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Here. (http://blog.newsarama.com/2007/12/20/hellboy-ii-the-golden-army-trailer/)  Was a little disappointed with the first movie as a whole, although it did have some nice parts, and I really liked the casting.

I loved the first one. Trailer looks good to me.

Guillermo del Toro is awesome.

Disappointed might be a strong word.  Mostly I just thought the romance plot between Hellboy and Liz seemed a bit shoe-horned in.

Dood, sweet.

Yeeeow  :awesome_for_real:

Anyone know what the music was in the trailer?  I've heard it before, but can't get it off the tip of my tongue...

Rammstein's "Mein Herz brennt". 

As to the trailer, I too loved the first movie, and it's looking like the next movie should be good as well.  They seem to have dropped the rookie guy, which doesn't bother me much.  The actor was alright I suppose, but the character itself was just pointless.  And, they're also apparently letting Doug Jones do the voice of Abe this time around.  And, I recall reading somewhere that for the dvd there'll be some sort of Lobster Johnson short film. 

I hope for the third, they pull inspiration from Conqueror Worm.  I want to see Hellboy fight more Nazis, and a giant ape. 

Something about the first one was less than the sum of it's parts, I'd have to watch again to pinpoint why. Still it was enjoyable enough.

So much of what I love about the comic is Mignola's art style, which you obviously aren't going to get out of a live action movie.  As much as I love Del Toro's work, the movie didn't feel like Hellboy, so much as it felt like Hellboy reinvented as a Hollywood movie.

Yeah I wasn't really thrilled by it, I've never even stopped to watch it on tv when it pops up.  I'm really amazed so many people are saying they really liked it.  For me it was a total meh, not even worth buying the dvd for $10 type of deal.

Didn't like it either. I like Perlman though (don't really care for Del Toro much), so I'll eventually give this a shot.

The best way to enjoy comic book movies is to have never read the comic.  Since the comics industry seems to be one giant ball of terrible writing and inscrutable logic-torturing continuity that only fanboys can decipher, this hasn't been difficult for me.  I mean, the good stuff mostly gets turned into movies nowadays anyway, right?

I'm being facetious, but you get the point.  The X-Men movie trilogy might not have been perfect, for example.  You might even consider it deeply flawed.  But it's a finite series of movies with a beginning, middle, and end that you can partake of with a straight face.  Their self-contained continuity isn't polluted by decades worth of writers struggling to keep the story going for all eternity.  Nobody ever went to space, or fought dinosaurs, or got turned into a baby or whatever.

I guess I'm just saying that comic book movies > comic books.  For the most part.

I'd slice my own throat before I started criticizing stuff purely out of nostalgia or "raping" my childhood, or whatever it is that diehard fans of things start whining about. I'm just not like that. I can take things on their own merits.

And as for comics specifically, I didn't read comics for almost 20 years before seeing these movies. It was this little comic movie renaissance that got me to look back into the written material. Especially relatively new stuff like Hellboy or League of Extraordinary Gentleman -- and I still think those films are mostly a waste of my time. They don't work well as movies. In my opinion, of course.

Those two movies shouldn't ever be lumped together. Hellboy was decent with some flawed pacing and a couple of shoehorned plot points that didn't work especially well. LoEG was a train wreck.

I just lumped them together because, well... They were relatively new. Y'know, like the comics haven't existed for long. I think? Either way, I wasn't acquainted with those written stories in the slightest.

I try to wait until after I've seen the movie to read the comic it's based on.  This is because nine times out of ten I end up liking the comic version better, so it's better not to set any expectations before watching the movie.  :-P

The League comic is very much worth reading.

Very much so.  And it was a completely unexpected pleasure after watching the movie.

Honestly, when you write a story like that, and it gets turned into a movie like that, could you really be blamed for demanding your name be taken off all future adaptations of your work?

1) Alan Moore is a bit of a grumpy old man in how other people adapt his work - just take the money for "V for Vendetta" and shut up - especially considering his most notable works involve taking other people's creations and warping them to suit his needs. He is an excellent writer, but he is also a grumpy fucker about it.

2) The first Hellboy movie fell over every time there was a love scene between Hellboy and Selma Blair's character. Hellboy may love that character in the comic, but it's a love he knows will never work so he hasn't (in the TPBs I've read) moped about after her or gone into a sulk when something didn't go his way.

Then again, I think Hellboy comics work best when Hellboy is on the sidelines or just fighting something, so there you are.

From Hell was cool. He shouldn't be too pissed.

From Hell was a good movie, but at the same time it was a pretty loose adaptation, even as comic adaptations go.  That being said, I don't think the original comic as written would have made all that great a movie.  I'm a fan of his work, but I think he tends to get overly pissy about some overall minor things.  League of Extraordinary Gentleman isn't one of those things though.  That thing was was an abomination, and a very shitty last movie to end Sean Connery's career with. 

As an aside, the new Black Dossier book is....out there.  Interesting, but crazy as hell.

Hellboy-wise, the weakest parts of the movie were the romance and buddy-cop type scenes with the rookie.  Which, surprise surprise, are the parts that were thrown into the movie without any basis in the comics.  Hellboy's about interesting stories, one liners, and Hellboy either beating the crap out of some monster, or a monster beating the crap out of him.  There's plenty of characters he's friends with that fit, we didn't need a forced average guy character. 

I read an interview with Alan Moore once in which he said that he specifically writes in such a manner that his stories are not translatable to the silver screen. He just doesn't like his work being in any other medium besides comics. That's probably why adaptations of his work are either very loose, or completely shitty.

He takes full advantage of the medium he work in.  There's things you can do in comics that you just can't do with TV, movies, or books (Watchmen probably being the finest example of that).

Bah, he's a good enough writer and his stories are good enough as is without needing some Hollywood cunt fucking it up, he can be a grumpy fucker all he wants. I think it's awesome that he can make enough money writing comics that he doesn't need Hollywood's money and can tell them to get stuffed when the check comes.

Movies are a helluva lot better medium. He should be trying to work with them instead.

Meh. I wouldn't say a better medium. There are many stories that just won't work in a visual medium like movies, and he's very good at those things. Internal monologue, descriptive allegorical ramblings, etc.

Now, if you were to say movies are a better medium financially, you are correct. But again, as a writer myself, I'd be tickled pink to be able to make a good enough living writing what I want without NEEDING Hollywood money. Not that I'd turn down Hollywood money, mind you... I do love the phat cash. But when you don't need it, it's even better.

OK, internal monologue... I'll give you that. Remember Dune? Eee..

Anyways, I don't just mean financially. It's better because it's a multimedia...err medium. The writing and visuals is only the half of it.

With movies, you're also stuck telling a story that is between an hour and a half, and three hours long that people will be expected to watch in one sitting (at least if you're making something for a theatrical release).  Also, as a comics writer you have more control over your end product.  If you're writing movie screenplays you better be directing the movies as well if you want them to make it to the screen the way you envision.  You're also going to have to be able to get a good performance out of all the actors you cast, get good special effects artists, etc...

Oh, and a lot of good writers can write 5-6 scripts a month.  Writing a screenplay and then directing the movie takes a hell of a lot more time.

The length of a feature film is deceptive. There's a lot crammed in that two hours, and a lot of depth and subtlety in the storywriting when it's done right. A lot can just be said by showing, not telling. It's possible to communicate pages and pages of material in just one minute of film, just because you can have so many different types of artists collaborating together in that one minute, not just writers.

Anyhow, I'm not going to argue too much. I just think Alan Moore is a dick when it comes down to it. He could have the power to control the outcome of some of these films, if he wanted to.

Oh, he's definitely a dick.

I just think his dickishness is justified by the much larger and offensive dickishness of the guys he's pissed about.

I believe the Wachowski's invited him to work with them multiple times, as did the Hughes brothers. I happen to think they did OK without him, but basically, he was just being a dick from the getgo. Blaming them for fucking up even before the projects began, even when he had a chance to rectify it and offer his expertise.

I don't think Hollywood is all that bad. Especially with the comic book thing. I mean, many directors are comic book nuts themselves. Not just the Sam Raimi or Kevin Smith types either. Even Scorsese, for example, had a lot of homemade comics/mock storyboards when he was a kid. He still does all of his own storyboarding... He thinks in "panels", much like a comic book artist does.

And as far as collaborating with the original author goes, he should look at what happened to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. That didn't turn out so bad.

So... He's just a dick.

He had a couple of legitimate gripes about V for Vendetta (a movie which I liked for the record) in regards to changes to the story as well as some of the marketing.  He also doesn't have any say over whether or not these movies get made, (which in hindsight I'm sure he realizes is largely his fault for signing on with DC), and I can't really fault him for not wanting to take the time to work with the Wachowski's or the Hughes bros. on projects he doesn't approve of in the first place.

But then I'm one of those crazy people who doesn't think that everything needs to be adapted into a movie.

Man, I want EVERYTHING adapted to film!

Sure, after what, Miller trying for a decade to have a movie made that wasn't shit? He wrote the Robocop 2 and 3 screenplays and we saw how those turned out.

And the only reason Miller and Rodriguez did so well with Sin City is that they DIDN'T follow the typical Hollywood pattern. In fact, Rodriguez had to quit the Director's Guild in order for Miller to get a co-direction credit. If you want to bring up those two as signs of Hollywood treating authors right, those aren't the droids you are looking for. Hell, Rodriguez's whole career could be chalked up to telling Hollywood to go fuck itself. He just does it nicely.

The issue with Rodriguez quitting the guild was merely a legal issue. It sucks, yeah, but it had nothing to do with them trying to cockblock Miller specifically. There are rules to that sort of thing, and Rodriguez was too stoked/impatient to wait on the project to get rolling. If a similar situation popped up in some kind of labor union, you'd get a similar outcome.

Besides, unions are probably the most benevolent element in hollywood. I know there are bad guys in that industry, but they're not it.

You can cram a lot in, but you're still limited to one doing one major story arc per movie for a lack of a better way of putting it.  I'd rather have Geoff Johns doing his work on Green Lantern and JSA among other things, and able to write mutiple story arcs in the time it would take him to do one movie.

(http://i241.photobucket.com/albums/ff26/stuabrtow/BPRD_Mug.jpg)

The best geek goody money can buy.

I like that cup!

I thought "V for Vendetta" worked very well as an adaptation and as a film of our time. If it had been a straight take and been about Thatcherist England, it would have been outdated and off-target.

I don't doubt that Hollywood is a bitch of a place for writers (see: the current strike) but in most cases Moore is just being a stubborn bastard.

For the record, I didn't think LXG was that bad a movie (no, it wasn't a great film); if they had done a straight take of the first run of the comic, it would have been a very boring movie.

I'm going to do you a favor and ignore that whole bit.  Your post had way more credibility before this.  Yes, it really was that bad a movie.  Go back and watch it again.

I've seen LXG at least twice. It is hilariously bad, but it wasn't eye-gougingly bad. That honour in 2006 was reserved for Van Helsing.

No.

There is nothing eye-gouging about Kate Whatsherface in tight pants and frilly shirts.  Mind-numbing and drool inducing 'entertainment' perhaps.

LXG was, however, eye-gougingly bad.  I wanted my money back even though I saw it when a friend rented it through NetFlix.

Yes.



(Van Helsing was silly and melodramatic and it set that context in the first 5 seconds of the film.  It's not the movie's fault that it wasn't what you wanted it to be.)

No, Van Helsing was just shit. Kate's ass in leather could not save that movie, and I should have turned it off after Dracula first appeared with that accent. It was shitty shit shit shit.

LXG was bad, but it wasn't anywhere near that bad. It was a bad version of the comic story, it was a cheesy fest of silliness, and it had Tom Fucking Sawyer, but it wasn't Van Helsing.

OK, knocking Tom Sawyer is Alan Moore's schtick. Fuck him. I'm glad they rubbed that in his face.


That being said, the movie was really bad. No argument there. But it wasn't because of Tom Sawyer!

Tom Sawyer was an American icon, that was written into a collection of British pulp characters, who shouldn't even have been the age he was at that time. It was a character shoehorned into something he had no business being in because some asshead producer thought American audiences wouldn't identify with non-American characters. The concept was ludicrous on its face.

And yet I liked the movie.

Queue Eff Tee, motherfuckers.

Del Toro has another movie due for release called The Orphanage. It's being compared to The Others, so it should be a solid thriller/horror flick. Still, I'm definitely higher on Del Toro working on projects with more of an action flavor.

It's already in release.  I got it at my theater last week, but haven't watched it yet.

Doh!

BTW, LXG was bad, but Van Helsing was so awful I couldn't sit through the whole thing. With Van Helsing, I wanted gore, cursing, and T & A the way Coppola did it in his Dracula flick. That one had Keanu and it still managed to be awsome (Garry Oldman FTW).

 Bram Stoker's Dracula was the last time Winona looked smoking hot, hotter than Kate at her best.

Well, all I can say is that Roger Ebert agrees with me.  Van Helsing may not have delivered what you wanted, but it delivered what it promised.  Yes, it was fucking silly.  It was supposed to be.

Van Helsing was promoted as the next great action franchise, ala Indiana Jones. It was a long way from delivering what was promised.

Not at all what I pulled from those commercials, but that's a matter of interpretation.  By "what it promised" I'm referring to the first couple minutes of the movie indicating what you should expect.

By which point people had already paid their money.

Yes, fine, fair enough.  I honestly don't really care to continue to defend a movie I found passably entertaining.  Hate it all you want.

LXG was worse. That's all.

LXG was worse in the respect that its existance actively discourages people who have never read the comic to actually give it a try.