The View From The Mountain

When I was a kid, I collected a series of action figures made from a company called Mego. They produced eight inch tall figures from several IPs back then, like Star Trek and the Planet of the Apes. They also produced superhero figures from DC and Marvel Comics, like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four. I received the Fantastic Four--all four figures--as a birthday gift from my mother one year. The interesting thing was, I never actually asked for them. I never even knew they had made figures of this superhero team, which I didn’t know that much about because I hadn’t read their comics. But I was still very grateful to have the F4 in my League of Superheroes. Created by comic book legends Stan Lee & Jack Kirby back in the early 1960s, the Fantastic Four were known as Marvel’s First Family. They were a superhero team who were truly family. Reed Richards was the stretchy leader who was married to Sue Storm, who had the powers of invisibility and force fiel...

I first saw actress Florence Pugh as part of an unplanned double feature with the movies Fighting With My Family and Malevolent . Fighting was a biography based on the life of British-born wrestler Saraya Bevis, better known as Paige in the ring. Malevolent was a horror movie about a brother and sister team of con artists who pretend to be ghost hunters so they can bilk their clients--until they run into some real life terrors. Both movies were very good, and I was really impressed with how completely different Pugh was from one film to the next. And so I followed her career, which wasn’t hard to do, seeing how Pugh kept popping up in just about everything since then, including Dune: Part Two , and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pugh debuted in the MCU as Yelena Belova, the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in the enjoyable Black Widow . Pugh also reprised Yelena later that year in the shitty Disney+ series Hawkeye (Pugh imbued her scenes with some mu...

The first Ant Man movie was a pleasant surprise when it was released back in 2015. Paul Rudd starred in the title role as a man who can shrink himself down to the size of an ant (and more), thanks to a special suit. The film was well-directed by Peyton Reed, who took over at the last minute from director Edgar Wright ( Shaun of the Dead ). While Ant Man is considered a second-tier hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s been around since his first appearance in 1962, in the comic Tales To Astonish , having been created by such big-league comics talents as Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. The first Ant Man film worked superbly by having its titular character operate as a street level hero. Rudd plays Scott Lang, an ex-convict who’s struggling to make it in the world, only to fall back into a life of crime, thanks to Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his grown daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly). Hank was the one who created the Ant Man suit, and the mo...

I dreaded watching the Doctor Strange sequel, so much so that I avoided it for a while now. I didn’t want to see it for the simple reason that Scott Derrickson, who did such a marvelous job with the first Doctor Strange film, opted out of helming the sequel. Derrickson, who directed such frightfully good films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose , Sinister , and The Black Phone , gave us a wonderfully weird and dark Doctor Strange film that was tinged with such strong elements of horror that it was a little unnerving in certain moments. In other words, the first Doctor Strange was pretty fucking great, and remains one of my all-time favorite Marvel Movies. But since I was a Doctor Strange fan from way back when I was a kid, I finally gave in and watched Doctor Strange in The Multiverse Of Madness on Disney Plus, and guess what? It really wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I kinda, sorta liked it. Well, OK, I really liked it. Yes, I really enjoyed Doctor Strange 2, I admit it...

While I’ve always considered myself more of a DC Comics type of guy (with Batman being my all-time favorite), I’ve also been a huge fan of Marvel’s Spider-Man since I first saw him in the cartoon show as a little spud (“Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can….”). And so I’ve also enjoyed the Spider-Man movies produced by Sony: the Tobey MacQuire Spider-Man films, the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films, and the absolutely fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is my favorite Spider-Man film, bar none. But I was never a big fan of the Tom Holland Spider-Man films. I have no problem with Holland himself; he’s a genuinely talented actor who gives it all with what he’s given to work with, but that’s not much. Spider-Man: Homecoming had Peter Parker act like he’s the ward of Tony (Iron Man) Stark, and even after Stark kicks the bucket (and good riddance) in the Avengers films, Peter is still living in his shadow in Far From Home. ...

Hey, Venom’s back, and he brought Carnage with him! The first Venom film snuck up on me, despite the fact that I was never a huge fan of the character. It was Tom Hardy’s deft performance, along with the generous dash of humor, that won me over with the first Venom film. But the inclusion of Woody Harrelson in a scene at the very end, along with the hint that he would be Carnage, was so tantalizing that I wished that had been the main storyline of the first film. Well, Carnage--a villainous version of Venom in red--takes center stage in this sequel, as Woody Harrelson’s deadly alter-ego runs rampant over San Francisco, aided by his girlfriend (well-played by Naomi Harris, who played Moneypenny to Daniel Craig’s James Bond), who can kill people with a blast of her ear-shattering shriek, sort of like Marvel’s villainous version of DC’s Black Canary. With two fine actors as these playing baddies, it’s a shame they’re not on screen for very long to be really e...