Blog Archives
Superhero Podcast Review: Jake and Tom Conquer the World
While I haven’t been watching as many movies lately, I’m still listening to just as many podcasts and finding new ones all the time. This is another case where I did a #PodernFamily search to see what came up, though I’ve interacted quite a few times with these guys on twitter before giving them a listen. It’s another instance where it’s a bit of a stretch to call them a “superhero podcast” but comics and superheroes appeared to be a significant part of at least half of their episodes so I went with it. And again, if you run or listen to a superhero podcast that I haven’t reviewed here yet, I’d love it if you shared it with me to review in a future installment with my grading of: Subscribe, Unsubscribe, or Selected Episodes. On to the review!
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Spaghettiman
Spaghettiman 2016
You’d think that when I told you that there’s a movie about a guy who develops incredibly weird super powers and is a bit of a schlubby roommate with his overweight friend that it’s also a movie unlike anything else I’ve seen. But when it comes to this site and the amount of indie movies I’ve seen, there are actually quite a few bizarre similarities. This is not the only movie I’ve seen where the hero as a main character has the power to shoot food out of his hands. This also isn’t the only low budget movie involving superheroes where two friends and roommates have a friendly-yet-contentious relationship with each other. This isn’t even the only movie I’ve seen that seems to have chosen a random word out of the dictionary and added “man” to the end. The point is, I’ve seen quite a few of these movies, and I’m not trying to say that any of them are copying off each other, I highly doubt that any two projects had ever even heard of each other. But I have, and when looking at them comparatively, this ends up falling somewhere in the middle of these quirky, low budget, superhero movie concepts.
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Filmwhys #77 Monster Squad and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
The Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Nolahn from The Lair of the Unwanted who asks me why I hadn’t seen Monster Squad, an 80’s family horror movie that’s somewhere along the lines of the Goonies meet the Universal Horror monsters. And in return, I ask him why he hadn’t seen Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the first animated Batman movie spun off of the successful animated series and some could say the best Batman film of all time. You can also find Nolahn’s book: The Bargain Bin Review on Amazon.
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FTMN Quickie: X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Rogue Cut
X-Men: Days of Future Past: The Rogue Cut 2015
While I haven’t made the time to watch the extended version of Batman vs Superman, I did manage to snag a copy of the Rogue Cut of Days of Future Past that I’ve been curious about ever since it was announced almost two years ago. Rogue has always been one of my favorite characters and I really enjoyed Days of Future Past so I was curious how much of an impact this change would have to the movie. I will say that ultimately it doesn’t make a significant impact in the overall story, there are a few scenes here and there and a couple extra jokes laced with some profanity that would have pushed the theatrical version just over the PG-13 limit, they don’t make a difference in the overall narrative, but it does answer just a few extra questions.
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Superhero Podcast Review: 3 Geeks Podcast
Welcome back to another round of my superhero podcast reviews. I’ve run out of suggestions and decided to pick one out of the hat using the hashtag #PodernFamily and picking the first podcast that came up that seemed to have a superhero angle to it. If you have any suggestions for a superhero podcast that you run or listen to, I’d love to hear it. There are a ton of superhero podcasts out there, but it feels a little weird to just pick one at random to review and give one of my three ratings to: Subscribed, Selected Episodes, or Unsubsribed. But anyway, here we go with today’s podcast.
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Filmwhys #76 Before Sunset and Moonwalker
The Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Tim Costa from First Time Watchers who asks me why I hadn’t seen Before Sunset, the second film in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy which is just about to be inaugurated into the Criterion Collection and in return I ask him why he hadn’t seen Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, mostly a collection of music videos and performances from the height of his fame with the barest hint of a superhero story involving Joe Pesci and some kids buried in the middle.
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Doomed!
Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four 2016
In the superhero movie world there’s one big secret out there that’s very poorly kept, the fact that there was a Fantastic Four movie fully produced, completed, and then shelved never to be released back in 1994. It’s also fairly widely known to those with any hint of an interest that the film was made merely to extend a deadline for the filmmaking rights to the characters. The only problem was that everyone below the line was never aware of this, from the director to the actors, and all of the crew. This documentary tries to tell the rest of their story and is able to fill in quite a few gaps in this story, though the entirety may never be fully known since the executives who know the other side of the story aren’t exactly keen on sharing. But regardless, this doc paints a fascinating picture through the eyes of people who were passionate about making this little movie that could despite a low budget, a rushed schedule, and a practically non-existent post production. This is an early review and the film will be released digitally on October 11th and available on Blu-Ray and DVD on December 20th through distribution by Uncork’d Entertainment.
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Electra Woman and Dyna Girl
Electra Woman and Dyna Girl 2016
It’s time for me to take a look at yet another movie that came out earlier this year. This film was very loosely based on the 70’s kid show of the same name produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. In fact, they are also producers on this movie, which is a little surprising considering some of the much more adult directions they go to in this. There’s some crass humor and occasional moments of gore even though they’re played up as a joke. It follows a bit of a cliched formula, but at the same time it comments on those same cliches in a similar way that Deadpool did, but not nearly as successfully. There were some fun moments here and there, but the tone felt off and the jokes about the cliched story weren’t quite enough to distract from the actual cliches.
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Hero of the Year
DC Superhero Girls: Hero of the Year 2016
This is the first feature length movie based on the initiative that DC has started about a year ago that combines toys, a webseries, and comics that are targeted towards girls rather than boys. And since there isn’t a large enough roster of notable women superheroes in the DC universe, they add in a handful of villains into the mix to make up the full slate. One of the biggest issues that I had with the webseries was that it focused too much on the girly aspects of the concept and not enough of the superheroism, this film is much closer to the right balance with a fair amount of action, humor, and friendship without spending too much time on makeovers and costume designing.
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Zoom
Zoom 2016
This year has been an interesting one, I’ve discovered and watched more films in the past month or two than I ever anticipated coming out this year with a few more to come. This film is one of the few that found its way to me via the PR department which suggested that I watch the film via the site We Are Colony. This film is one of the few where I do stretch the definition of a “comic book movie” to include movies about comic books themselves. The comic book in question is written by Allison Pill’s character and also plays a large part of the movie via animation. I wasn’t exactly sure where this film was going, and there is one major component of the story that’s easily spoiled, and is in much of the advertising for the film but is actually better if you’re unaware of it for the first watch. There’s a lot of humor, a lot of sex and nudity without having a lot of actual nudity, and it has an interesting concept that can be surprising, but I will be spoiling in this review. One final note about We Are Colony’s site, it unfortunately wasn’t a great experience for actually watching the movie without a solid high speed internet connection, there’s very little buffering allowed and there’s no option to lower the video quality – or if there is, it’s not easily found. So trying to watch this movie with a spotty internet was more of a pain than it should have been.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 