Wow, what a gorgeous movie! Seriously, I’ve seen a lot of movies in my day (More than eight, definitely), and I have never seen a film in which the scenery was this sumptuous. Oh, sure, I’ve seen movies with considerably more lush set design, costuming, what have you - the 1984 version of “Dune” springs to mind - but, the exteriors just completely blew me away in a fashion that I haven’t felt since “The Fifth Element” (1997) or back in ‘77 when I was ten and saw Star Wars for the first time.

Ok, so here goes – let’s just dive in and get the painful part of this review over with right up front and then spend some time on meaningless rambling and thoughts. Avatar, the movie, was much, much better than I expected – surprisingly so, but still not the masterpiece that you would expect or possibly hope based on the intense amount of effort and money that has been put into it. Why is that the painful part? Well… because I was hoping for a disaster of monumental proportions that I could make fun of endlessly and think back on in my old age fondly as the height of Hollywood overindulgence.

Man, I’m sick as a dog tonight, but I’m still gonna’ try my normal Friday night triple-play of reviews. We’ll see if I make it through, or even survive.

PLAY BY PLAY

I’ll admit right up front that I’m not really familiar with Astro Boy. I know he’s a hugely popular Japanese character, and has been since the early 1950s, I know that there have been many cartoon and manga (or as they call it in Japan, “Comics”) iterations of him over the last half century, and I know that a lot of people are fanatical about him. I’ve even seen a few minutes of cartoons here and there over the years, and I recognized him on a poster in one of the later episodes of Macross/Robotech (In the newstand the three Zentradi spies are running)

Once again, we have an above-average episode that hits on some moral and character development in the show that, somehow, manages to fall a bit short of its potential. But as they’re consistently beating their own average, I have little to complain about.

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Iron man’s unexpected winning streak continues with what is unquestionably my favorite episode of the series so far. I initially decided to start reviewing this series on a lark, since Marvel is woefully underrepresented on our site (Owing mostly to the fact that I don’t really like it, and the guys on here who do like it don’t wanna’ write about it), but Iron Man is really the only Marvel Hero who works for me (I think mainly because Rocket Red was so woefully under-used in the DC universe).

Sorry it took me a week to get this review up, but life got in the way. The good news, however, is that it was worth the wait and that with “Meltdown” two weeks ago, this one, and tonight’s new episode, this turkey of a show has finally hit some kind of a stride and is becoming worth watching. It’s not all the way there yet, but they seem to have finally hit on the idea that they need (A) stories and (B) to make use of their characters.

PLAY BY PLAY