Superhero Shorts: Lazy Teenage Superheroes
Welcome to another edition of Superhero Shorts, where I feature a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions with the creator. Today I’m talking with Michael Ashton who made a short film about a group of slacker teenagers who happen to have super powers. He did it for practically no money with his friends and did most of the impressive special effects work himself. As usual, you can watch it below, or you can watch it at the official website.
Read the rest of this entry
Filmwhys #13 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and All Superheroes Must Die
It’s that time again folks, another Filmwhys episode has been released to the general public. This week I have guest Jason Soto of the site Your Face who asks me the question why haven’t I seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original one from 1974, a low budget horror movie that first introduced us to Leatherface. And in return I ask him why he hasn’t seen All Superheroes Must Die, which is pretty close to a superhero horror movie. I was also able to ask a few brief questions with the creator of All Superheroes Must Die, Jason Trost at the end of the episode.
Read the rest of this entry
DC Animation Should Make a Theatrical Feature and it Should be The Killing Joke
I’ve said before to anyone who would listen that DC Animation should release a theatrical feature. They haven’t done one since practically their first all the way back in 1993 with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm which was more or less a spin-off of Batman: The Animated Series and had a fairly limited theatrical release. Since then, they’ve released several other spin-off movies for Batman: TAS, Batman Beyond, and Superman: TAS before releasing their first stand-alone Superman movie Doomsday in 2007 based on the Death and Return of Superman comic book arc. Their very next one, Justice League: The New Frontier would be their first PG-13 rated feature. In the following years, they’ve released 15 other straight-to-home-video animated movies based on other popular comic book runs as well as a handful of short films included on some of the DVDs. The stories they tell in these animated features are much more like what you would find in a Japanese Anime movie, these aren’t kids films, they are grown up stories based on well written comics. They are done on a direct-to-home-video budget, but it is used efficiently and often has some amazingly high quality animation, as well as a superbly chosen voice cast. Marvel is dominating the box office while DC is hit and miss, and I think a well placed animated movie could be a great selling point for DC.
Super Buddies
Super Buddies 2013
Since started this site, I’ve expanded my focus quite a bit. For the first half of the first year, I was limiting myself to only theatrically released superhero movies. I quickly included home video releases so I could review the great DC Animation titles and my list of movies to watch is always growing. And while I doubt I’ll ever expand it so much that I end up watching and reviewing Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, I did decide to watch and review this movie. It did help quite a bit that my daughter is already a fan of the Buddies series of movies and I realized that I haven’t really watched a lot of movies with her lately even though I would almost always mention Jena in the early days of this site. Now, this movie has a few things going against it right from the start. It’s a Disney, straight-to-home-video movie, it has talking puppies, and it’s somewhere around tenth in the long running series of Air Bud and later Buddies movies. I’m not going to go out and say that this is a good movie by any means, but when I look at it from the perspective of being aimed towards younger kids, you could do a lot worse than Super Buddies.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
Filmwhys #12 Rope and Planet Hulk
It’s time once again for another episode of Filmwhys, or the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film podcast where I have a returning guest for the first time, webnovelist Stefan Gagne from Pixelscapes who asks me why I haven’t seen one of Hitchcock’s more experimental films, Rope which is only the third Hitchcock movie that I’ve ever seen. And I ask him why he hasn’t seen one of Marvel’s animated offerings, Planet Hulk.
Read the rest of this entry
Kick-Ass 2
Kick-Ass was a great hyper-violent superhero satire directed by Matthew Vaughn back in 2010, a few years later nearly everyone returns for the sequel minus the director. I was a big fan of the original Kick-Ass and had high hopes for the sequel following some fun looking trailers and the addition of Jim Carrey to the cast, despite his public disapproval of the film’s violence a couple months ago. The original had a nice commentary about some of the realities of real-life superheroes contrasted with some balls to the wall stylish action scenes involving an 11 year old girl and a not insignificant amount of blood. The sequel tries to bring back what worked in the original, but only hits its mark about half of the time. It’s still a good movie and it’s great to see Hit Girl back to kick some ass, but it just never reaches the original in terms of flair, humor, or message, and when it comes close it feels more like a rehash of the original rather than a return. There are a few possible surprises in this movie which I will mention so here’s your obligatory spoiler warning if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
Read the rest of this entry
Planet Hulk
I’ve viewed and reviewed a lot of DC Animation movies, but I haven’t gotten around to nearly as many Marvel Animation features. There aren’t quite as many of them, and they aren’t quite as high quality as their DC counterparts, but they are still often times an enjoyable diversion. I saw Planet Hulk for the first time a couple years ago when I was on a big animation kick and was going through most of the Marvel and DC Animated titles that were out at the time, and of the Marvel releases, this one was my favorite, even though there was one major problem I had. This movie is Planet Hulk, and of course the Hulk is the main character in it, but it is not the Hulk that I’ve come to know. The story is not what I would expect the Hulk to fit into, and I don’t recognize any name in the voice cast outside of Kevin Michael Richardson. But it still manages to be a fun watch and worth a look while you’re waiting for the next DC title to come out.
Read the rest of this entry
Filmwhys #11 The Godfather and Masters of the Universe
I think it will be hard top this one for quite a while because today for the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast my guest is Joel from the Lamb who asks me the biggest question, why haven’t I seen the Godfather, which is such a well known and well made movie that it really needs no further introduction. And in return I ask him why he hasn’t seen Masters of the Universe. In my defense, I’ve known that Joel has the occasional love of cheesy action movies and while not everyone can enjoy Masters of the Universe, I thought he very well might.
Read the rest of this entry
Top 10 Best Superhero Casting…
Top 10 Best Superhero Casting…
There’s been a lot of talk about the casting of Batman (and a little Ant Man) in the past couple weeks so I decided to take a look back and share my thoughts on what I think are the 10 best casting decisions in superhero movies, and also 5 that were great choices but turned disastrous either through the script, direction, or whatever else it may be. Are there any great ones that I left off my list? Did I get the order wrong? Who would you have chosen? Make sure you share your opinion in the comments below.
Read the rest of this entry
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 