Category Archives: Blogs
What’s Wrong With This Picture? It’s All About ConteXt-Men
There’s been a mini-controversy rolling around the past couple of weeks. Technically, since it’s the internet age it was a controversy for a couple days and then most people moved onto the next thing, but it’s kept popping up into my view and certain things about how it was presented to me irritated me so much that I wanted to say something about it on the only real platform I have. Now, to start things off, I’m as much of a feminist as a middle-aged white male can be. And what really brought me to action here was when I did the one thing that you should never do: I read the comments.
Read the rest of this entry
Filmwhys Casting Call for Fans of Obscure & Unloved Superhero Movies
Hello fellow superhero movie fans! I’m beginning a new series of Filmwhys Extra podcast episodes and I am looking for guests. Each episode of this series will take a look at a single superhero movie through the eyes of the fans that love it. Now, this would be an easy thing to do for films like Iron Man, Spider-Man, or the Dark Knight. No, what I am aiming for are the more obscure and cult films like Griff the Invisible, Tank Girl, or Sky High. That as well as the films that aren’t typically well regarded by movie fans like the Fantastic Four, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Supergirl, or Daredevil. I’m currently building a guest list and hope to record and post the first episode by the end of April. What I’m looking for are people, preferably with some podcasting experience or at least a microphone that’s not embedded into a laptop who want to talk about one of these films. Once I get around to one of those movies, I will start contacting guests to set up recording times, generally no longer than 15-20 minutes. I would especially like to include as many female voices as I can since it often feels like podcasting is dominated by male voices. If you are interested, leave a comment below mentioning what film or films you would be interested in discussing, or you can e-mail me at Bubbawheat@msn.com, and please share this post with anyone you know who might be interested in joining as well.
C2E2 2016 Recap
Another year has gone by and once again I was able to check out one of the comic book conventions that took place quite near me. This year’s C2E2 felt very similar in a lot of ways to last year, but my experience was quite a bit different for more than one reason. This year I saw fewer panels, but actually talked to a couple celebrities. I also managed to bring my nine year old daughter along for Sunday which was also kid’s day. It did feel a little bit smaller than last year, but at the same time it also felt busier.
Read the rest of this entry
Defining Superhero Movies pt. 1: Time Period
Something that I haven’t done on this site in a long while is to break down some element of superhero movies in general. And I think it’s time that I revisit what I consider to be my guidelines for what it means to be a superhero movie. As you may or may not know, I don’t consider superhero movies to be a genre itself. Instead, I think of it more as a category of movies. There are a handful of elements that need to be present in some form for me to consider a movie a “superhero movie”. Not all of them need to be there, and it is a very rough set of guidelines, so there will be many movies that fall right on the line of what may or may not be a superhero movie. And for those movies, I might fall on one side of the line while different people might fall on the other side of the line. But for now, I’ll be taking on these elements one at a time starting with the time period.
Read the rest of this entry
Top 8 Superhero & Comic Book Films of 2015
It’s the New Year and that means that it’s time to look back at the previous year that has passed. And along with most movie sites I’ll be taking a look back at the films that came out this year and sharing my top 8 films. That may sound like an odd number, but there have been only eighteen films by my count released here in the US this year that I would classify as a superhero film or was based on a comic book. In the recent boom of superhero and comic book films, this is actually the smallest number of films released since 2009 as the number has been steadily growing since shortly after 2000. And because of that, I was actually able to watch them all before the end of the year! There were some good films this year, some surprises, and several disappointments. But there are eight films that I wanted to share once again with you as my personal favorites.
Read the rest of this entry
Not Everything with a Tenuous Link to Superheroes is a Superhero Movie
AKA The Adventures of Food Boy is Not a Superhero Movie
It’s been a long while since I’ve written one of these blog posts looking at what does or doesn’t make a superhero movie as a whole. I usually err on the side of acceptance, including movies like the Spongebob Movie that only has the characters turn into superheroes for the last fifteen to twenty minutes at the end, or Birdman where the main character is an actor who used to play a superhero and is having hallucinations of that same hero, or even Electric Man where it’s mainly about comic books and one of the characters merely cosplays as the fictional comic book hero. But I finally found a movie that made me draw the line even though the poster for the film has the titular Food Boy opening his shirt in a clear homage to Superman and one of the alternate titles of the film is High School Super Hero.
Graphic Horror: Tales of Halloween interview with Andrew Kasch
I haven’t had much time for movie watching lately, but one film that I did watch at home on VOD was a brand new anthology film called Tales of Halloween. One of the reasons that I watched it was because I was contacted with an interview opportunity for the film, it was inspired by other anthologies including Tales From the Crypt which I am a huge fan of, and was based on a horror comic. And also one of the opportunities was Andrew Kasch who happens to also work on two current/upcoming superhero TV shows the Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. He was a great guy to talk to and I had forgotten how time consuming transcribing interviews was. We talked a little about his career, his work on television, and of course his new film Tales of Halloween which he was a co-director of one of the ten segments in the film.
Read the rest of this entry
It’s October, and that means Graphic Horror
It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to watch a full movie that I intended to review for this site here so I wanted to spend a quick moment to give an update to you on what I’ve been doing lately and what I hope to be doing here in this coming month where nearly everyone starts bringing out the horror movies from now until Halloween, and I’m no different. I’m not quite sure how many movies I’ll be able to get in this month, but I plan on adding at least four films to my graphic horror tag for films based on horror comics, plus the usual two episodes of Filmwhys that aren’t specifically horror related, the next of which has already been recorded and will be posted on Monday as usual. I also have had the chance to appear on a couple podcasts in the past few weeks so I thought I’d share those here as well.
Read the rest of this entry
Is Warner Bros. Relying Too Heavily on Batman?
I’ve been meaning to write on this topic for quite a while now, but since recently it came out in the news that next year’s Batman vs. Superman is supposedly even less a sequel to Man of Steel than we initially suspected and is much more a Batman story. But even if you discount the whole Batman vs. Superman issue, there’s still the matter of what they’re doing with their home video releases. This year alone, Warner Bros. have released seven straight-to-video animated movies and one more that’s due before the year’s out. Every single one of them features Batman in some way, shape, or form, and half of them have him specifically in the title of the film as the main character. You have to go back four years to 2011 to find a year where Batman made up less than half of that year’s line-up, having only Batman: Year One released alongside the other actually non-Batman titles All Star Superman, Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, and the live action Green Lantern.
Read the rest of this entry
September Update, stats, and the like
It feels like it’s been quite a while since I’ve gone and done just a regular blog-style post where I share my thoughts on where the site is, where it’s been, and where it’s going. I’ll also share a few stats from August which I totally didn’t steal from another blogger who I follow but can’t remember but when I do remember I will totally give them a link right here. I find it fascinating how things can change over time. I’m closing in on four years writing on this site and what it is now is pretty different from what it was three years ago even though I’m still watching and reviewing superhero and comic book movies as the one constant.
Read the rest of this entry
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 