Min and i had a Bad Marvel Movie Marathon during our holiday feasting, and here's some quick thoughts on the movies. We watched them in order of anticipated watch-ability, so that as we got more tired the movies would get better to compensate, but that's not quite how it worked out.

Ghost Rider - This was surprisingly watchable. Deliberately campy, but that's a good thing. Took a little too long to get started with the kid Johnny Blaze instead of Nicholas Cage, but any movie that Sam Elliott narrates can't be that bad. Ghost Rider looked awesome, in my opinion. I don't know why they resisted making Blackheart look just as true to the comics. Fun. I won't wait so long to watch the sequel.

Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer - This was absolutely awful. After giving it maybe 20 minutes, we watched the rest in fast forward, hoping for a cool Surfer/Doom fight or something but no such luck. We knew that Galactus was just going to be a big cloud (why??) but i wasn't prepared for Dr. Doom to walk around maskless the entire movie. Still, this wasn't just untrue to the comics, which at this point i'm used to, but it was just a bad movie. The director obviously thought he could get a lot of mileage out of things like the Thing burping, Mr. Fantastic dancing, a camel leering at the Human Torch after a pratfall, etc. etc., but it just made the whole thing feel like the worst type of super-hero movie from the 80s and 90s. And the whole Reed/Sue relationship thing was done so poorly.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - I thought this one started off really well. Even the stuff from the Origins comic was done decently, and then the strike force team was introduced well and the break-up played out ok too. Deadpool (in the first half of the movie) was a standout character. Then it got a little campy with the Blob, and then when Wolverine goes to the island it got a little slow. It seemed like he just kept standing around trying to decide what to do while people kept revealing secrets to him. Not very Wolverine-y. Finally, the return of Deadpool and, ummm... that was stupid. Take the mouth away from the funniest guy in the movie? And turn Deadpool into Mimic... why? So overall, mixed feelings on this one.

X-Men First Class is next on the queue, and min has never seen the 1990s Captain America movie...

Ghost Rider: Nicholas Cage cracks me up.

FF: miscast, poorly written. awful plot. awful storyline. sad execution. i know Chris Evans can act. I've seen him do it. but even his acceptable performance as Johnny Storm couldn't save this disaster. i want to know why they replaced Doctor Doom with Emperor Palpatine. and was anyone else weirded out by Jessica Alba being so monochromatic?

Wolverine: ugh. Origins. why can't you leat it die? we can all happily pretend it never was. Deadpool had a perfectly acceptable story for why he's hideous and has a healing factor blah blah. why did it get replaced with this mishmosh of making no sense? where do those swords go when they retract???