Blog Archives

The CK’s Not-So-Secret-Santa Review Swap

There’s a blogathon that was started over at The Cinematic Katzenjammer in July called the Not-So-Secret-Santa Review Swap, I didn’t get around to joining it back then, but when it came up again here for Christmastime, it sounded like an interesting change of pace. Considering that my site isn’t exactly the best place to showcase the movie I received as my “gift”, Love Actually, I considered hosting it there, but instead what I will do is also point out some of the review gifts related to my site like Dredd, including the one I handed out, Bounty Killer. I hadn’t heard very much about my movie, Love Actually, before this year where it seems to have exploded into my own blog feed with equal parts of love and hate over the movie. It’s a very unusual type of movie, it interweaves many different stories about love, set at Christmastime, and it is not a family film by any stretch of the imagination with plenty of swearing and some nudity. There’s a couple different ways to look at what the film is trying to do which is probably colored by what you ultimately think of the film as a whole. It is a look at many different types of love and relationships, but it also includes several unhealthy relationships. The stories are all generally separate from each other, but they are also connected in several different ways. It’s a very atypical holiday movie, and yet it ends with everything coming together the same way every other holiday movie does. And which side of the fence am I on? Personally, I didn’t care for it very much.
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Special

Special 2006

It’s time once again for me to tackle this month’s obstruction for the 5 Obstructions Blogathon hosted by My Films Views. This month’s obstruction was deceptively simple: write a review that’s more than 1,250 words long, and if you want to go the extra mile write a review that’s over 2,000 words long. I try to average my reviews at about 1,000 words, I personally feel like if they’re much longer than that they are being too wordy and also fewer people want to read overly long reviews. I also thought about using this to go off on a bad movie, which is often easier to write about than a good movie. Instead I decided to take a closer look at a movie fewer people will have seen. I hope you enjoy and also be sure to check out some of the other entries in the blogathon.
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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.
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5 Obstructions #1: Batman & Robin

Obstruction #1: Write a good review of a bad movie

When I saw this blogathon I immediately thought it was a great idea, in fact, I even had the idea for the first “obstruction” a while back. For full details, check out the overview post over at Nostra’s My Film Views. But basically the idea is five writing challenges inspired by a movie that challenged the filmmaker to make the same movie five different times, each time with a different challenge, or obstruction. For the first obstruction, I figured I could easily find a bad movie that I’ve seen recently and I decided to make that challenge into a “sell out” review. That is to say I am writing this review as if I had been paid by the filmmakers to give it a good review, and I figured the best place to use that marketing double-speak is for the film Batman and Robin. Enjoy.
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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon: Uma Thurman

Uma Thurman Double Dip
G Girl / Poison Ivy

It’s been a fun trip through my first blogathon and we’re down to the last week and this will be my own last entry. There were several posts this week and a few more to go to finish out the week. Thanks everyone who participated, I enjoyed reading all of them! For my last entry I chose an actress who I just watched onscreen in one of these two roles, I’ll leave you to (easily) guess which one. I’m talking about Uma Thurman who played Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin, as well as G Girl in My Super Ex-Girlfriend.

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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon: James Marsden

James Marsden Double Dip
Cyclops / Richard White

There’s still a couple more weeks left in this blogathon before I call it to a close and I’d say it was pretty good for my first one. If you haven’t done your article yet, be sure to get it in. There were another two entries these past couple weeks so head over to the blogathon main page to go see them. For my third entry in this blogathon I chose another member of the X-Men who followed Byran Singer to his other superhero project and played both Cyclops and Richard White. I’m talking about James Marsden.

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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon: Halle Berry

Halle Berry Double Dip
Catwoman / Storm

I’d like to thank everyone for their support so far in my first blogathon, it’s going at a nice steady pace and I hope it keeps up through the next four weeks through to the end. We’ve got two new entries this past week so be sure to check out the blogathon main page to go see them, and there’s still plenty of room and time to sign up for the blogathon yourself. But as for my own entry this week, I went with one on the lower end of the spectrum, considering one of the roles is in what’s often considered the worst comic book movie of all time, I’m talking about Halle Berry who starred in the pseudo-Batman spinoff Catwoman, and also played a small-yet-ever-growing role as Storm in the X-Men series.

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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon: Nathan Fillion

Nathan Fillion Double Dip

Captain Hammer / Steve Trevor

Welcome to my first blogathon! In case you haven’t heard, I’m hosting my first blogathon, called the Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon. There’s still plenty of spots left so feel free to check out the full list and sign up! So here I am today with my first entry into my own Blogathon, my Comic Strip Double Dip offender today is Nathan Fillion who played both the clueless hero Captain Hammer in Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog as well as the voice of the womanizing Steve Trevor in DC Animation’s Wonder Woman. I’ll be taking a look at both of these movies and both of the roles and see how they compare to each other, and which one is worth seeing.

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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon

Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of a blogathon, but for the longest time couldn’t come up with an idea interesting enough for one. But now I think I’ve got it, so here I am with the Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon. The idea of the blogathon is based around actors who have appeared in more than one superhero or comic book movie as different roles. The easiest ones to point out are Chris Evans who played one of the leads as one of the Fantastic Four, and then several years later snagged the lead as Captain America. And there’s also Ryan Reynolds who didn’t play a great version of a favorite Marvel anti-hero Deadpool and then went and didn’t play a great version of a favorite DC hero the Green Lantern. There are many of these roles out there, and I’ve collected as many as I could find and listed them below.

Blogathon
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My Movie Confessions

Before I get to my confessional post, I’d like to mention that I’m in the process of putting together a podcast. I will do my best to bring the superhero love when and where I can, but I thought it would be easiest to round up some other movie bloggers to have a general movie podcast. As of right now, it seems to be between me, Nick over at Cinematic Katzenjammer, Joe over at Two Dude Review, and Vern over at The Vern’s Videovangaurd, with a couple others possibly joining up. We’re all fairly new to the podcasting game, so we’re taking it slow. I hope to have the first episode up by the middle of August and will be trying for a new episode every two weeks at first. As for today’s post, I’ve had a few ideas rolling around in my head, I know I want to do a post about the actors who double dip in the superhero pool, but I haven’t done the planning needed for that one yet. In the end, I took the easy way out and joined a fun little blogathon headed up by Nostra of My Film Views called Movie Confessions. I figured that I ask so many questions of others, it’s time to answer a few myself.

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