Friday Foster
Friday Foster 1975
As February nears its end, it’s time for me to wrap up my short lived celebration of Black History Month in superhero and comic book movies since this is absolutely the last one that I could find. It’s a mid-seventies Blacksploitation film starring the great Pam Grier along with a very impressive cast for the time and film company possibly most well known for their exploitation films like Blacula. The film itself was based on a serialized comic strip of the same name that ran for just four years and actually ended the year before the film was made. Considering I don’t have an extensive background at watching many exploitation films aside from the parody Black Dynamite I don’t have much to go off of, but this ended up being a rather fun watch. Even without the experience of those films to go off of, it was bogged down a bit by a rather nonsensical and drab plot as well as a lack of any notable action or nudity which I would have thought would be more present in one of these types of films.
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Filmwhys #65 Black Dynamite and Hancock
The Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Adrian King from Adrian Has Issues who asks me why I hadn’t seen Black Dynamite, the pitch perfect send up of 70’s Blaxploitation films made in 2009 by Michael Jai White. And in return, I ask him why he hadn’t seen Hancock, the film where Will Smith plays Superman if he were a jerk who drank too much and didn’t remember who he was until he randomly found his wife who was also super powered but was hiding it all this time. It’s weird, but the first half works. Also a bonus to bring things back just a little bit to Black History month with a double shot of Black cinema even though Will Smith is the only Black character in Hancock.
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Lego Justice League: Cosmic Clash
Lego DC Comics Super Heroes: Justice League: Cosmic Clash 2016
It’s the second month of the year and that means the second DC movie that includes Batman in it. Not only that, but it’s the second film that includes Batman fighting another hero and the first this year where he is fighting Superman. Aside from that, it’s also the fourth Lego DC movie to be released on home video after the success of DC Heroes Unite, Attack of the Legion of Doom, and Justice League vs. Bizarro League. It actually continues where Bizarro League left off where Cyborg is now a full fledged member of the team and Batman is on board with everyone but is still somewhat on the outskirts of the team. Like all the others, there’s plenty of humor and while most of it is childish, there’s enough referential humor to make things fun for adults as well.
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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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Deadpool
Deadpool 2016
The time has finally come, the first theatrical superhero movie of the year and it’s a doozy. As I’m writing this, it’s on the way towards a monster $135 million plus box office holiday weekend, which is around three times greater than what was expected for this R-Rated movie on what could be considered a third tier superhero. In a way, this also seems like what happens when the filmmakers take the essence of what the character is in the comics and translate that as closely as possible to the screen. For many years, liberties have been taken with the origin, the costume, and other aspects of the characters but for fans of Deadpool, this is how they see their character on the page and on the screen and they are ecstatic. Personally, I can’t really call myself a fan of Deadpool in the comics because I’ve never read the comics. Most of my exposure to Deadpool comes from the beginning of X-Men Origins: Wolverine as well as a couple fan films. But this film hit me in all the right places, from the very wrong humor, the pop culture references from the 80’s and 90’s, the meta humor, and the action all wrapped up like a chimichanga of awesome.
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Pootie Tang
Pootie Tang aka Sine Your Pitty on the Runny Kine! 2001
Something that I started in the first year of this site and revisited just last year was to “celebrate” Black History Month in what little way that I could by reviewing films that featured Black superheroes. I covered most of them during the first year of this site including pretty much all of the good ones. It wasn’t until last year when I decided to revisit this idea with Abar: The First Black Superman as well as a couple episodes of Filmwhys where I could cover some Black cinema outside of the realm of superheroes. This year I found a couple more Black movies to watch and I decided to start with this film which is pretty far from your typical superhero movie. But it does seem to follow the typical origin story pretty closely with a few tweaks here and there. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few moments of completely absurd humor, the jokes didn’t connect with my sense of humor and without that I was left shaking my head more often than shaking my gut.
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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.
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Superhero Party Clown
Superhero Party Clown 2010
I’m back trying to watch my way through the superhero and comic book movies I have left to watch from 2010. I decided to go with one of the smaller releases which was this little independent film from writer/director Jeremy Inman who I didn’t realize until later also wrote and directed one of my least favorite films from last year Avengers Grimm. Of course, I don’t exactly hold that one against him since I get the impression that the Asylum puts pressure on the talent to churn something out under schedule and under budget whenever possible. This has quite a few cliched characters and relationships, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with plenty of backstory mythology to the created superheroes for the film.
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Heavy Metal 2000
Heavy Metal 2000 2000
It’s been a while since I’ve participated in a blogathon that I didn’t host, but when I saw the O Canada Blogathon over at Speakeasy all the way back in October I figured I could come up with something Canadian to join in. Although my first two thoughts were shut down for various reasons, I knew there was a very obscure Canadian independent film called Sidekick, but it’s also so obscure that I’m having trouble getting my hands on it. I also knew about a French/Canadian production called Crying Freeman, but looking into it I realized it was based on a manga rather than a comic and I’m holding off on those for the moment. So last on my list was this one. I had watched the first Heavy Metal last year but hadn’t heard good things about the sequel and since I didn’t care for the original all that much I didn’t have high hopes for this one. And for the most part my fears were right.
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Tamara Drewe
Tamara Drewe 2010
This is one of those movies where I end up drawing a bit of a blurry line as to what I consider a comic book movie and I realize that I don’t think I’ll ever come up with a set of criteria that won’t be too exclusive without also being too inclusive. But similar to Dick Tracy, Tamara Drewe actually started out its life as a weekly serialized comic strip that ran in the UK newspaper the Guardian starting in 2005. Then it was released in a collected form as a graphic novel in 2007 and then just a few years later it was turned into a movie. It’s a loose retelling of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd but that’s not really a story that I’m familiar with so any references and allusions to it would have been lost on me. There were some funny bits, but the more I think about the film, the less it really sticks with me.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 