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Veggietales: The League of Incredible Vegetables
Veggietales: The League of Incredible Vegetables 2012
Coming into the home stretch for this month of kids’ superhero movies is what is likely to be the youngest skewing movie I will ever cover on this site, unless I run out of other movies to review. I’m not interested in reviewing something intended for preschoolers like Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, but even this is probably stretching what passes for an actual movie. For one thing, it only runs for about 48 minutes: the length of an hour TV show minus commercials. The target audience is also for around 5-10 year olds, but that’s not too far from the target audience for other superhero shows like Superfriends. And also, it’s part of the dreaded Christian propaganda machine. Not that I have anything against Christians in general, I still vaguely consider myself to be one, but their idea of entertainment usually falls more on the side of being preachy than being entertaining. But I have had my experiences with Veggietales as both an uncle and a father so I more or less knew what I was getting into, and I have to admit that I do enjoy the sense of humor that goes into these films. It’s just that message crammed into the end that sours it a little for me.
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Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie
Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie 1997
When I was watching the original Power Rangers movie I was coming at it from a place of half-remembered nostalgia. Even though I didn’t remember it, I still remembered a large portion of the cast. And even though Turbo follows the format of the show much more closely, it suffered from a severe lack of fight scenes and had it even worse with the lack of connection or explanation of the new villainess. It served as essentially the pilot episode of the new season of the show as they transitioned out some more of the cast and a new set of costumes and robots likely pulled from a completely different Japanese series. And yet, even though it mirrored the actual television episodes more closely, it was even less satisfying than the first movie as an actual film.
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Filmwhys #69 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Wanted
The Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Kristina Dijan from Speakeasy who asks me why I hadn’t seen the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a captivating tale of suspense and suspicion from director John Huston and a rare villainous turn for Humphrey Bogart. In return, I ask her why she hadn’t seen Wanted, a visually impressive and violent comic book adaptation where people and cars do impossible things years before the Fast and the Furious franchise made them commonplace.
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Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie 1995
This is a film that I’m certain that I saw when I was younger, quite possibly in theaters. In fact as I was tweeting about this movie while watching it, my longtime friend reminded me that we actually watched it together back in ’95. I do remember watching those first few seasons of the Power Rangers, probably up until Amy Jo Johnson left as the Pink Ranger. But watching this movie again, on a DVD I rented from an actual video store no less, I remembered absolutely nothing about it. Not the villain aside from a few recent meme comparisons to the forthcoming Apocalypse, I didn’t even remember that three of the Rangers had been replaced. Heck, I didn’t even remember the name of the big red villain with the exposed brain and I’m pretty sure they never actually mentioned it during the entire course of the movie. It was essentially what I expected it to be: a bunch of cheesy one-liners with some 90’s teenage style and a little bit of good martial arts action mixed in.
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Sharkboy and Lavagirl
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D 2005
I’m continuing on in this month of kid’s superhero movies with probably the biggest one on the list in terms of the amount of people who are aware of this film, even though it’s not exactly thought of as a great movie. The story behind the film is that writer/producer/director/composer/all-around-filmmaker Robert Rodriguez decided that he wanted to make a film for his kids, specifically that he wanted to bring the characters created by his son Racer to life in this film. In fact, Racer even gets an official “Story by” credit in the film and the main character is named after Racer’s middle name. And as for the general conceit of this film, I’m generally a big fan of these types of dream worlds or fantasy worlds along the lines of Wonderland, Oz, and the like, but for many reasons I just didn’t care for this one at all. While it’s a nice legacy for Racer to have this physical incarnation of a story he thought up when he was around 6, it just doesn’t hold up as a very cohesive film.
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Justice League vs. Teen Titans
It’s time for another entry in the DC Animated canon and they are continuing their fairly recent connected universe of films that tie together Batman and Robin with the Justice League movies aside from Gods and Monsters. This film follows the recent trend of naming superhero films based on having the heroes fight each other. At least this time there’s an element of mind control rather than a difference in ideology. As for my own experience with the Teen Titans themselves, I’ve seen a few episodes of Teen Titans, plenty of Teen Titans Go, but I’ve only seen the Blue Beetle in a single episode of Batman: Brave and the Bold. It felt like an odd fit considering that in the universe of this story, the Justice League is still quite young but the Teen Titans is already established. Though it does seem to be even newer than the Justice League. But aside from the specifics, this is a much better tone than the live action DC Universe and aside from a few minor nitpicks, I enjoyed the hell out of this one.
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Filmwhys #68 Grave of the Fireflies and Gotham Knight
Episode 68 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Andrew Robinson from G-Man Reviews who asks me why I hadn’t seen Grave of the Fireflies, one of the greatest war movies of all time and one of the best Studio Ghibli anime not directed by Hayao Miyazaki. And in return, I ask him why he hadn’t seen Gotham Knight, a more experimental anime anthology featuring Batman and stories that took place in between Batman Begins and the Dark Knight.
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Super Capers
Super Capers 2009
Another month has come and gone and after going through last month watching fewer horror movies than I had hoped, I’m moving on to yet another themed month. For the month of April, I decided that I want to get some of the bad movies out of the way, specifically many of the awful looking superhero movies geared towards kids, some that I grew up with and others that I’ve never seen and never really wanted to see. To kick things off, I decided to watch this parody kids movie from 2009 called Super Capers and starring the perennial teen star who would go on to do nothing of note and this was actually one of the last few movies that he worked on before disappearing off the Hollywood planet. The film itself is actually more like a superhero parody film along the lines of Superhero Movie. It has a handful of good jokes, but it’s underscored by way too many cartoonish sound effects that hamper the humor rather than enhance it. And while it has an interesting cast, the actual characters are generally one dimensional punchlines and those punchlines aren’t all that great. It was a bit better than I was expecting it to be, but it’s still a far cry from a good movie.
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Filmwhys Casting Call for Fans of Obscure & Unloved Superhero Movies
Hello fellow superhero movie fans! I’m beginning a new series of Filmwhys Extra podcast episodes and I am looking for guests. Each episode of this series will take a look at a single superhero movie through the eyes of the fans that love it. Now, this would be an easy thing to do for films like Iron Man, Spider-Man, or the Dark Knight. No, what I am aiming for are the more obscure and cult films like Griff the Invisible, Tank Girl, or Sky High. That as well as the films that aren’t typically well regarded by movie fans like the Fantastic Four, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Supergirl, or Daredevil. I’m currently building a guest list and hope to record and post the first episode by the end of April. What I’m looking for are people, preferably with some podcasting experience or at least a microphone that’s not embedded into a laptop who want to talk about one of these films. Once I get around to one of those movies, I will start contacting guests to set up recording times, generally no longer than 15-20 minutes. I would especially like to include as many female voices as I can since it often feels like podcasting is dominated by male voices. If you are interested, leave a comment below mentioning what film or films you would be interested in discussing, or you can e-mail me at Bubbawheat@msn.com, and please share this post with anyone you know who might be interested in joining as well.
Batman vs. Superman
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
In the past couple years there hasn’t been many other films that have had the amount of buzz and hype that this film has had next to Star Wars and Civil War. And once the early reviews hit, they hit pretty hard. So even though I technically saw this film on opening day, I went in with a whole lot of trepidation. As far as my history with Zack Snyder, I’m generally more in favor of his films than against. While I haven’t seen his first feature film, Dawn of the Dead, I have enjoyed more than I haven’t. In fact the only film of his that I’ve actively disliked was Sucker Punch. And while Batman vs. Superman is weighed down by some of his shortcomings, there was enough mystery and nuance to the film that I enjoyed seeing where it was going. It mainly suffered from two things: it constantly mired itself in artistic flourishes to make it feel like it’s tackling serious topics rather than two guys in costumes fighting each other, and like Age of Ultron it had to spend a lot of time making it known that there’s connective tissue linking it to other films coming in the future. Finally, as is usually the case there may be spoilers ahead so tread carefully if you are worried about that sort of thing.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 