Balls Up (2026)

Brad (Mark Wahlberg), and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) work for a condom company. Elijah has ideas, but is incredibly socially awkward, while Brad is good at a slick sales pitch, but is, as Elijah tells him, an 'empty suit.' Their attempt to get their company named the official condom sponsor of the World Cup falls apart when Brad puts too much peer pressure on Brazil's representative (Benjamin Bratt), causing the man to throw aside 9 years of sobriety in a coke and nudity-filled bacchanal.

They get fired, but Santos' promise to get them a first-class trip to the World Cup went through before his career and life were destroyed by Brad's frat house jackassery. So they attend the final between Brazil and Argentina, Elijah gets hammered, decides the Brazilian sausage mascot is actually a plant by the rival company that got named the condom sponsor and is taunting him, and charges onto the field. Brad, the empty suit, rather than sitting back and letting it happen, gives chases and ends up blocking what would have been a game-tying goal for Brazil, making the 2 "es Stupidos" public enemies #1a and 1b in Brazil.

Watching this was not my choice. I have an aversion to Wahlbergs. Some would call it pathological, others would call it common sense. Anyway, Alex's friend Mike threw it on during the Chicago visit two weekends ago. I feel as though, if it wrapped after their escape from the drug lord's compound, it would have been fine. Not great, but about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. It would still run certain jokes into the ground - the guys trying to swallow their prototypes condoms full of cocaine drags on too long - but there were a few funny parts. If the bit with the caiman was the final splash of absurdist humor, that would have been a relative high point.

But there's a whole bit after that with a bunch of eco-warriors in the jungle that, again, drags for how few laughs it produces. Eric Andre and the other guy whining to each other about not getting any from the girl they both joined hoping to impress is just sad.

The phone translator gag isn't bad, the karaoke scene's worth a chuckle, maybe, although Wahlberg's singing voice was, I assume intentionally, horrific. Alex sang along to some lyrics during his gig that weekend, and I compared it to a cat being strangled while imitating AC/DC's lead singer. That's about what Wahlberg's voice was. The payoff to the initial meeting with their rookie public defender was, if not something that made me laugh, at least clever.

Wahlberg and Hauser do a decent job playing characters who don't have much in common other than they need someone to cover for their weaknesses. It so happens they each meet the qualifications for the other on that score, but they're bad at accepting that when there's anything of real importance on the line. Which felt like the point of the karaoke. With something that ultimately doesn't matter, they work together great, no friction. Once there's pressure, each of them start trying to prove something and they mess up.

Still, it feels strange at times that Brad actually cares about or tries to help Elijah, if he's such a self-absorbed guy with no values. I guess the idea is he's not a psychopath, incapable of caring for others, and playing the empty suit that says whatever will get him what he wants. It's that he's afraid to express anything deeper. I'm not sure there is anything deeper, though.  

Oh well, Track of the Cat could use some competition for worst movie in next January's Year in Review posts. 

Hard Work Means No Play

Injae got the first win of his boxing career over the awesomely named Rock Kang. Unfortunately, now he must face Kang's big brother, Boulder Kodos!

OK, that's a lie, he's just shadowboxing with his memories of Bakesan (currently on his way to prison for 6 years.) The fifth volume of The Boxer shifts focus back to Yu's career. Now the lightweight champion, he's being aimed directly at the junior welterweight champion, Yuto Takeda. Most of the volume is focused on Takeda, emphasizing his contrast to Yu.

Where Yu's the epitome of natural talent, Takeda is described, even by his coach, as almost entirely lacking in talent. The epitome of hard work. What's more, he fully buys into the idea that if you just keep trying, you can overcome any challenge. He feels like he should protect and inspire others, give them hope they can persevere and triumph as well. This as compared to Yu, who gives zero shits about anything other than his cat.

Yuto's backstory is that he looks up to his father, who was a silver medalist in judo and became a cop. Misaki, who was a gold medalist boxer before opening her own gym, was childhood friends with Yuto's mother and father. When Dad dies rescuing a woman from some muggers, and Mom is claimed by a lifelong illness weeks later, Misaki's left with in charge of a child she has no idea how to raise.Yuto wants to protect people like his dad, so he's got to be strong, so boxing.

Except he has no talent. It's actually kind of a neat contrast with Jean-Pierre. We were told the lightweight champ would slowly go through the motion of throwing a punch, making himself aware of every bit of what his body was doing and what it should be doing, in pursuit of perfection. Takeda has to go through every motion, every piece of action that goes into throwing a single jab and memorize it to then cram each piece together, because otherwise he can't do it at all.

There's some ups and downs in Takeda's story. A classmate he tries to help, who ends up running away and looks on the verge of committing suicide. A gifted fighter that abuses his skills as hired muscle, that beats Takeda again and again and again (and again and again, and so on), until Takeda starts making abrupt leaps in skill.

I'm not sure what JH's is going for with the strange growth curve. Setting up a certain development in the title fight with Yu for one, but otherwise, I'm not sure what it's meant to represent, if Takeda is supposed to lack in athletic talent. Can you brute force talent into existence?

Either way, it's the brute force he and Misaki are counting on to defeat Yu, as the strategy is simply to keep the pressure on Yu, give him no room to breathe, take every hit without stopping, until Yu gives out from exhaustion. Will that work? Ehhhhh, no.

Sunday Splash Page #424

"Blinded by the Bling," in Marvel Boy #1, by Russ Heath (artist), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

I'm just going through these alphabetically, but it's a little funny I picked the two titles that lasted the least amount of time, as, per Grand Comics Database, Marvel Boy's book only lasted two issues. Gotta love the cover, though, where the blurb declares him the 'newest, most amazing,' in line 1, then finishes with, 'finally in his own magazine!' on line 5. How can it be "finally" if he just got created?

Friction between grammar and hype aside, Bob Grayson's scientist father decided to live on the Moon with his infant son after his wife was killed by Nazis in the 1930s. Except their rocket got redirected and landed on the uranium crust of Uranus' surface. Ah, 1950s astronomy, gotta love it. Now 17, Bob's developed some level of telepathy - presumably from all that radiation in the planet's crust - and his dad's sending him back to Earth to try and prevent the outbreak of violence over a new continent rising from the sea. Bob gets a costume, a big red flying saucer, and wristbands that temporarily blind people with 'atomic radiance.' But no killing, Bob's got to handle things the old-fashioned way: punching.

Then he fights pirates who happened to get beached on the continent as it emerged from the sea and thought they'd declare themselves kings, tries and fails to convince the actual inhabitants that surface dwellers aren't all like those guys, and watches the island sink back beneath the waves.

By the time Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk were creating Agents of Atlas, there was a slight problem. Someone brought Marvel Boy back in the pages of Fantastic Four, as "The Crusader." He behaved erratically, attacking banks that wouldn't give him loans for medical supplies to take back to Uranus, and eventually was destroyed by his much more powerful wristbands (which later became Quasar's quantum bands.)

So Parker changed Bob's backstory. Not the part about him being from Earth originally, or his scientist dad wanting to escape the violence. But the people living on the surface of Uranus weren't true Uranians, who are an amoeba-like collective living deeper within the planet, but Eternals who tried to conquer Earth thousands of years earlier and were exiled. They were allowed to stay on Uranus by the true inhabitants on the condition they don't leave, their byproducts being useful to the collective. Bob's exploits as Marvel Boy were supposed to make him an ambassador of sorts, so Earth would invite them back, which is totally different from leaving, totally. As Bob puts it, 'the Uranians do not consider such fine points of detail.'

The Crusader was the child of the exiles, modified to resemble Bob, but brainwashed to be blindly loyal, who got hatched before he was ready when the Uranians figured out what the exiles were up to and destroyed them. Bob ends up stuck in a dying colony, until he's offered a place in the Uranian collective, where he lived for decades, leaving to help save Jimmy Woo. Which also means he left the collective forever. No going back.

So Parker and Kirk go away from the superhero aesthetic, leaning on the '50s sci-fi vibe. He's still got a flying saucer - silver-grey instead of red - and the sort of vaguely rubber spacesuit look you might see in The Day the Earth Stood Still or something similar. No more wristbands and fisticuffs; Bob leans on his technology and his telepathy, which has advanced from some low-level mind-reading to linking thoughts and creating illusions/altering perceptions.

Decades as part of a collective of a species very different from humans has changed him. In the early issues of the mini-series, he keeps speaking in an alien language and admits human minds are difficult to fool, because they're so strange to him now. His reactions and emotions seem muted; Venus observes that he used to blush around her, but now he barely reacts. Even as he settles in with his old friends, he maintains a detached air, with some occasional dry humor, mostly at M-11 and Gorilla Man's friendship.

I'm a little surprised having been part of a collective for so long, that Bob isn't more tactile with his teammates. Instead, he tends to stand apart, hands folded behind his back. But he also extends his esophagus to eat, and his helmet produces a Uranian atmosphere, so maybe it's a safety issue.

Saturday Splash Page #226

"People's Committee of Exposition," in Yellow Claw #1, by Al Feldstein (writer), Joe Maneely (artist), Stan Goldberg? (colorist), Irv Watanabe? (letterer)

When I started the splash page series in 2017, I tended to keep the entries short, before deciding I had a lot to say in some cases, and it was my blog, so I should go ahead and say it. But by then, I was already past Agents of Atlas. However, the hardcover of the original mini-series had the first appearances of each member of the team, and those are the only issues I have of those titles, so that's how we're spending the next 3.5 weekends.

I'm less enthused that the first entry gives us Yellow Peril and Red Peril nonsense, but that's '50s comics for ya, at least here in the States. Hopefully it was better elsewhere in the world.

Set sometime after Mao's Communist forces pushed Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist forces out of China, they're looking to invade Formosa and finish the job. But they can't possibly defeat the mighty American Navy directly, unless the legends of this ancient mystic the Yellow Claw, and his strange powers, are true. So a general goes looking, finds Claw, gets a demonstration of his mind control and crystal ball, and goes away thinking this is going to work out great. Except the Claw intends to use them to aid his own conquest of the entire world, starting by bringing down the U.S. from within.

Maybe the funniest part to me is the Claw enters the U.S. via a rubber raft from a submarine. Why not just enter the country in full splendor and mind control your way through any issues? Just to cinch the Claw's criminal bonafides, he tracks down the former commandant of Auschwitz and threatens to expose him if he doesn't help. Jimmy Woo only appears in the last few panels of the last page of the introductory story, far less than the Claw's grand-niece Suwan, who seems unsure of his plans, but unable to resist his powers.

This was just the first of two or three stories in the first issue, but unfortunately, it's all that's in the hardcover. Yellow Claw's the Fu Manchu, inscrutable Oriental stereotype with his insidious, underhanded schemes and whatnot. Woo doesn't have enough page time to establish much beyond being an FBI agent whose parents used to tell him stories about Yellow Claw. Presumably it was difficult for them to finish these stories, as every peasant we see runs screaming into the hills at the mere mention of the name. Suwan would, I guess, carry on a star-crossed lovers thing with Woo, trying to buck her grand-uncle's will.

Agents of Atlas ditches the obnoxious coloring and de-ages Claw a bit. Which, if he supposedly learns from some lama how to prolong his life, why let himself look 2 trillion years old? "Yellow Claw" becomes an Americanized bastardization of his true title "Golden Claw", and that's separate from his name, which ends up being "Master Plan." Which year, is cheesy, but fits into the notion Parker's playing with, that everything that's going on has been part of an extremely long-range scheme the Claw's been up to and had to adjust on the fly to various complications, mostly related to Woo's career path.

Because Woo did end up getting some use in Marvel in the '70s and '80s, but basically as just another SHIELD agent. You know how it goes, a writer creates a new agent they think is really keen, but every other writer has their own preference, so it's nice for creating a bench of actual SHIELD agents with faces and personalities, but none of them ever really rise to prominence. At least, not for anything good (looking at Maria Hill and her Gyrich-level obnoxiousness and incompetence.)

And that gets folded in. Golden Claw was supposed to be a villain Woo would defeat that create a legend for himself, but government bureaucracy - and racism, and the myth of meritocracy - being what it is, he got shunted into some dead-end desk job and that was it. So Woo aged, and stagnated, and grew frustrated and probably resentful of how his life turned out and seized an opportunity to be the big hero, expose a conspiracy, and got his team incinerated. Bob restores him, but to his last mental impression of Jimmy, recorded by his headband in 1959.

So you get young Jimmy Woo, hotshot secret agent type, in his prime, who also gets to be the "man out of time," having lost decades of his life. It's an opportunity to do things right the second time, minus the desperation and regret. (It also puts him behind in regard to how much things have changed for other people he once knew, which comes back to bite him in the ass when he goes looking for Suwan, who had a very interesting 50 years of her own.) Jimmy's operating outside the law, his team pulled together by trust and respect rather than an order from Eisenhower. Which also means they can't be disbanded on a whim by the shifting political climate. The work can continue for as long as they want to work together.

What I Bought 4/22/2026

I may be just about recovered from the Chicago trip. Of course, I have to go out for 2+ days next week for work. The annual spring inspection trip where my boss comes along. At least his presence saves me from having to talk to the operators, since he loves to do that.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #3, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Stegman kind of Kelly Jones'ed Moon Knight's outfit there.

It's Moon Knight versus Bushman in a fear gas addled bout, with Zodiac being the most annoying pro wrestling announcer you can imagine. Yes, worse than Jerry the King Lawler screaming about "puppies," or Michael Cole existing on a plane of reality where he can interact with the rest of us. Honestly, Zodiac's glee at the violence just makes me wish Arcade was in the book. There's a guy that knows how to put on a show.

Moon Knight's losing, Bushman hacking him up while doing a whole spiel about how he created Moon Knight, and that'll always be true. Bleeding badly, Marc gets a visit from Steven and Jake, looking more ghostly than normal (Rosenberg colors them a sort of Ghostbusters ectoplasm green), who tell Marc Bushman's handling the fear gas' effects by causing fear so he doesn't feel it.

So Marc turns it around. That, actually, he haunts Bushman. The guy Bushman killed, who came back and kept kicking his ass. Who cut his face off, all that jazz. Moonie starts carving into Bushman, while Zodiac sounds about ready to achieve orgasm, and then, stops. Because he won't kill for anyone, not Bushman, Khonshu, or Zodiac. He will, however, kill Zodiac. Don't get my hopes up, man. Also, turns out something's going on in the city, and that's why none of the supporting cast found Marc.

Moon Knight's explanation for why he'd kill Zodiac but not Bushman is clever enough, but I think it's simpler, or maybe more selfish, than Marc makes it seem. He just doesn't want to give Zodiac what he wants, and Zodiac wants him to kill Bushman. So he won't do it. Which I guess means Zodiac better hire someone to cheer on Moon Knight killing him when (if) we get to that point.

Gullible's Travels - Cash Peters

This is the story of Cash Peters' last six months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. Like the Sound of Music theme park, in Salzburg, which Peters has been sent to on at least 5 occasions.

OK, actually it's his last 18 months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. It was supposed to be six months, but he was either really bad about shifting to another career path, or not working at it very hard.

This doesn't really include the Sound of Music theme park, outside a brief description of it as one of his periodic dissertations on how his job is not nearly so fun and keen as you imagine. Well shit man, I knew that as soon as I saw there was part of a chapter spent on the Precious memories park in Carthage, Missouri. I have driven past that place more than once for work, I can guess what hell exists within its confines and there is no realistic amount of money you could pay me to visit.

Though if there was a realistic amount of money, and I went, the end result would probably be much like Peters, in terms of people sending me e-mails telling me what an evil, horrible person I was. The difference is, Peters actually seemed fairly charmed by the set-up, whereas I would be on the verge of running out screaming, clawing at my face and speaking in tongues.

For the most part, Peters is taking a humorous, exaggerated approach. He's pretty evenly split between places he's excited to visit (the Museum of Dirt) and places he's basically going under protest (the barbed wire museum.) And in those categories, he's fairly evenly split between places he ends up enjoying (the National Bird Dog Museum,) and those he ends up hating or being swiftly bored by (the Museum of Dirt, Graceland.)

Either way, there are certain recurring gags. His tendency to seize on any opportunity that's free; he calls almost every PR person he encounters "Lisa," because apparently all PR people are named that; his 10 rules of life, of which there are 32; his phobia of confrontation because he's British. I was not aware that was an issue. I thought the British did confrontation, but in a very faux-polite, backhand insult manner. Like, you aren't sure if they're actually pissed, but you know they're looking down their nose at you? Well, learn something new everyday.

I think the parts I enjoyed the most were often the effort he expended trying to reach some of these places. When no one could confirm a place existed, and he starts calling around or accosting random people on the street or harassing his producer for help finding the place. Or when he thought he was getting a tour of a particular farm in Minneapolis, only to learn he was getting a formal tour of Minneapolis. So disappointed. Whether he actually finds the place, or whether he actually enjoys it once he gets there, is beside the point. I'm not sure there was one place he visited in this book that I would want to visit myself. But getting a front-row seat to his Sisyphean task of finding this place or that place is entertaining.

'I snapped shut my notebook and swore by the seven golden fleeces of Sinbad to track down this Museum of Dirt that nobody would let me see. It might take me a few days, but I would find it, oh yes, and when I did I would fix up an appointment with the curator personally, and insist that he give me a guided tour. And Lisa - well, Lisa could go screw herself-f-f.'

Dream Scenario (2023)

Paul (Nic Cage) is a biology professor at a small college, who learns one day that he has started showing up in other people's dreams. His daughter's, old acquaintances, his students, complete strangers.

At first this brings him fame, and he thinks it will help him to publish a book about ant shared intelligence or something that he's been talking about for decades. But as things don't work out the way he wants - he doesn't want to use his celebrity to hawk products, especially not Sprite - the nature of the dreams shift. Instead of Paul just standing around, watching what's happening to these people in their dreams, he starts killing them. Turns out people take being murdered in a dream by someone personally, and Paul becomes a pariah. Which he exacerbates by being defensive and playing the victim.

I think you have to enjoy cringe comedy to watch this movie. The first half in particular is just an endless stream of Paul humiliating or embarrassing himself by being awkward, passive-aggressive, milquetoast, and so on. The thing is, I don't enjoy that stuff. It's painful to watch, to the point I almost gave up on the movie 50 minutes in.

The second half, once things start the downhill slide, is actually better. Things are actually happening, instead of people just talking about how Paul never does anything. Students flee from him and vandalize his car. Waiters ask him to leave restaurants. And at least it feels like Paul's reacting genuinely, even if it's him being aggrieved and focusing on how much he's suffering. He's an ugly, selfish man with a victim complex, but at least he stops hiding it. When he gets kicked out of the house because he makes his daughter's school play all about him by insisting on attending when he was asked not to, at least he actually did something, even if it was just about the worst possible thing.