Author Archives: Bubbawheat
The Death of “Superman Lives”; What Happened?
The Death of “Superman Lives”; What Happened? 2015
It seems that I’m finally getting around to some of the backlogged non-theatrical releases that have come out this year. This film was originally launched as a kickstarter by John Schnepp a couple years ago to chronicle his quest to find out what happened to this multi-year project that ended up never getting made. He gets interviews with many of the major players including all three script writers, producer Jon Peters, director Tim Burton, and plenty of concept artists. Enhancing the interviews are snippets of the film recreated in animation or in a couple cases live action as well as plenty of concept art and behind the scenes archival footage. It’s not really an investigation of how this film got cancelled, instead it’s more like a look back on the making of the film that ends just before they would have started filming. As someone who has heard a little bit about this project, and probably from the source that most people would have heard it from: Kevin Smith, I thought it was generally fascinating, though it did run a bit too long for my taste and especially for my wife’s taste.
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Filmwhys #55 Battle Royale and Captain America 2: Death Too Soon
Episode #55 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guests are Jeff and Chris from the Really Awful Movies Podcast who ask me why I hadn’t seen Battle Royale, a violent Asian film that draws a lot of parallels to the Hunger Games except that it came out ten years earlier and was banned due to the violence. And in return, I ask them why they hadn’t seen Captain America 2: Death Too Soon, the 1979 TV movie that had very little to do with the actual comic book, but had Christopher Lee in it.
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Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four 2015
This is the fourth Fantastic Four movie that I’ve watched and reviewed for this site, it seems like the franchise gets rebooted every ten years or so. This one has been plagued for well over a year with reports of reshoots, studio interference, the director Josh Trank acting odd on the set, large sections of his film being pulled out at the last moment in the editing room, and now that it’s come out it’s getting largely negative reviews and the box office is over 30% less than early projections. There’s quite a bit of backlash against this film for quite a few reasons: it hasn’t been done well in the past, fans seem to think it would fare better with Disney Marvel behind it, and the early reports had the film changing seemingly everything that people supposedly knew and loved about the Fantastic Four. I will say that I don’t believe that it deserves the 9% it has at the moment on Rotten Tomatoes, I can imagine that it’s a high amount of mildly negative reviews which isn’t entirely fair to the film. What is a bit more obvious is that whatever the reason, this film became a victim of studio interference rather than a single creative vision. Ten years from now, the story surrounding the film will be much more prominent than the film itself as it will likely fade into obscurity unless someone has the guts to finish an alternate cut of the film to bring back the original intent. For my part, I could see where the film was going initially and I was interested, but it made a reshot nosedive towards the end and I could feel that a lot of the characters were missing from the final product.
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Five Reasons Why Fantastic Four Movies Fail
I will immediately preface this post by saying that my familiarity to this franchise extends only to the four films as well as the mid 90’s cartoon which I haven’t watched since then. Though I have heard other descriptions of how the team works in the comics, at least before it was cancelled by Marvel earlier this year. This team of heroes has gone through three different iterations, none of them have been critical successes, one of them wasn’t even released, and only one was much of a financial success. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to adapt this family of four heroes with unique powers that act together as a family, I mean the Incredibles was able to do it, so why can’t the Fantastic Four? Here are a few reasons why I think it’s been so difficult.
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Infographic: The Members of the Fantastic Four Ranked
Which is your movie highlight this summer? If you like science fiction, the new Fantastic Four film will most likely be on your list already. With new actors for the main characters and Chronicle director Josh Trank taking over responsibility, this film is expected to become a major success. You can expect lots of special effects created with latest technologies, which promise to be inspiring and entertaining. Check out the infographic below which was sent to me and ranks all the Marvel heroes who have been a member of the Fantastic Four at one point in time. Enjoy!
100 Essential Superhero Movies – Ranked
It’s been over a year since I posted my list of 100 Essential Superhero Movies, and I do want to keep this list updated every year, adding in new movies from the previous year, and taking out movies that only just barely made the cut. Another thing that I decided to do a little bit differently is to rank the films by their quality, so that it’s more obvious which films are the failures that are still important in the grand scheme of superhero movie history, but aren’t very high quality films. And while my personal preference will obviously come into play, I did make a decided effort to combine my opinion along with the general opinion. Also, I will be sharing my rankings every day for the next 100 days over on Facebook and Twitter and will be collecting them here afterwards. Enjoy!
Update: For the most current version of this list, here’s the 2016 Edition
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Rat Pfink A Boo Boo
Rat Pfink A Boo Boo 1966
No, that’s not a typo in the title, the movie I’m talking about today really is called Rat Pfink A Boo Boo. Well, technically it very well could be a typo, but it’s one made by someone who worked on the film though the director claimed later on that it was intentional. Before I get to the actual movie, I do want to talk about the site where I watched this film. Which is appropriate as the film feels like about half filler anyway so you’re not missing out on much. Anyway, I found out about Fandor last year because they were promoting a meet and greet with director Jeremy Saulnier with his film Blue Ruin. While looking through their site, I also noticed that they had the Wild World of Batwoman streaming. The other day, I finally decided to watch that film and signed up for their 2 week free trial and tweeted, asking for suggestions on what films to watch during my trial. @Fandor actually responded the next day with a martial arts superhero film I hadn’t heard of that’s available at their site. I was just really impressed that they took that extra effort to check my profile and suggest an appropriate movie to me instead of just some random film. Then I noticed that they also had this film which I always assumed was going to be an obscure film that I would have to track down so I decided to go ahead and watch it. And even at just over an hour long, it felt nearly twice that, not to mention the jarring shifts in tone, both color and narratively.
The Wild Wild World of Batwoman
The Wild Wild World of Batwoman 1966
This is one of the last couple films that I’ve put on my 100 Essential Superhero Movies list that I had yet to see. There are a couple reasons that I added this film instead of a more well known, or better film. One is that it was essentially one of the first fan films, or probably more accurately a mockbuster. It was made by Jerry Warren who didn’t have the rights to the Batman character, but wanted to capitalize on the TV show’s popularity and so he made this Batwoman movie. There were enough changes made to the characters that even though he was sued for copyright infringement, he actually won the case. It was also one of very few superhero movies that became popular as a cult film when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Watching it today, it is very obviously along the lines of an Asylum mockbuster where the characters seemingly know that they’re in a parody of a film even though it’s all supposedly being taken seriously.
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Filmwhys #54 Surviving Desire and TMNT
Episode #54 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film podcast where my guest is Alia Miller from the Super Zero Podcast and What She’s Having Podcast who asks me why I hadn’t seen Surviving Desire, one of Hal Hartley’s early films that takes a unique look at a specific type of relationship. And in return, I ask her why she hadn’t seen TMNT, the 2007 animated film in between the original live action turtle films and the recent live action/CGI hybrid film-soon-to-be-films.
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Justice League: Gods and Monsters
Justice League: Gods and Monsters 2015
It’s time for me to catch up on some more slightly under the radar new releases that have slipped past me in the past couple months or so. The first one that I checked out is the latest in the neverending releases from DC Animation, this brings about the return of Bruce Timm as writer who was the head of animation during the days of Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League, and is more or less credited with making DC Animation the respected studio that it has become today. He has overseen much of the DC Animated universe as executive producer, but the last movie that was written by him goes all the way back to the first with Superman/Doomsday. Gods and Monsters takes an alternate universe look at what the Justice League could have been if things had turned out very differently for a lot of people. Here, the Justice League is a small group of superhumans who are respected to a certain extent, but mostly feared by the general public as a potential menace who destroys any enemies they come across. I’ve always enjoyed alternate universe stories, and while this one was fascinating, I often felt like I was missing something with my limited knowledge of the extended DC Universe.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 