CPO: A Brief History of Cross-pollination

The Incredible Hulk is coming out at about the same time as I’m writing this thing. I’ve got super-heroes on the brain once again.
Marvel’s word of the moment is cross-pollination. Everyone, myself included, has apparently jumped on that bandwagon and accepted the term. When Tony Stark shows up in The Incredible Hulk, they (and [...]

CPO: Dan in Real Life

The way that I was able to come up with this script is that I read somebody else’s script and changed how some of the parts were, so that the movie would be more like my family and me. And that’s how I wrote the script all by myself. Then I made the actor’s improvise [...]

CPO: 09.04.08

I watched Iron Man this week, and damn if that isn’t a fun movie. It’s fast-paced, develops its characters, makes in-jokes that aren’t distracting to non-comics fans, and left me wanting more. The film raises questions about the accountability of weapons manufacturers, without preaching or providing easy answers. Thematically, it’s a coming-of-age story for the [...]

CPO: Summer Movie Preview Haiku ‘08

The tradition here at CPO is to do all movie preview columns in bastardized, hastily written, not particularly clever haiku. I’d break that tradition if I could, but my hands are tied.
Maybe, we can do a couple of limericks if the spirit movies us.
It’s not going to. . .

CPO: Closure

Closure can mean a lot of things. In terms of sensation and perception, it can refer to the process by which one’s mind fills in the blanks, the holes in the raw data supplied by our sense organs. We see two juxtaposed, sequential images in a comic book, and our mind can read it as [...]

CPO: Thug Life

“Thug life born, thug life bred, and when I die, I’ll be thug life dead. ”
Those touching words were said by somebody at some point in time. Perhaps it was a wrestler who said them, or maybe it was in a movie. Perhaps I have the wrong homophone and it was merely a commercial for [...]

CPO: Debate Topic (07.03.08)

Resolved: Nicole Kidman should stop making movies.

R0BTRAIN’s Bad Ass Cinema: Halloween

So it’s October again, and without fail the annual Horror movie marathon has started up at my house. My buddy Shaun is a freak about Horror and especially Slasher films, so he’s been savoring this opportunity to bust out his collection and watch promiscuous teenagers get knocked off by the dozen. Beyond question his favorite [...]

R0BTRAIN’s Bad Ass Cinema: Predator

Come on… Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on. Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Come on! Do it now! Kill me! - Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch from Predator

So lately I’ve been toying with the idea of a “Bad Ass Hall of [...]

R0BTRAIN’s Bad Ass Cinema: A Chuck-tember to Remember 4 - Revenge of Chuck

The Revenge is a time honored tradition, and especially amongst the different sub-genres of Martial Arts films. Chuck Norris films are apparently no different, as Norris’ screen characters seemed a natural fit for getting retribution over a serious wrong. Time and again, the Tae Kwon Doe Grandmaster has been called to action after suffering the [...]