Category Archives: 00’s movies
Inspector Gadget’s Last Case
Inspector Gadget’s Last Case: Claw’s Revenge 2002
This post was brought about by a monthly Patreon vote, if you’d like to influence what movies I review and support this site, you can join for as little as $1 a month at Patreon.com/FlightsTightsAndMovieNights. This was one of a handful of movies that I found on Tubi that I hadn’t covered, most of them are extremely low budget and/or foreign animation tossed into the home video and streaming market. I was a fan of the original Inspector Gadget cartoon and also reviewed the two live-action movies here but haven’t been familiar with the various later incarnations of the character. This movie doesn’t really feel much like an Inspector Gadget story at all, especially with such a strong focus on the Gadgetmobile which wasn’t even a character in the original cartoon. It really almost felt like a completely different story with some Inspector Gadget trappings tossed into it.
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Origin Stories: Marc Webb & (500) Days of Summer
(500) Days of Summer 2009
This is part of a new series of reviews that I’m starting that takes a look at directors of well known superhero movies and takes a step back to either their big movie just before their superhero movie, or one of their first films. In this case, it’s both. 3 years before Marc Webb directed the Amazing Spider-Man films, he had a single feature length film to his credit: a romantic dramady starring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I had seen this film many years ago and really enjoyed it. Rewatching it this time around definitely hit differently, but there are still a lot of great moments throughout this film and it holds up very well as a visual and interesting look at a short lived relationship from the guy’s point of view. Also, this post was decided on by a monthly poll from our patrons at our Patreon, so for only $1 a month, you can help choose a movie review that appears on this site.
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Garfield’s Pet Force
Garfield’s Pet Force 2009
I was doing a random search on Netflix trying to find something that I hadn’t covered yet and didn’t have to pay for and one of the movies that came up was this straight-to-video kid’s movie. And one of the biggest selling points for me was that it was just over an hour long. Now, when I was a kid I liked Garfield pretty well, it was the era when Garfield and Friends played on TV and I typically watched it every time it was on, but ever since I was an adult and the seemingly awful live action Garfield movies came out, my opinion of Garfield has gone way down. So my expectations for this movie were pretty low. There was a small amount of interesting meta humor, but for the most part it was a pretty dull and uninteresting take on superheroes with Garfield characters, including several that I had never heard of before.
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Marvel Then and Now: An Evening With Stan Lee and Joe Quesada
The Hero Initiative Very Very Live: Marvel Then and Now: An Evening With Stan Lee and Joe Quesada Hosted by Kevin Smith 2007
In honor of this month’s Patreon poll, since I wasn’t able to borrow any of the titles I chose for March’s poll since they were all chosen from my local library’s shelves, I decided to pick a similar non-fiction title that I haven’t covered here yet. I plan on watching the winning title Crumb as soon as the library re-opens. I’ve had this on DVD for quite a while but never got around to watching it before now. I’ve seen a few different Stan Lee interviews and was able to see him live once, I’ve also been a big fan of Kevin Smith and have enjoyed a lot of his speaking engagements whether it’s his podcasts or other things similar to this. Unfortunately, this was filmed mostly live with several technical difficulties, low sound quality for most of the run time, and poor editing with some repetition thrown in. Not nearly the best way to watch an interview with these two about Marvel.
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Homemade Vigilante
Homemade Vigilante 2009
I’m way late to the party on this but a lot of things have been going on, both in my personal life as well as the whole virus scare in the US. But I’m still trying to keep things running here on this site and I made it around to watching the movie that won February’s Patreon poll. It’s a 2009 extremely indie film and if you’re curious about it, you can also watch for yourself as it’s currently streaming on Vimeo. This movie actually predates the trend that happened around this time with lower budget (but much higher budget than this one) films focused on self-made superheroes that don’t exactly know what they’re doing. This falls much more in line with the comedic side of things like the first half of Super without ever really going into true superhero territory while also falling back on rather dry British style humor that doesn’t always mesh with wider audiences.
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Over the Hedge
Over the Hedge 2006
I vaguely remember watching Over the Hedge back when it was relatively new. I don’t think I made it to theaters to watch it, but eventually after it came out on home video. I mostly remember the fact that it starred Bruce Willis and Garry Shandling as the two main characters and at some point I got an Over the Hedge comic strip collection. I’m also reviewing this in part for Movie Rob’s Genre Guesstimation where he tasked me with deciding the genre for him to examine during February. I chose animated comic book/comic strip adaptations and while I’ve pretty much covered every American animated comic book movie, I thought I’d expand things to cover this movie based on a comic strip. And unlike comic strips like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, or the Addams Family which are generally a series of stand-alone strips or panels, Over the Hedge is a serialized comic strip that you can read online here, which is close enough to a comic book for my purposes here on this site.
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RoboCop Prime Directives: Crash & Burn
RoboCop Prime Directives: Crash & Burn 2001
I’ve finally come to the end of this four part miniseries and it’s going to be difficult to really say too much that I haven’t said in the previous reviews. There were a few more ultraviolent moments as well as some entertaining bits. The interstitials felt almost nonexistent compared to the previous two episodes though they did have some good moments through the end credits. The budget really showed in this episode with the climax using the most of the extremely limited budget and without a great, compelling story and characters to back it up, it really fell pretty flat. There were some nice callbacks here and there but it was mostly just an uninteresting finale to a dull miniseries.
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RoboCop Prime Directives: Resurrection
RoboCop Prime Directives: Resurrection 2001
I’m continuing through the four part RoboCop miniseries that originally aired in Canada and I’ve noticed that it really is starting to feel much more like a series rather than four connected movies. In a way the actual story of the movie is getting better as threads are starting to thread deeper and the characters are getting farther along on their arcs. On a different day, I might actually not consider this on my list of movies, but today I’m feeling generous. The third part has a few less interstitial interruptions and the ones they have aren’t as entertaining as the one in Meltdown but I’m definitely ready for this series to be over with the next installment.
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RoboCop Prime Directives: Meltdown
RoboCop Prime Directives: Meltdown 2001
It’s been a while since I watched the first episode of this four part miniseries that originally aired in Canada as the library only carried the first volume. But I’ve currently got a 1 month trial of Amazon Prime and all four episodes are on there so I thought it would be the perfect time to finish this series up. I didn’t remember a whole lot about the first episode but I remembered that I didn’t care for it enough to re-watch it so I just jumped right into this second episode. While the main storyline is nothing to write home about despite being much more violent than the earlier RoboCop sequels, the satirical news and commercial breaks mixed in really caught me in just the right way and made this a much more enjoyable movie because of them.
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Almost Super: Franklyn
Almost Super: Franklyn 2008
This post is a part of my Patreon rewards program. Each month, Patreon members can vote on one of the movies that I review each month. If you would like to participate join today for just $1 a month. I don’t remember where I first heard about this film, but it had vigilante in the description and a guy in a mask on the cover. After watching it, while the movie does have a hint of vigilantism and evokes similarities to Watchmen, but it’s a far cry from a superhero movie. It does share some similarities to other movies that I’ve covered on this site where there is a superhero but it’s partly a hallucination of the main character. This involves four different characters and two of them have hallucinations, but only one of them involves anything close to a superhero. It’s still an interesting film in its own right, but much of the interest is left open to interpretation.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 