Category Archives: 00’s movies
Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman
Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman 2003
It feels like animation month here is already starting to wind down and as I write this, the month isn’t even half over yet. While I’ve hit a bit of a rough patch in some of the more grown up animation as well as the previous Batman animation, this was a much more welcome return to form. Mystery of the Batwoman was essentially the last project to come out of the Batman: The Animated Series era that more or less bridges a bit of the gap between the New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond even though both of them had been off the air for a couple years before this project was completed. At its heart, like the title says it’s a mystery where Batman as well as the villains try to figure out who this Batwoman is, and as I always do I will be discussing her identity so here’s your spoiler warning.
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The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
It’s not even halfway through the month and I’m already at my final fully animated film aimed towards grown ups until the Killing Joke comes out later on this month. And unfortunately, like Lady Death, this one fell flat for me though for completely different reasons. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie as it had a very similar juvenile sensibility only this was much more liberal with the nudity and gore which makes sense as it was directed by Rob Zombie. Straight up comedies are occasionally difficult to review objectively because humor is such a subjective thing. But when it came to my sense of humor and this movie’s sense of humor, they only lined up about 3% of the time. The rest of the time I was either cringing at the jokes made at the protagonists expense, or marveling at how they managed to get Paul Giamatti and Rosario Dawson in these roles. There was plenty of horror homages and felt like it was trying to recapture some of the early Ralph Bakshi animation, but it just fell completely flat for me.
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Lady Death
Lady Death 2004
I feel like I’m already halfway through this month of animation and unfortunately I’ve hit the first snag. Things have been going pretty peachy so far and I just hope that this isn’t a portent of things to come. I also want to make a quick mention of Hulu where I watched this film. Recently it has been pushing its paid subscriptions so hard that you can barely even get past the front page without signing up for a free trial. They do still have a large number of movies available to watch without a subscription, but it’s not intuitive on how to get to anywhere to search for them. But if you aren’t scared off by this review and want to watch it for yourself, just click right here and go straight to it. But the film itself has a few moments of gorgeous artwork, but aside from that is just a jumbled mess with bad voice acting.
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Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker 2000
I’m continuing my month of animated movies switching back and forth between animation for adults, and those for younger audiences. While this isn’t exactly a kid’s film, it did spawn off of the great era of DC Animation on television starting off with Batman: The Animated Series. It was a show that while I don’t have clear memories of when I watched it, whether it was right after coming home from school or during those Saturday mornings while I was an early teen even on through my later teens, though I didn’t quite follow the show into the Batman Beyond era. I know I’ve seen a few episodes and watching this film again it reeked with familiarity, but there was never anything specific that I could put my finger on. The flashback scene also brought back more memories of the series I did watch, and overall it went quite a bit darker than I would have expected and like the series before it, Return of the Joker was a solid Batman story on par with some of the best animated movies they’ve released in recent years. And while I don’t usually mention this for older movies, since there is a large mystery aspect to this film’s story I will be discussing the reveal so don’t read if you’d rather watch the mystery unfold for yourself.
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June-ing the Cult: Elwood Jones and Zebraman
Zebraman 2004
June has come to an end and as I try to squeeze my foot in the door I don’t quite make it so this last June-ing the Cult post is showing up on the doorsteps of July. This has been a fun month of movies that range from odd to awful to just plain bizarre, but they have all been a treat to watch. Wrapping up this month is the second film from Japan and is easily the most bizarre of them all, almost moreso since it comes from acclaimed and prolific director Takashi Miike. Zebraman starts out as a look into the life of a sad teacher who tries to live out this superhero fantasy based on a cheesy show that he watched as a kid until it eventually turns into something much more bizarre involving super powers and alien invaders. It was a nice way to wrap things up even though I doubt I’ll get around to the vastly different sequel any time soon. But before we get too far into the film, let’s hear from Elwood Jones who chose this film for me to watch.
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Paper Man
Paper Man 2009
There are several reasons why I occasional stretch the boundaries of what I consider a “superhero movie”, sometimes it’s because I already decided to watch the film and didn’t want to feel like I had wasted my time on it, other times it gives me an excuse to watch something that’s very much unlike a typical superhero movie. This one falls very much in the latter category even though I knew next to nothing about this film before I put it on aside from the fact that it starred Jeff Daniels and it had Ryan Reynolds playing yet another superhero, albeit an imaginary one. As it started playing, I quickly fell in love with the cast and really enjoyed the rather quirky dramedy about this struggling writer developing a completely non-sexual relationship with a teenage girl played by the always lovely Emma Stone.
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Ben 10: Alien Swarm
Ben 10: Alien Swarm 2009
And now we come to the film that will likely wrap up this month of kids movies unless I happen to squeeze one more in tomorrow. I ran a Twitter poll of a few options to choose, and this was the movie that won. Now I am only slightly aware of Ben 10 as a concept, I know that it started out as a cartoon and has gone through various different series as well as a couple different live action movies and this was the latter of those, and probably not the best choice for an entry point into this universe. But surprisingly this was much less difficult to understand the overall basics of the world than the two Power Rangers films and that’s even including my past experience with the Power Rangers. Considering the fact that it was a made for TV movie, it was much better than I expected. There were some interesting concepts thrown around even though they were treated with kid gloves for the most part. What it did do the most was make me curious about the Ben 10 universe as a whole.
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Sharkboy and Lavagirl
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D 2005
I’m continuing on in this month of kid’s superhero movies with probably the biggest one on the list in terms of the amount of people who are aware of this film, even though it’s not exactly thought of as a great movie. The story behind the film is that writer/producer/director/composer/all-around-filmmaker Robert Rodriguez decided that he wanted to make a film for his kids, specifically that he wanted to bring the characters created by his son Racer to life in this film. In fact, Racer even gets an official “Story by” credit in the film and the main character is named after Racer’s middle name. And as for the general conceit of this film, I’m generally a big fan of these types of dream worlds or fantasy worlds along the lines of Wonderland, Oz, and the like, but for many reasons I just didn’t care for this one at all. While it’s a nice legacy for Racer to have this physical incarnation of a story he thought up when he was around 6, it just doesn’t hold up as a very cohesive film.
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Super Capers
Super Capers 2009
Another month has come and gone and after going through last month watching fewer horror movies than I had hoped, I’m moving on to yet another themed month. For the month of April, I decided that I want to get some of the bad movies out of the way, specifically many of the awful looking superhero movies geared towards kids, some that I grew up with and others that I’ve never seen and never really wanted to see. To kick things off, I decided to watch this parody kids movie from 2009 called Super Capers and starring the perennial teen star who would go on to do nothing of note and this was actually one of the last few movies that he worked on before disappearing off the Hollywood planet. The film itself is actually more like a superhero parody film along the lines of Superhero Movie. It has a handful of good jokes, but it’s underscored by way too many cartoonish sound effects that hamper the humor rather than enhance it. And while it has an interesting cast, the actual characters are generally one dimensional punchlines and those punchlines aren’t all that great. It was a bit better than I was expecting it to be, but it’s still a far cry from a good movie.
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Up, Up, and Away
Up, Up, and Away 2000
I’m continuing my efforts to watch the last few remaining Black superhero and comic book movies that I haven’t reviewed with this Disney Channel Original Movie. I was never really much of a fan of the DCOMs as some people refer to them, they were always too far on the schmaltzy scale for me as they seemed to be targeted directly towards tweens before the term tween even existed. The ones that I’ve been forced to sit through by my wife and daughter have been the surprisingly abundant girl-focused ones like the Zenon films, the Halloweentowns, and most recently Descendants. None of them would have likely appealed to me when I was younger and they definitely didn’t appeal to me as an adult. So I didn’t have very high hopes for Up, Up, and Away even with the inclusion of Robert Townsend as director and star considering I am a mild fan of his earlier work The Meteor Man. But while I didn’t absolutely fall in love with Up, Up, and Away, it did do a few things that surprised me and it made me laugh more than once.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 