Blog Archives
Batman: Soul of the Dragon
Batman: Soul of the Dragon 2021
It’s been a couple months since I subscribed to HBO Max with the intention of catching up on several of the animated DC movies that I’ve missed out on these past couple years but I only just now got around to watching the first one. There wasn’t any specific reason why I picked this one out of the others that were on there, it just stood out as being a little bit different than what I’ve come to expect in these animated movies and in that respect, it very much was. This was done in the style of the 70’s with a bit of classic Bond mixed with Bruce Lee and some exploitation cinema all mixed together. Not only that, but despite the fact that this is labelled as a Batman movie, ninety percent of the film is all about Bruce Wayne and Batman only shows up for one scene near the beginning, then for the climactic end battle. The story beats were a little on the cliched side, but it was cliches done with love and it was a lot of fun overall. This is still a relatively recent release so there will be spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
Read the rest of this entry
Inspector Gadget’s Last Case
Inspector Gadget’s Last Case: Claw’s Revenge 2002
This post was brought about by a monthly Patreon vote, if you’d like to influence what movies I review and support this site, you can join for as little as $1 a month at Patreon.com/FlightsTightsAndMovieNights. This was one of a handful of movies that I found on Tubi that I hadn’t covered, most of them are extremely low budget and/or foreign animation tossed into the home video and streaming market. I was a fan of the original Inspector Gadget cartoon and also reviewed the two live-action movies here but haven’t been familiar with the various later incarnations of the character. This movie doesn’t really feel much like an Inspector Gadget story at all, especially with such a strong focus on the Gadgetmobile which wasn’t even a character in the original cartoon. It really almost felt like a completely different story with some Inspector Gadget trappings tossed into it.
Read the rest of this entry
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising 2020
Despite enjoying the first My Hero Academia movie Two Heroes a couple years ago, I still never got around to watching any of the series. Instead, I’ve been slowly making my way through Hunter X Hunter and Eden on Netflix. I’d still like to catch it at some point in time but who knows when I’ll ever actually get around to it. I was a little bit more familiar with some of the main cast, but there were still plenty of them that I either didn’t recognize or didn’t remember. And while the movie doesn’t waste too much time on exposition, there’s enough there if you’re coming into this movie fresh like me. And this film had a much better flow and a more comprehensible storyline than the previous film so it was an enjoyable ride from start to finish rather than just having a high point at the end.
Read the rest of this entry
Captain Underpants: Mega Blissmas
FTMN Quickie: Captain Underpants: Mega Blissmas 2020
Merry Christmas Everyone! I thought I’d take a little time out of my day to write about the latest superhero Christmas special that’s come out this year on Netflix. It’s not quite a TV episode but it’s not exactly a full movie. It clocks in at just under an hour but it feels more like a double episode of the Captain Underpants cartoon that’s also on Netflix. So much so that I’m not going to add this to my big list of Superhero movies, but I watched it, and I haven’t been that active here lately so I figured I’d still write about it. I watched the Captain Underpants movie a little while back but I never watched any of the TV series. This definitely has the same type of humor that mixes a typical 9 year old’s imagination with some meta humor, but it rehashes a very similar Christmas theme about how getting exactly what you want isn’t always the best thing.
Read the rest of this entry
Justice League Dark: Apokolips War
It seems like we’ve been in the era of this interconnected for a good long while. It was kicked off with the events in the Flashpoint Paradox back in 2013 but really started with Justice League War in 2014 with the biggest connective tissues being Jason O’Mara as the voice of Batman and a similar visual style in the animation. The DC Animated Movies have also crossed the line from PG-13 to R several times and this is one of the bleakest and most violent animated movies in quite a while yet there’s still enough humor to keep things entertaining without completely going off the rails. It also brings together several of the spin-off-yet-still-connected movies like the Teen Titans, Suicide Squad, and Constantine that feels like it’s following a loose parallel to Avengers: Endgame without feeling derivative. Like always, this was fun and it really builds on everything that came before it to make a fitting end to this little corner of the DC Animated Universe. And as this is a recent release, I won’t be shying away from story details so this is your spoiler warning.
Read the rest of this entry
Red Son
Superman: Red Son 2020
It’s still been difficult to try and get back into any sort of normal rhythm for this site, but I haven’t yet abandoned it. In fact, the site reached a major milestone the other day. We’ve reached 1 million total views! Thanks everyone for the continued support and visits. As for new movies, it seems like it’s mostly streaming and home video, including the DC Animated movies. I’ve always been a fan of alternate realities/Elseworlds stories, especially when it comes to superheroes. These characters have been around long enough that their origin stories are going to be multiple choice anyway. Why not allow writers to take things into more extreme directions if it’s going to tell an interesting story rather than just a slightly different shade of the same thing over and over. This takes the Superman origin story and turns it on its head. It’s similar and yet very different from the Batman Elseworlds story Gotham by Gaslight, turning Superman into a very different character rather than just injecting him into a different setting.
Read the rest of this entry
Garfield’s Pet Force
Garfield’s Pet Force 2009
I was doing a random search on Netflix trying to find something that I hadn’t covered yet and didn’t have to pay for and one of the movies that came up was this straight-to-video kid’s movie. And one of the biggest selling points for me was that it was just over an hour long. Now, when I was a kid I liked Garfield pretty well, it was the era when Garfield and Friends played on TV and I typically watched it every time it was on, but ever since I was an adult and the seemingly awful live action Garfield movies came out, my opinion of Garfield has gone way down. So my expectations for this movie were pretty low. There was a small amount of interesting meta humor, but for the most part it was a pretty dull and uninteresting take on superheroes with Garfield characters, including several that I had never heard of before.
Read the rest of this entry
Over the Hedge
Over the Hedge 2006
I vaguely remember watching Over the Hedge back when it was relatively new. I don’t think I made it to theaters to watch it, but eventually after it came out on home video. I mostly remember the fact that it starred Bruce Willis and Garry Shandling as the two main characters and at some point I got an Over the Hedge comic strip collection. I’m also reviewing this in part for Movie Rob’s Genre Guesstimation where he tasked me with deciding the genre for him to examine during February. I chose animated comic book/comic strip adaptations and while I’ve pretty much covered every American animated comic book movie, I thought I’d expand things to cover this movie based on a comic strip. And unlike comic strips like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, or the Addams Family which are generally a series of stand-alone strips or panels, Over the Hedge is a serialized comic strip that you can read online here, which is close enough to a comic book for my purposes here on this site.
Read the rest of this entry
The Best of the Decade pt 1: Animation
It’s a new decade, so of course it’s time to look back at the previous decade and rank stuff. So here I am joining in by ranking the top movies that I cover here over the past ten years. And since I’m a big believer that comic book movies aren’t a genre, I’ve split the decade into six different categories and I’ll be sharing two top ten lists each week over the next three weeks. The two lists that I’m sharing today are both animation, but because of their massive output and similar quality across the board, DC Animation is given their own separate category. As for the other list, there is a mix of bigger budget theatrically released animated superhero movies as well as lower budget comic book movies. Enough chit chat, onto the lists!
Read the rest of this entry
Steven Universe the Movie
Steven Universe the Movie 2019
I’ve actually been a relatively big Steven Universe fan ever since I first saw a couple clips of the show at work and it was so weird that I had to watch the show to figure out what the heck was going on. As a show, the storytelling of it is that it gives you just a small bit of the show’s overall mythology in each episode so that you have to watch a lot to really understand what’s going on. But once you do watch it as a whole, there’s an extreme depth to the world of this show and a unique take for the entire concept of a hero. The movie extends that concept and creates this excuse to actually age Steven by a couple years, from a young teen to an older teen. It also takes music, which has been a staple of the show, and expands it into a full blown musical movie with many different songs in a relatively short run time. While none of the songs really connected with me, the spirit of the show definitely came through in the movie.
Read the rest of this entry
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 