Marvel Movies

I was originally going to make this as a post to try to rank the non-Avengers Marvel movies, but there is so much more to talk about than that. So first to start things out, this post is about all of the different Marvel segments, Marvel Studios owns the rights to all of the movies that have gone into the Avengers as well as many other peripheral and smaller characters, 20th Century Fox owns the rights to X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Columbia Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man.

So as it is my understanding, deals were signed with these other production companies before Marvel started producing its own movies, and the terms of the agreement allowed these companies the right to the characters as long as they kept using those rights. Imagine what could happen if Marvel owned the rights to all of these characters. Imagine who could pop up in what movie? There are so many possibilities that are currently unable to happen.

Now I would assume that these agreements were made well before Marvel started producing its own movies, but even if there was an inkling that they might one day produce their own movies, why would you sign an indefinite contract giving up the movie rights for some of the biggest characters?

Now I can't really complain with what has been done with the X-Men movies, I have enjoyed them all so far. The Spider-Man movies are another story, the first 2 made this whole superhero boom possible, without them we would not have had a chance for The Avengers or all of the movies leading up to it. The issue is the 3rd movie along with The Amazing Spider-Man series. The 3rd movie just had way too much going on, now the stories I have read involve it being the work of too many re-writes and a director who had already done what he had wanted to do in the first 2 films, but was obligated to make the 3rd, also possibly he might have not been in charge of the editing as well. But the new series, I could not have cared less about the first movie, and doubt I will waste time seeing the 2nd movie even on HBO, it just doesn't seem interesting. For the record, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 got 10% less on Rotten Tomatoes than Spider-Man 3.

Now the issue isn't that they are making bad Spider-Man movies, but the fact that they are going to run the character into the ground. They have 3rd and 4th movies scheduled from 2016 and 2018 already, even though this movie was so poorly rated. Give Spidey a break!

Why don't they just sell it back to Marvel for a percent of the proceeds of all future movies made with Spider-Man in them, it just pains me to see this character being ruined for future movies. As long as these movies make money, the studios will keep making them, and my dream of Spider-Man being in the Avengers can no come to fruition. I would also lots to see a Spider-Man and Deadpool movie, also just a Deadpool movie, and so many combinations of these characters teaming up, and even possible secretly popping up in other movies.

On top of the Avengers movies Marvel has been producing TV series, the animated shows actually have the characters teaming up and popping up outside of their normal domain, because Marvel has the right to all of the characters in animated form. I would also love to see an X-Men show like one of the shows being produced for Netflix, take a few of the lesser known X-Men and make a show out of their activities, something online those lines.

This doesn't really need to be mentioned, but The Fantastic Four was just brutal, and it might get messed up once again when they reboot starts up soon. I just think that Marvel could do a much better job than Fox has with it.

The reason that I like Marvel Studios rather than these other Studios is that they have been very methodical about what they have been doing. They choose good writers, as well as good actors to fill the roles, which is also what was so successful about the first 2 Spider-Man movies. The actors don't just have to be good at acting, but a fit for the role.

I guess the real takeaway from all of this ranting is that I wish this was a perfect world, and I wish it wasn't driven by money! I wish we could have some crazy crossovers or even like a Marvel vs DC style movie, but that will, in all likelihood, never happen. I wish this was a world that was ruled by what would make the best and most interesting movies, but what rules the movie industry is only money.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

I must say that I didn't know what to expect from this movie going in. I really enjoyed all of the X-Men movies that have come out, even the much maligned X-Men: The Last Stand. I think X-Men was my favorite cartoon growing up, so there have always been some expectations for the movies, more so than for other comic book movies.

Not to belittle the movie itself, but the most amazing feat in the movie is to get this amazing cast together, now there are a few different groups of characters, but there are so many awesome actors in this movie, and it was nice that they stuck with actors from the original series, and also have brought in some new ones as well.

This is not my favorite X-Men movie, in fact it might be 4th out of the 5 that have been made, but it was still a fun and enjoyable movie. There was not as much action as I would have liked in this movie, but I was still quite interested. I think they tried for a little bit of a different feel than other X-Men movies, and if that was the intent then it worked. They don't introduce that many new characters, but there are a few of them. I honestly would have liked to see Quicksilver a little more, he was the comic relief early in the film. I guess I had missed that Quicksilver had been in the credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier? He was portrayed by a different actor, but that is something I would like to look at again, he will be portrayed by the same guy who played Kick-Ass in the Kick-Ass movies, so that should be interesting.

It really seems like they tried hard to show Mystique as Jennifer Lawrence a lot, when the character would have likely been in normal blue state, but I guess if you have Jennifer Lawrence in a movie you are going to show her being Jennifer Lawrence. I could really mention all of the different cast members and say that they all did a good job, which they did, but come on is there more perfect casting than Hugh Jackman as Wolverine? Even in the terribly written Origins movie he still was great as Wolverine. I am glad that they were able to work in more Beast action, in the other movies the character has been in, he hasn't been all that involved. In this movie he is part of the movie for the majority of it, he was my favorite character growing up.

I do feel like a little something was missing from this, maybe it was just some extra fighting, but when the mutants are all on the same side, for the most part, the fighting is kept to a minimum. If they mutants were to fight the humans too much it would just lead to dead humans in all likelihood. I also was happy that they actually had sentinels in this movie, I remember sentinels as much as any other things from the cartoon growing up, and the way this movie ended they could easily pop up in the future in similar ways to that of the cartoon as well.

It is really hard to try to describe this movie, and try to relate it to other things. This is a bit of a spoiler, but what this movie did is that it can actually be watched in the same cycle as the first set of X-men movies, but then its also possible that this series can get back into the events as the first series, yet both happened? It rebooted the whole thing, while also validating what had already happened in the other movies. So they could actually make X-Men movies in the past which would be following up this story line, while also making X-Men movies in today's present times, and they could all be in the same time stream. I know I am making this more complicated than it needs to be.

I have a bit of a rant to on for Marvel movies in general. I am going to create that as its own post in the next few days.

I think all of the movies that I have seen this year have been good, and borderline ownable. Its really hard to rank this, I have to put it just ever so slightly ahead of the Lego Movie this year, but that is really a toss up for me.

2014 movie rankings:
1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. X-Men: Days of Future Past

3. The Lego Movie

Peter's Cooking Diary #25

I have to admit I have been a bit uninspired with my cooking lately, I need to start making some new recipes or something, because it seems like I have made a lot of these recipes before, and I want to keep making some new things. I will have to start brainstorming new ideas for that, I kind only have a set of a few low carb dishes that I like to make.

The first dish I wanted to make this week was a semi homemade type of thing that I did with things that I made with things that I already had on hand. A friend had left some Ninja Turtles Mac and Cheese which was the start of the dish.

I started off by mincing some garlic and some onion, to add more of a depth of flavor to the dish. I enjoy Kraft mac and cheese, but adding more flavor definitely helped.

I took the butter that would be mixed in with the sauce, and I cooked the onion and garlic down in it until they were softened.

I added a can of tuna to the pan and let it incorporate with all sorts of flavors as well as some oregano and some red pepper flake.

I melted some more butter and tossed some panko bread crumbs in them and just tossed them until lightly toasted and the butter was absorbed.

The last thing I did was chop up some string cheese which I had on hand.

The cooked noodles, some of the pasta water, and the cheese sauce in an oven safe dish.

I stirred in the onion, garlic, tuna, butter, spice mixture and stirred everything together well.

I mixed in the chopped up cheese bits, and then topped the dish with the panko bread crumbs and baked the dish in the oven at 425 for 7 minutes. I went until the bread crumbs were toasted on top. One thing to mention is that I intentionally undercooked the pasta as I knew it would cook more in the oven.

This was the finished dish, my semi-homemade baked tuna mac. It was amazingly delicious and quite possibly the best mac and cheese I have ever made. You could add just about anything you want to the mac and cheese. I really did have all of the things sitting around and threw them in, you could add bacon, you could add any meat you wanted. You could add corn, or peas or any vegetable you wanted to this as well. You can also add whatever spices you want to try in this dish, I just don't like to make things exactly as stated on the box.

Something I never really discussed previously how I use bacon in my dishes. I always keep the bacon in the fridge until I am able to use it. If you are slicing the bacon, it cuts much more easily when it is cold or even frozen than when it is allowed to reach room temperature.

 I slide the bacon because it cooks much faster than cooking it in strips, and I also can get the whole package in the pan rather than doing a few strips at a time.

This is just the normal bacon cooking shot that I have in here quite regularly, I love the smell of bacon, and I love draining it as it cooks. I feel like I can get more grease out of the bacon this way rather than through strips.

The bacon is getting used in this dish, well a portion of it is anyway. I removed it from the pan and drained off all but a few tablespoons of the grease.

I added the onions and garlic to the pan and let them sizzle for a little while, the liquid released from the onions is great at loosening up. The little bits of bacon are definitely good for the flavor of the dish.

You can tell the onions and garlic have picked up some stuff from the bottom of the pan. This is about half way through the cooking.

This is when the onions were about done, I added some thyme, red pepper flake, and some flour and stirred it all together, then I added some chicken stock to get up any last bits from the pan before transferring to the crock pot.

This is everything from the pan plus about half of the cooked bacon, some soy sauce, the rest of the chicken stock, and some bay leaves.

I seasoned the pork chops with salt and pepper and then pushed them into the other ingredients, from there I covered and cooked on high for 5 hours.

This is the finished dish, I removed the pork chops and let them cool, and then allowed the sauce to cool as well, removed some of the fat from the surface of the pan, and then stirred in some apple cider vinegar to balance out the sauce.

Since I have covered oven roasted broccoli previously I won't worry about that too much in this edition. I did get a small food processor, and I used it to make some smashed cauliflower, which is much lighter and fluffier when run through the food processor. I look forward to try to do all sorts of different things with it in the future.

Peter's Cooking Diary #24

Well I took a week off from writing on here because I made stuff that wasn't really anything new for me. This week I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I made something that I have never made before, and I actually didn't have a recipe, I just tried something out from my own brain and it really worked. My inspiration this week was Chipotle, I wanted to try to make the ingredients that I get in a burrito bowl. We will start from the bottom up.

This was the first thing that I made, 1 lb of pinto beans, 2 cups of chicken stock for flavor, and 3 cups of water. I added some bay leaves, oregano, cumin, coriander, and some mexican chili powder. The beans  cooked for 5 hours in the crock pot.

This was the finished pot of beans, I drained most of the liquid from them and put them in my container and placed them in the fridge.

The next item I was making was some slow cooked carnitas using this smallish pork roast.

I pretty much used the same spices for the pork as I did for the beans, plus I added some salt to this spice mix as well. I stirred everything to combine in the bowl.

I coated all of the sides of the roast liberally with the spice mixture.

I added the roast to the crock pot dry, to keep the spices from all getting washed off right away.

I poured about 2 cups of chicken stock to the side of the roast as a cooking liquid and also added a few more bay leaves to the pot for more seasoning. The roast cooked for 10 hours on low, or just overnight while I slept.

This is what the roast looked like when it was done cooking. I removed it from the pot and let if cook for about an hour. I let the juices stay in the pan and cool off as well. I removed any chunks of fat that were floating in the juices.

I hand pulled the pork into bite size pieces, and removed any pieces of fat that I found. I also poured the remaining juices over the pork to keep it nice and juicy.

So the final thing I made was some corn salsa, I have always wanted to make some corn salsa, and figured it would go well with the things I was making. So this is 5 ears of corn with husks and silk removed, on a foil lined baking sheet that is coated in cooking spray. I placed them under the broiler for about 10 minutes and rotated them and put them back in for another 10.

This is the final roasted corn, I guess my oven is a little bit uneven as some of the corn got way more roasted than the other ears.

I took a knife and removed all of the kernels from the cob, I also ran the back of the knife down the cob to get as much of the corn out cob as I could.

The next step was to roast the pepper that I was cooking with, I used the broiler to roast the peppers using a method I saw online, removing the stems and seeds from the peppers and flattening them out. If I had gas burners I would have used them to roast the peppers, but I had to use what I have.

I roasted the peppers for about 10 minutes, in retrospect I would have probably cooked them for a few more minutes and gotten them really charred.

While the peppers were still hot, I tossed them in a bowl and popped the lid on to steam from their own heat, this would help to loosen the charred skin from the peppers.

I let the peppers steam for a while in the bowl before removing the skins from all of them. When I said I would have cooked them a bit longer, it was because some of the skins were really hard to get off, a little more cooking would have made that a lot easier.

This is the pile of roasted peppers.

I took them one by one and chopped them very finely, cutting them in strips vertically and then chopping finely across. This might have actually been some of my best knife work and it was at like 11pm at night as well. I wish I would have taken better pictures to illustrate what I did.

This is the corn along with all of the chopped peppers. I also forgot to mention, I used 2 red bell peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers and 2 anaheim peppers. I really wanted to get some poblanos, but the only poblanos that were left on the shelf were super wrinkly and did not feel or look fresh at all.

To finish the salsa, I added some cilantro and some minced red onion, as well as the juice of one line and a little bit of salt for seasoning. This salsa could not have turned out better. I really like it and will definitely be trying to do things similar to this in the future, especially when local sweet corn is available.

I eat the bowls with beans, pork, and the corn salsa, as well as some guacamole and the bowls I have made have been very delicious.