we’ve talked about Thor here on GOO Reviews, you’re right, it has been a while, not since 2013 in fact when we published our review of Thor:  The Dark World.  And that’s actually a little weird because it’s not as if Marvel movies went away or became less popular in the four years since then, quite the opposite in fact.  It’s just that Thor’s only managed one other movie appearance since then, 2015’s Avengers:  Age of Ultron, a paltry number in comparison to his fellow Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man, with whom Thor ostensibly shares the title of that team’s “big three”.  In that same four-year timespan, as well as appearing in Age of Ultron, Captain America headlined two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest and most eventful chapters in Captain Americas Winter Soldier and Civil War and Iron Man co-starred in and often even outshone the titular characters in Captain America:  Civil War and Spider-Man:  Homecoming.  That’s two more movies each for Cap and ol’ Shellhead to become even more the central figures of the MCU whereas Thor’s been mostly off world, doing gods know what in adventures that either had little to do with the MCU’s main, Earth-bound stories or that we had no real interest in (like [again] Thor:  The Dark World [just as an example]). Continue reading →