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In other PSA news...warped GI Joe PSAs.

The Punisher, Ennis-style

The movie's good. Sadistic, brutal, darkly funny -- everything an adaptation of a Garth Ennis comic should be. The way the violence escalates throughout the course of the movie is really effective, and it's probably nastier than a lot of people are expecting. The Punisher isn't even a little bit of a hero; he's just as big a monster as the criminals he's fighting. He has motivation and is reasonably careful about who he kills, so I guess he's a marginally better person than, let's say, Pol Pot. The beauty of Garth Ennis' take on the character was that he never shied away from the fact that his protagonist is a brutal psycho. And he's cool with that. This movie is kind of a throwback to 1970s drive-in crime dramas, with weird, fun set pieces and really screwed up ethics. And musical numbers. The musical numbers are important too.

Tomorrow: Hellboy!

The Punisher, minus MIT Grad Dolph Lungren

My hubby scored us free passes to the new movie The Punisher tonight. I'm glad, because it comes out the same day as Kill Bill, Volume 2 and we were going to have a doubleheader of ultraviolence that night. Seeing them on different nights is probably better. That's terrible scheduling, by the way. Why divide your audience? They're going to appeal to the exact same demographic. Might as well aslo release Hellboy that day, just so everybody can get screwed.

I hope this one's good. I'm a big fan of Garth Ennis' work on the comic, which is what this flick is based on. They're wisely pretending the godawful 1992 Dolph Lungren version never happened, and they're also ignoring the laughable Christopher "Giant Hack" Golden run on the comic book, where they reveal that Frank Castle's family weren't really killed by the mob, they were killed BY THE DEVIL!!! So he dies and gets sent back from heaven as a demon fighter with huge demon-shooting guns. Oh, the agony. When Ennis took over the book after that, he rebooted it and wiped that whole debacle from continuity.

Anyway, this one looks like fun and best of all, I get to see it for free! Freeeeeeeeeeee!!!