I went to the San diego Comic Con this Friday and Sunday and had a blast. (see my facebook photo album) Saw some famous people (Mark Schultz, Danny DeVito, Jerry Trainor, Mark Hamil, Billy Dee Williams, Matt Groening) and got some good loot (a battlestar galactica t shirt, comics, manga). My buddies and I sported our DRC T shirts, handed out DRC stickers and it was on like Khan. My approach was to avoid the long lines for hand outs from the big companies. As much as I wanted to get a free thundercats sword, I had no desire to stand in line for an hour to get one. In fact my favorite moments of comic con are always meeting face to face with the creators from the smaller companies. The highlight of this year for me was meeting Mark Schultz, the artist behind Xenozoic Tales, aka Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. 
On Friday, I picked up a book of his drawings, and brought it by his booth on Sunday for an autograph. He offered to personalize it and was very cool about it. In return, I gave him a couple of stickers for DRC. He liked it. In particular he liked the dinosaur spaceship design, "If a dinosaur would ever fly its own spacehip, that's what it would look like" he said. He also thought the girl I drew dangling from the T-Rex mouth was "lovely". After that, anything else that happened at Comic con would just be icing on the cake. I met some other comic creators and tried to push my comic on them: I met Bobby Rubio, formerly from Pixar, and picked up a autographed copy of his super cool Alcatraz High (bobbyrubio.com, alcatrazhigh.com) He agreed that Dinosaurs Robots and Cheerleaders were three things he liked. I spoke with Dan Mendoza (toxic candie.com) creator of Zombie Tramp. I met the creators of Archaia's Werewolf comic, Feeding Ground (archaia.com), and the creators of the web comic carpechaos.com, and the creators of Scarlett Huntress (smcomics.com) I also met with the cool dudes at Red 5 Comics and picked up a couple issues of Atomic Robo (my favorite) to complete my collection. The only down side to the whole event was I never found a Starbuck series two action figure, or got to see Katee Sackhoff, who I knew was there this year, but I couldn't justify staying past 10 at night to get a glimpse of her at the Batman Year One screening, not to myself, or more importantly, my wife.
I saw the final Harry Potter movie this weekend with my kids in IMAX 3D. One word: epic. The problem with Harry Potter movies is if you read the book, you either know whats going to happen, or will be disappointed they changed something. But they played it just right: changed a few things to make a better movie. Not a moment was wasted. After over a decade of movies to set this one up, they jumped right into things. Before I knew it, they were breaking into Gringott's. I think someone who is not familiar with Harry's world will still enjoy it because its one long spectacle of magical battles. The one pause in the action was my favorite part: revealing Snape's secret. It was beautifully done. This was the best HP movie, (as it should be since its the best of the books), and the perfect finale.
Ever since I saw the preview of Transformers 3, with the giat robo worm tunneling into a buliding while people inside screamed in terror, I knew I had to see this movie. As the tepid reviews came rolling in, my excitemet died down a little. Perhaps, I thought, it would be another Transformers 2, with a few awesome moments strug together by an incoherent story. I went into this just expecting cool robot action with a passable story. I was pleasatly surprised by Transformers 3. The story itself was actually decent. The new girl who replaced Megan Fox did a good job, and to anyone who thought her character was usless, I'd point out that she used her brain to single handedly save Optimus and therefore the world by the end of the movie. I like Shia's character, Sam, the nerd who refuses to be treated like a nerd. While a lot of the story was entertaining, some of it felt like it should have been saved for the DVD deleted scenes reel. In fact, at one point I felt there hadn't been enough robot action, until about half way through, when it really picked up and never let go from then on. The second half of the movie was one ridiculously awesome action scene after another, including the robo worm scene, which was great despite possibly breaking several laws of physics. If it looks cool, the physics don't matter. All in all, a great spectacle of a movie that should be seen on the big screen. So why did it get such harsh reviews from critics? I have theories: Its sort of hip among critics to bash Michael Bay. Especially when he makes movies with a lot of explosions, special effects, and that make the military look good. (I saw a review that called Bay a war monger. Really? So any movie director is a war monger if there's action in it?) That is one of the things I like about Transformers movies: the human military aren't useless against the evil robots; they get some good licks in, especially in this one. Instead of the cliche movie military who just want to nuke everything, the military in Transformers is smart and effective. There is a good chunk of the movie that is just the humans battling the Decepticans with out any Autobot help. There's a great scene where Sam (almost) singlehandedly takes on Starscream. Another reason for bad reviews: some criticism is justified. Some of the plot lines seemed unecessary. It seemed like it might be important that they mentioned his girlfriend had a brother who went off to war. It wasn't. John Malkovitch's character was in some funny scenes, but didn't contribute much else. There are too many characters trying to be the funny/quirky one. Still the humor was better this time around and the special effects were unbelievable. I'm actually thinking it might have been better than the first one. Definately better robot vs robot battles (and BTW to critics who say the battles were too confusing, its not our fault you can't keep up) so if you judge this just on the amount of giant robots beating the crap out of each other, this one wins. Which leads me to my request to Michael Bay:
