Blog Archives
Superhero Shorts: Babble-On Begins
Welcome to the first in a series where I take a closer look at what is often the unsung heroes of the superhero genre, the short film makers. In the world of YouTube and affordable, portable, high-quality cameras, it’s extremely easy to make a short film, and put it out there for everyone to see. And yet it’s become that much more difficult to get yours noticed due to the sheer volume of work out there. In this series I’ll be taking a look at the popular ones, the good ones, and maybe even some that you’ve never seen. Most of them will be parodies or comedies because it’s easier to pull off a joke on a low budget and still get a laugh than to pull off something serious on a low budget and not get a laugh. Today I’ll be looking at a video that just came out this past week. It may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an origin story, but it does feature a couple superheroes. Babble-On Begins, Episode 1 which you can watch right below.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time 1993
It’s Thursday night, and we’re halfway through our stack of movies from the rental store. All that’s left is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Jena was ready to watch this one and enjoyed it a lot. I fell asleep during the last 20 minutes of it and had to rewatch it a few days later. This movie was tough to really figure out what they were trying for, it seemed like it was pulling itself in too many directions. It felt like it was trying to be more dramatic, and yet it also seemed a lot more childish and cartoonish in its humor. The nostalgia definitely wore off on me by this point, as I found the jokes to be less funny, and a lot of the action to be less interesting. But there were still a few spots of fun to be had here.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze 1991
It’s Wednesday night, we had just watched the first live action Ninja Turtle movie the night before and I thought it would be easy to get Jena interested in watching the next movie in the series, The Secret of the Ooze. And at first she seemed really into it, but about halfway through the movie she lost interest, and then towards the end we convinced her to come back to finish the movie with us. Like before, she liked all the fighting and overall thought the movie was “great”, her favorite turtle was “the red one” also known as Raphael. Compared to the first movie, I thought the fights were much better, I could tell that it had a larger budget, though I wasn’t quite as fond of all the humor in this movie, especially the Vanilla Ice cameo. Maybe the nostalgia is starting to wear off. I imagine it will be almost completely gone by the time I finish the last movie.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1990
It’s Tuesday night and our stack of movies from the video store is not getting any smaller so I decided it was time to put in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live action movie. I have seen all three turtles movies when they first came out, probably in theaters but I don’t remember for sure. I had also watched and loved the cartoon series, so the worse parts of this movie may very well get glossed over with nostalgia, just a fair warning to anyone looking for a hard hitting review. And this movie has a lot of nostalgia and some surprises to my less than stellar memory. It’s a lot more violent than you may first expect, but it still has a lot of that late 80’s and early 90’s style humor.
Bolt
Bolt 2008
It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m looking forward to catching up on my movies… well not technically catching up, but getting back to being ahead of schedule. And what better way to do that than with a bunch of movies that I can watch with my daughter. A lot of last month’s movies were rated R so I had to find a time to watch them when Jena wasn’t around. I also don’t have any specific schedule so it’s just whichever movie she is more willing to watch at the time, and tonight it was Bolt. She’s been watching it a few times last week, but I haven’t had the chance to watch it with her until now. It’s not exatcly what many people would think of when they think of a superhero. One one level it’s an animated kids cat and dog movie where they travel across the country to get back to their home. Based on that it sounds more like Homeward Bound than Krypto the Superdog. But it’s a totally fun movie with a good mix of action, comedy, and heart. And Jena absolutely loves the entire movie from start to finish. The entire rest of the day she was talking about Bolt and Penny.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 2012
So once again, I’m watching a movie late into the night just before my own personal deadline of midnight Eastern time. Hopefully it’s the last time for a while since I’ll be getting back to two movies a week instead of three. Anyway, I spent this evening watching the new Ghost Rider movie and let me tell you, I’m not even sure where to begin. It was something else that’s for sure.
So anyway, this movie takes place what seems like a few years after the first movie, and it has a little animated recap of what the Ghost Rider is and how Johnny Blaze came to gain the rider’s curse. They have a brief mention about how he thought he could control the curse which was how the first movie ended. He had the chance to close the deal and become a normal human again, but instead he chose to keep his curse and try to use it to do good. Apparently that didn’t work and now he wants to get rid of it again. And don’t you know, there’s a black French guy that tells him he knows some religious guys that can get rid of it for him. Of course, that’s not the whole story, apparently there’s also a half devil kid that’s set to bring on the apocalypse or something along those lines. But it’s all good.
Blade: House of Chthon
Blade: House of Chthon 2006
It’s not looking like I’m going to get around to watching the new Ghost Rider anytime soon, so instead I decided to check out something else that I hadn’t seen before. When I bought the Blade series on DVD it wasn’t just a trilogy, it was four movies. The extra movie at the end was the TV movie slash pilot episode of the short lived television series on Spike TV. Blade: House of Chthon. My wife and I were both curious about it so we decided to pop it in and check it out. Long story short, I can see why the show didn’t make it past its first season.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 