Blog Archives
Follow Friday: The Smoking Pen
Welcome to another edition of Follow Friday where I take a look at a great movie blogger that you should check out too. I prefer this over a blogroll because it gives each blog their own time to shine, plus I personally rarely click on blogrolls so why would I expect you to? Not only that, but I get the chance to check out some great blogs I might not have found otherwise found, talk to some great people, and share the conversation with you. So this week I was directed by filmsRruss to check out a blog dedicated to action movies, guns, and all things badass, which does include quite a bit of coarse language, and so does this post FYI. I’m talking about The Smoking Pen.
Avengers Redux, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Try the Theater
It may sound odd, but I haven’t been to a theater in about four years. The last movie I remember seeing was Wall*E, back when Jena was too young to really enjoy or remember it, shortly afterwards we ran into some major money troubles and have only recently gotten to the point where I think we’ve just about fully recovered. I was originally going to title this blog “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Theater” so that should give you a little preview of how things went. We went down to the local AMC twelve screen, the only theater in our relatively small midwest town outside of a single screen theater that shows mostly independent movies so we could watch the Avengers.
Follow Friday: filmsRruss
Welcome to another edition of Follow Friday where I take a look at a great movie blogger that you should check out too. I prefer this over a blogroll because it gives each blog their own time to shine, plus I personally rarely click on blogrolls so why would I expect you to? Not only that, but I get the chance to check out some great blogs I might not have found otherwise found, talk to some great people, and share the conversation with you. So this week I was directed by At The Back to check out a blog I’ve visited before, and even received an award from, filmsRruss.
My history with comic books
It may seem odd for someone to start up a site about superhero movies without having a strong connection to comic books. The two things go hand in hand as the superhero genre started with comic books, almost all superhero films are adapted from comic books, and those that aren’t often become comic books after the fact. But I’ve said from the beginning that I’m not a huge comic book fan, I haven’t read dozens of X-men or Superman comics. In fact I can count the number of comics of either of those two that I’ve read on one hand. But that’s not to say I’ve never read any comic books. I’ve read a few, I own a few, and here is where you can get pretty much my entire experience with comics.
Follow Friday: At the Back
Welcome to the first weekly edition of Follow Fridays. I decided to do a Follow Friday for a couple reasons, one: I never click on anyone’s blogrolls, and two: I think my blogroll widget did something to cause my posts to miss their schedules. I also liked the way that both the Lamb and Fog’s Movie Reviews feature other blogs in their own post rather than just an easily overlooked sidebar. Now of course, I couldn’t just steal another idea without adding my own little spin to it, so I decided to carry on my Superhero Shorts idea of interviewing the creators of the blogs I feature, and let them choose the blog to feature for next Friday. And my first pick goes to At The Back.
How I feel about spoilers
There’s not a whole lot that can really be contentious in a review situation. There can be disagreements on how good one movie or another is, but in the end, it’s all personal opinion and everyone is entitled to have their own opinion of a movie whether it’s good or bad. But there is one other thing that some reviews include that many people complain should not be included in a review as it may “ruin” the entire moviegoing experience and that my friend, is the spoiler. A twist, a death, a revelation, a relationship, a sled, they can all fall into the category of a spoiler in someone’s eye, but does it really hurt if a review includes a spoiler? If you found out, and I haven’t seen the movie yet or read any spoiler-filled reviews so this is completely made up, if you found out that in The Avengers that Black Widow died in the movie before seeing it how would it really impact your viewing of the movie? I think I would still enjoy the movie just as much if I had gone in ignorant.
Five by Five? Try Seven by Seven
First off, I’d like to say thanks to FilmsRruss for picking me along with six other blogs to share with his readers in the blog meme “7×7 link award”. I apologize to him in advance if this post comes off as insincere, but I just don’t look at these chain letter awards the same way I used to. I honestly do appreciate the fact that another blog likes this one enough to share it with their readers, but I don’t buy into the whole “award” mentality that it’s supposed to give off. That said, I decided to not just follow along with the basics of it and decided to go on a blog journey. Everyone who got the award would mention who gave it to them, so I went backwards through the links to see if I could get to the origin of this award.
Will the Avengers be an origin movie?
It’s the middle of April and I want to take a quick moment here at the beginning of this post to say thanks. Thank you to everyone that’s been visiting and commenting on my site. I’ve tried to put a lot of work into this and seeing the site grow makes me very happy. I’d love to hear feedback on what you like, what you don’t like, and any ideas of what you’d like to see more of. I’m looking forward to getting ready for the Avengers next month and re-watching all the lead up movies including the only one I haven’t seen before, Iron Man 2. I could also use some help coming up with names, should this Tuesday blog post have a name? I’m also not sold on “Superhero Shorts” mainly because I most enjoy the interview part of the article, and “Superhero Shorts” does not convey the idea of an interview. I also love hearing suggestions on what I should watch next, got any ideas? Leave a comment, let me know what I should watch after the Avengers and before I start prepping for the new Spiderman. Speaking of which, that brings me to today’s blog topic, do we need more origin stories?
Why are there so many bad superhero movies?
I’ve gone back and forth so many times trying to figure out what to write this week. I’ve thought about writing on The Avengers, origins, sequels, and probably a half dozen topics that I’ve since forgotten about. I finally settled on this topic, why are there so many bad superhero movies? There are lots of great superhero comic books, and comic books are a visual medium, so you would think that moving from one visual medium to another would be easier than say adapting a novel, right? And yet it was so easy to come up with a list of the 33 worst superhero movies, and I can probably think of a dozen high profile movies that didn’t even make that list. The number of really great superhero movies, there are probably only a couple dozen or so, and many of those have only been made in the past few years.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 