I’m not gonna lie. I fell off The Walking Dead wagon years ago. Like a lot of fans, I checked out when Steven Yeun’s Glenn was killed off. And while the series, and its subsequent spinoffs, continued on, I never returned to the franchise. Until now.
Continue reading “‘Tales of the Walking Dead’ is a Welcome Addition to the Franchise”
On November 17, Hit-Monkey, Hulu’s latest TV-MA rated animated Marvel property, makes its debut on the streaming platform. Based on the comic by Daniel Way and artist Dalibor Talajić, Hit-Monkey tells the tale of a Japanese snow monkey who seeks revenge against the gangsters that decimated his family. One of the characters drawn into Hit-Monkey’s orbit is Detective Haruka, played by the incomparable Ally Maki.
Continue reading “Ally Maki Brings the Asian American Girl Club to Hulu’s ‘Hit-Monkey’”
M.O.D.O.K was just the beginning! This November, Hulu is continuing to crank out the epic Marvel animated shows, with its latest ambitious adaptation of Marvel’s Hit-Monkey!
Continue reading “Make Way for Hulu’s ‘Hit-Monkey’”
The official trailer and key art for Netflix’s new film, directed by Matt Thompson and written by Dave Callaham, has finally dropped! The talented voice cast includes Channing Tatum, Jason Mantzoukas, Olivia Munn, Bobby Moynihan, Judy Greer, Will Forte, Raoul Max Trujillo, Killer Mike, Simon Pegg, and Andy Samberg. America: The Motion Picture is produced by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Will Allegra, Channing Tatum, Peter Kiernan, Reid Carolin, Matt Thompson, Eric Sims, and Dave Callaham.
Continue reading “Netflix Has Released the Trailer and Key Art for ‘America: The Motion Picture’”
America: The Motion Picture is hitting the streaming platform on June 30, and Netflix’s social media has officially released the cast list! Their official Twitter wrote that the film is “crossing rivers to deliver you to a prosperous new horizon.” With the tweet, a video of a sneak peek at what the characters look like revealed all of the actors involved in voicing them.
Continue reading “Meet the Cast of Netflix’s ‘America: The Motion Picture’”
This week on Hard NOC Life, Keith is joined by his DC TV Classics co-host Britney Monae to fill in for Shawn as they break down the week in Nerd Pop.
Continue reading “Hard NOC Life: Olivia Munn vs. Super Predator”
Following the success of the first two films comes the newest sibling to the LEGO world: The LEGO Ninjago Movie. Was it as full of color and artistically beautiful as the first two?
Continue reading “NinjaGO or NinjaNO? – A LEGO Ninjago Review”
X-Men Apocalypse.
I swore I wouldn’t write a review for the film. Primarily because any review I penned would pale in comparison to the excellent piece penned by my buddy and fellow N.O.C. colleague, Valerie Complex.
Seriously if you haven’t read it, go do so now. Val snatched so many wigs and edges, you would’ve thought Director Bryan Singer and Fox were members of the Charles Xavier Cosplay Appreciation Society.
Don’t expect this movie to rely heavily on the source material. Director Bryan Singer presents a film that’s a hodge-podge of various stories made up by people who know nothing about the X-Men. Aside from Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and Apocalypse (Oscar Issac, doing well with whatever the hell he is given) being mildly entertaining, they can’t save the film from imploding. Everyone else is either used as filler or bores you to death with their on-screen presence. Choppy action scenes are put in place to mask the uninteresting, underdeveloped characters, cheesy dialogue, Playstation 2-quality special effects, and makeup that looks like it was bought from the bargain bin at Chapel Hill Beauty Supply. The worst part is the newcomers don’t get their chance to shine like the trailer would have you believe. Particularly the characters of color.
Continue reading “X-Men Apocalypse: Fox Wins But People of Color Lose”
Depending on where you stake your claim on the internet, there has been a lot of chatter about a movie that tanked at the box office1 and another one that isn’t due in theaters for at least another year. The thing that links these seemingly disparate films is that both thought casting white women as characters who are written as Asian American and Pacific Islander was a good idea.
Last night, the director of one of those films — Cameron Crowe — finally broke his silence and offered this explanation for why he cast Emma Stone (Amazing Spider-Man) as a character called Allison Ng:
Continue reading “These Actresses are Not Asian or Pacific Islanders”
On Monday, director Bryan Singer revealed on Instagram that he had cast Newsroom star Olivia Munn as Psylocke in the upcoming reboot/sequel X-Men: Apocalypse. And if you’re wondering, Pyslocke was previously portrayed by Mei Melançon in X-Men: The Last Stand, but everyone knows that movie doesn’t count (and after the events of the last X-Men movie, none of the other ones do either).
Due in theaters next year, Apocalypse continues the period-set aesthetic of the new X-Men franchise. While First Class was set in the 1960s and Days of Future Past in the 1970s, Apocalypse will take place during the 1980s, which is fitting since that’s the time period that saw Betsy Braddock go from a supporting role in Captain Britain to a full-fledged member of the X-Men. She’s also one of the first characters to undergo a convoluted, but canonical, race swap in the pages of the comic.
Anyway, some of the Nerds convened around the old Roundtable to talk about Olivia’s casting in the next X-Men film.
Continue reading “NOCs of the Roundtable: Olivia Munn is Psylocke”
Tonight marks the official debut of Fresh Off the Boat in its regular Tuesday night time slot. Though it did pretty big numbers last week, tonight’s airing is the make-or-break since it’ll be going up against ratings behemoth NCIS — as well as our beloved The Flash. This is why god invented DVRs.
But the Huangs weren’t the only Asian American family to show up on television last week. Over on the Disney Channel, the Callistos made their debut as well with the premiere of the new Disney Junior series Miles From Tomorrowland. And just like FOTB, a precocious Asian American tween is at the center of the show.
Continue reading “Asian American Boys as the Hero? Props, Disney”
So a few days ago, I wrote a thing. Maybe you’ve seen it. Ever since that post has been passed around, I’ve been taken to task about the stars I included (or didn’t include) on the list and whether or not I was basically proving Sorkin’s point by coming up with only three names.
On the first point, the names I included were not meant to be my casting suggestions for the role of Brad Katsuyama in a hypothetical Flash Boys movie. Instead, I was more concerned with Sorkin’s assertion that Asian movie stars didn’t exist. So I went to Box Office Mojo, and scanned their list of actors’ all-time domestic grosses and looked for the ones who were (North) American of Asian descent — whether or not you think hapas or Pacific Islanders should’ve been appropriately considered criteria is another matter1.
Continue reading “Asian Americans Should be Movie Stars: an Update”
Last week, North Korean hackers allegedly broke into the personal files of Sony Pictures execs as retaliation for the studio producing the James Franco and Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, which is about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un. Normally, we’d be all over the nerd-friendly news about, say, Spider-Man coming home to Marvel Studios, but that’s been covered plenty of times on the web. Besides, we already told the world the best way to mashup Spidey and the MCU.
The thing to emerge out of the Sony leak that really bugged me was the assertion by Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin that “there aren’t any Asian movie stars.”
