Blog Archives

Ultimate Avengers 2

Ultimate Avengers 2 2006

While I’m still moving at a bit slower pace than I planned to, I’m still moving through the animated Avengers movies before writing down a full fledged review for Age of Ultron, though if you can’t wait to hear my thoughts I was on a recent Lambcast where I discussed it with several other Lamb members. The sequel to the animated Ultimate Avengers brings back the entire cast along with newcomer Black Panther. The sequel tries to amp up the action, the danger, and the consequences but it’s difficult to do with the way this cast of characters is portrayed. It doesn’t help that the Chitauri aliens aren’t any more interesting than they were in the first film. The result it a lot of the same old same old that just doesn’t have a big payoff at the end. There’s nothing terribly wrong with this film, but it doesn’t do anything new, fresh, or exciting throughout its entire runtime.
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Ultimate Avengers

Ultimate Avengers 2006

With the popularity of my one-sentence review of Age of Ultron, I decided that I would leave you hanging a bit more and bide my time to give my full thoughts on the latest Avengers movie. Also, since I didn’t cover quite as many animated films last month, I thought I would instead take a look at the other animated Avengers movies that came out before even the first Iron Man movie when Marvel was working with Lion’s Gate to produce a series of animated films which would later tie-in with some of the live action movies. But they actually went the opposite route and began with the big team-up film instead of giving everyone their own separate introduction. It was based on the Ultimates universe and while it does share quite a few things with the Cinematic Universe, there are plenty of departures as well. It has been years since I’ve watched this, and I’m a little sad to say that it doesn’t hold up, especially after seeing them all realized so much better in the flesh, or at least most of them.
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Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron 2015

It was alright. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

C2E2 photo gallery

C2E2 Days 2 & 3

C2E2 is already over and it’s been a long weekend. I’m going to be combining my details of days 2 & 3 into a single post for a couple reasons, first is that I did not get home from day 2 until rather late at night and I basically went straight to sleep, and second is that I did not spend very much time on day 3 so there’s not too much to report there. Overall, it was a lot of fun. I’ve got tons of pictures which will show up as their own post tomorrow and I’ve got a little video project that I’m working on and hope to finish within the next few days so I’m excited about that. Enough chat, let’s get onto the show!
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Men in Black

Men in Black 1997

I’m down to the last few films left on my 100 Essential Superhero Movies list and the perfect excuse came for me to revisit the Men in Black trilogy when I was offered to guest on the As You Watch Podcast. Or you could say, offered to make my triumphant return considering that I am one of the founding members of the podcast. But as for the movie, I initially questioned whether or not to even classify Men in Black as a superhero movie vs. a comic book movie, considering the fact that it is based on an indie comic book that was later published under the Marvel label before the movie was made. It does follow enough of my own qualifications for me to include it: It’s set in the modern day, the heroes have superhuman abilities via the alien technology, they also have a costume of sorts, they also have a secret identity of sorts considering that they lose their normal identity when joining, and they are fighting something that is superhuman. I’m certain that I had seen this in theaters back when it was released and the song is ubiquitous with the movie as well. It was a lot of fun revisiting this film even though there were a few moments that definitely felt a bit dated this time around.
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Men in Black II

Men in Black II 2002

The way it tends to go with superhero movie sequels is that the first movie is good, the second movie is better, and the third movie is where it all goes to hell. Men in Black surprisingly bucks that trend and instead goes to crap in the first sequel only to redeem itself in the third. It doesn’t help that there is quite a bit of time between the three films. Five years have passed since the first Men in Black and they wrote out what made the original so great: the chemistry between Will Smith’s and Tommy Lee Jones’ Agents J and K. In a lot of ways, this sequel felt like the writers just wanted to recapture what made the first one so great and thought that the best way to do that was to just recreate all the elements of the first film that worked instead of expanding on them. And except for a brief moment here and there, it does not work for me at all. And somewhat surprisingly, even though I did watch all three films in order, it was just so much easier to pick out all of the flaws in this movie rather than try to determine what exactly it is about the first movie that makes it so great.
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Elektra

Elektra 2005

After the moderate success of Daredevil, Fox decided that instead of going ahead with a sequel they would instead make a spin-off movie based on what they thought was the most successful part of Daredevil, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra. Here, she is a full-on assassin who ends up caring about her next targets and decides to save them from the evil clan of ninjas called the Hand, she eventually battles against a group of supernaturally powered ninjas while protecting the treasure, which is similar in nature to the key from Buffy. And while Daredevil is considered a bad to ok movie with an ok to good director’s cut, Elektra is pretty much considered on of the many bad movies with a female superhero as the lead and performed dismally at the box office. I vaguely remember watching this in theaters when it came out because I was (and still am) a fan of the Daredevil movie and enjoyed it at the time. However there is probably a reason why I waited so long to revisit this movie as it did not hold up to my memory at all. I am now in agreement that this is a pretty awful movie with a small handful of redeeming qualities to it. I’m also not sure if an R-rated director’s cut could help redeem it in the same way that Daredevil’s did, nor do I think anyone is really clamoring for one.
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Big Hero 6

Big Hero 6 2014

Even though this was the last big superhero movie of 2014 that I had been looking forward to, the biggest reason why I wanted to see this movie in theaters is because of my daughter Jena and her 8th birthday this Saturday, November 8th. So that was the mindset I was in when I made it to the theaters to watch this latest Disney animated movie. In fact, I realized that even though I’ve had a pretty poor theatrical track record for the past several years, I had seen every Disney Animated movie in theaters since Wreck-it Ralph a couple years ago. There has become a finer line between the Disney animation studios, as the quality and subject matter between Disney Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and to a lesser extent the DisneyToon Studios with the likes of Wreck-it Ralph and Frozen being as good or better than Monsters University or Brave. So I was hopeful that the trend would continue with the first animated collaboration between Marvel and Disney. I have seen most of Marvel’s previous animated works and they were nothing special, and even though this movie doesn’t have any connection with the live action Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was still very excited to see it based on the trailers. I was hoping for a lot of laughs, a lot of action, and I had already heard that it had a lot of heart, and that’s exactly what I got from it. It’s true that it was fairly predictable even when it was trying to throw some twists out there, but it was still done well enough that I didn’t much care and just enjoyed the ride. Not only that, but Jena was there and completely on board for the whole ride as well. And as always here, I will be discussing the movie as a whole including any plot twists and reveals, so spoilers have been warned.
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Filmwhys #40 Modern Times and Elektra

Episode 40 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Adam Portrais of the Hero Movie Podcast who is also a big superhero movie fan and discusses one each week on his own podcast. But he’s also a classic film fan and asks me why I haven’t seen Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last silent hurrah featuring his Little Tramp character at the end of the silent film era. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen Elektra, the less interesting Daredevil spinoff and one of the very few superhero movies featuring a female protagonist.
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