It certainly is a weird time to be a creative user of YouTube, as robotic programs troll user data in search of copyright materials, putting the users who submit it at risk of being banned or silenced. But over the course of nearly two years, Michael Agrusso has steadily picked up a die-hard geek following making videos that use his voice, action figures and nearly every bit of Apple software known to the world. He moves beyond pandering to fans with lame comic jokes, and instead plays up to inside jokes and broader commentary on the state of films and how comics have taken so long to break into that market.

Perhaps you know him better by his alter ego: It’sJustSomeRandomGuy. The series started with I’m A Marvel/I’m A DC, a creative response to the news that DC Comics had canceled their proposed plans of Wonder Woman and The Flash live-action films on the same day. Agrusso continued the parody ads between a Spider-Man and Superman action figure with Batman, Iron Man and even the Hulk. As he wrote the words, his partner and girlfriend Brianna Li (neé It’sJustSomeRandomGal) would wrangle figures and provide the ever-important ‘motion.’  Beyond the ads, the spin-off series After Hours and Happy Hour would emerge, drawing on fan reactions to recently released comic book films while remaining true to developments in the actual comics themselves–for example, Captain America visiting Superman as a ghost, or playing up the aspect that no one remembers Spider-Man was married after the controversial One More Day storyline.

More endearing than Robot Chicken’s take on “action figure comedy,” it’s been a geeky word-of-mouth phenomena, resonating with fans of both the comics and their film adaptations (even Jon Favreau adores Agrusso’s work). Recently, Agrusso has even been discussing the idea of “fan donations” for toys–the Spider-Hulk figure used in his NYCC promo was donated by a fan–-and may soon establish a means for fans to send him their figures. After Agrusso premiered the two-part Happy Hour season finale at a panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday, he took the time to chat about returning to NYCC, concerns about YouTube’s recent crack down on original content based on copyright material, and whether or not he’s yet a “web celebrity.”

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If you’re a guy who lives in your parent’s basement, writes a movie blog, even vaguely resembles the Comic Book Store Guy’s tumescent mien, and have actually watched one of the Star Wars prequels in the last five years by choice, chances are you’ll probably enjoy Kyle Newman’s long-delayed (and for good reason) Fanboys… If you’re an adult, who refuses (or better yet forgets how) to quote episodes of The Simpsons, chances are you won’t.

That’s 75 of the 165 words The Playlist devotes to reviewing Fanboys, in a post appropriately titled ‘Fanboys’… Whatever.

It makes a certain kind of sense that *I* never bothered to see this film (although we did cover its Kevin Spacey-presented screening at Comic-Con last summer) and forgot it was even coming out this week. But I wonder if even the target audience alluded to in that pullquote is still desperate (if they ever were) to see this thing? After all the rigamarole with the Weinsteins and the cancer subplot, and literal years of chatter about it online, is it possible that Fanboys peaked long before it was released?

This article is filled with sour notes about the state of Batman video games, but if you want some pure audio delight, click here to listen to Frank Gorshin (he played The Riddler on the Adam West Batman TV show) sing “The Riddler.” Awesome.

Batman is known for vanishing into the night in order to instill fear into his foes, and to confound Commissioner Gordon who always wonders how he disappears so quickly. However, his video games are also known for leaving store shelves just as quickly and quietly. Is that why there’s no Dark Knight video game? Commission Gordon himself, looking a bit like Garth from Wayne’s World, was shown a tiny bit of the game, as you can see in this clip… so where is it?

It’s no secret that video games based on the Batman franchise have been anything less than lackluster. …Read more

• For all the griping about how critics just don’t get the stuff that fanboys love, a show of the numbers suggests that reviews from Tomatometer and Metacritic ranked critics are more friendly to movies based on comic books than maybe any other single genre. Jim Emerson elaborates on his findings.
• Rumsey Taylor on the “brand ambience” of Mad Men: “When Draper is describing each of these products, you’re held rapt by his words, and how they pronounce, with consummate precision, their transcendent significance. It’s all bullshit, of course, but what wonderful, wonderful bullshit.”
• Last night at Largo in Los Angeles, “Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen performed a series of light and effortless vignettes co-written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.” According to Vulture’s Nick Confalone, the performance felt “like sneaking a peek at P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love notepad, exploring that movie’s notion that there’s someone for everyone, even though everyone is a little bit weird and fucked up. Whatever the future for this show, last night it made us grin like an idiot and tell our friends, ‘Love is awesome, right?’” Wonderful bullshit indeed.

Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:

The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”

Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters, Shawn Bowers, after the jump.

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An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:

Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.

I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!

The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.

UPDATE: There are many, many more photos from inside the exhibit on Flickr.

Word hit the web yesterday afternoon that Richard Kelly, the writer/director of cult hit Donnie Darko, has been hired to direct The Box, a PG-13 horror film based on his own script, and set to star Cameron Diaz. “My hope is to make a film that is incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining my artistic sensibility,” Kelly told Variety.

Okay, fine. But what about Southland Tales? An allegedly unfinished cut of Kelly’s second film (a gonzo sci-fi meta-epic starring The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Justin TImberlake) was savaged by most critics when it screened at Cannes last year, but staunchly defended by Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman. That summer, the film was acquired by Sony, and Kelly made an appearance at Comic Con promising fans that the studio was committed to releasing the film. Then, in early April of this year, Kelly posted a message on his MySpace page saying that Sony had agreed to fund one last round of special effects. “The film will be completely finished for the first public screening sometime mid-summer,” Kelly promised.

Wouldn’t that be … now? Kelly hasn’t updated his MySpace page since the Variety story hit, but I’ve sent him a message asking for more details. I can tell you one thing: there’s no lack of curiousity about Southland Tales amongst comic book geeks. I’ve been trying to get my hands on the third installment of the Southland Tales prequel graphic novel series, but Forbidden Planet has been sold out for weeks.