Category Archives: Blogs
The 5 Obstructions Blogathon: #3 Super
I don’t do a whole lot of blogathons on this site, but Nostra over at My Film Views often comes up with some great ones, so it’s no surprise that I decided to take part in this multi-month blogathon called The 5 Obstructions. Basically it’s a series of 5 challenges, 1 a month that creates a writing challenge, or obstruction. It’s designed to take bloggers out of their comfort zone and think outside of the box when it comes to writing. The first one was to write a review of a movie that was the opposite of how you really felt about the movie, a positive review of a bad movie or vice-versa. The second one was the easiest for me as it was merely to include an interview along with the review and while I regularly feature interviews, most bloggers don’t. And that brings us to our third obstruction: write a review that consists entirely of sentences copy & pasted from other reviews of the movie. I chose the polarizing movie Super, or at least I thought it was polarizing. As it turns out, every review I picked mainly out of sites that I follow were quite positive. I did make a small handful of changes to pronouns to help readability a bit, noted by [brackets] and all the reviews I pulled these quotes from are linked at the bottom for your reading pleasure.
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Desert Island Films – Flights, Tights, & Movie Nights
Bubbawheat from Flights, Tights, & Movie Nights has kindly submitted his Desert Island Films. Read on for his choices and reasons, and be sure to check out his site.
If you want to know about some of my movie tastes outside of superhero movies, check out what 8 films I’d take with me while stranded on a desert island over at Tyson Carter’s site Head in a Vice.
Do toys count as spoilers?
I wouldn’t call myself a collector of movie figures, I have a small handful of mostly Kevin Smith inaction figures and a couple Simpsons figures. Out of the package as well, I got them to display the way I wanted to, not as an investment to resell in the future. But I also have a 6 year old daughter, so I spend plenty of time in the toy aisles of pretty much any store we go to. A few weeks back I walked past the Man of Steel toys and thought to myself how much spoilers are contained in the movie toys themselves, and is that irresponsible or is it just the basic fact of marketing? If you have an action packed movie with specific setpieces, it makes total sense that you would want to play up those moments in the toys so that kids can recreate those movie moments as close as possible. On the other hand, there could be spoilers within those toys if they reveal critical plot points to savvy adults. What if there was a Marion Cotillard toy with her dressed up her League of Shadows gear complete with knife accessory before the movie came out? Or to make a prediction for a future movie, what if they have a young action figure of the old guy in The Wolverine? The other point for the toy companies is that they do often extend the line of toys out past the context of the movie. Like for example Iron Man 3 I imagine had available different versions of his armor that either weren’t really featured in the movie at all, or armors that were only featured for mere moments within the movie and never really played a large factor. If you’re someone who avoids spoilers and you have kids, or if you would have kids, do you/would you avoid the movie toy aisle as much as possible for fear of spoilers? Or if you’re someone who devours every tidbit of early information, do you dissect even the toy line for hints into the movie’s storyline? Tell me what you think? Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Superhero Movie Bingo
I had an idea pop into my head the other day, and I just had to see it through to fruition. There’s plenty of common things that happen in many superhero and comic book movies so I thought I’d liven up the viewing experience by making a little game out of it. Just a fair warning though, I won’t be held responsible for you getting kicked out of the theater for yelling “Bingo!” during the movie, and trust me, it won’t be too hard to get one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a movie or two out there that could fill up the entire card. Is there any squares I missed the boat on, or any that I should have added. Let me know. The one that I wanted to add but didn’t because I wanted to keep the images from the more recent movies is “walks away from an explosion”. If I get enough fresh ideas I may revisit this one. Or, I may just revisit this only with an eye towards the bad superhero movies. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
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Can a Kaiju be a Superhero?
It used to be that the only people that knew the term “Kaiju” were either the extreme Japanophiles or the extreme B-movie geeks that watched all the old classic monster movies. Now it feels like many more people know the term, either because of the shrinking of the world through the ease of communication, or because of the anticipation of Pacific Rim helping draw attention to the term. In case you don’t know, Kaiju is a term used for a giant monster used in a monster movie, the most iconic being Godzilla. Now, I have to admit that I have seen very few Kaiju movies, most of those have been the MST3K versions, especially the Gamera series. It’s hard to forget “Gamera is really neat, Gamera is full of meat, we believe in Ga-me-ra. And one of those has been the 1998 Americanized, or should I say the Emmeriched version. But one thing I do know, or at least am pretty sure of, is that often Godzilla is the “good” Kaiju battling the “bad” Kaiju. So, does that make Godzilla a superhero?
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Jack the Giant Slayer giveaway and Filmwhys Quiz!
The contest is now over, congratulations to the winner, and read below for the answers to the Filmwhys quiz
I’ve been lucky enough to catch the attention of PartnersHub which often runs Blu-Ray giveaways across various movie blogs. Being that this is a niche site, I’ve so far declined to run giveaways for movies I wouldn’t review for this site. And while this is a fantasy movie, it would easily qualify for an “Almost Super” entry. And on top of that, it was released to Blu-Ray on my birthday! Not only that, but I did enjoy the movie myself a lot more than many of my fellow reviewers who have seen it. It’s not an amazing movie by any means, but it really is worth a watch. And while you’re at it, click on the pic below to check out the neat little app attached to the movie.
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FTMN Spotlight – Building Better Superheroes Infographic
Just last week I shared a Superman infographic and shortly afterwards I received another e-mail from someone else who made a superhero-related infographic. Eddie takes a look at various superhero reboots along with a few bits of trivia and decides which one is better. I don’t think I agree with his estimations 100%, but it looks pretty sweet and I’m happy to share it with you. Click to view the original at his site. Enjoy!
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How Much is a Movie Allowed to Change
aka when did “Canon” become a bad word?
Obviously, I just watched Man of Steel this weekend, along with a ton of other people, but not everyone was happy with the way Superman was represented on screen. Of course with 75 years of different writers, artists, comic books, TV series, and movies there’s bound to be some discrepancies, but when does it become too far removed that it no longer resembles what the original character is supposed to represent? Personally, I’m on the side that is much more forgiving of liberties with the character. In music, I’m a big fan of remixes and mash ups, and in a way I think this translates to some of these characters. I like both the Sam Raimi and Mark Webb Spider-Man movies for different reasons, just how I like both the original Christopher Reeve Superman as well as Dean Cain’s Lois and Clark, Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel, Tom Welling’s Smallville, and several of the various animated incarnations. They are all very different from each other even though they are essentially the same character.
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5 Obstructions #1: Batman & Robin
Obstruction #1: Write a good review of a bad movie
When I saw this blogathon I immediately thought it was a great idea, in fact, I even had the idea for the first “obstruction” a while back. For full details, check out the overview post over at Nostra’s My Film Views. But basically the idea is five writing challenges inspired by a movie that challenged the filmmaker to make the same movie five different times, each time with a different challenge, or obstruction. For the first obstruction, I figured I could easily find a bad movie that I’ve seen recently and I decided to make that challenge into a “sell out” review. That is to say I am writing this review as if I had been paid by the filmmakers to give it a good review, and I figured the best place to use that marketing double-speak is for the film Batman and Robin. Enjoy.
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FTMN Spotlight – The Saga of Superman Infographic
I got an e-mail yesterday introducing me to a great little infographic by Roslyn Willson about Superman and she thought my readers would enjoy it, and so do I. It’s a real nice piece and I hope you enjoy it, you can view it below or check out the original
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 