Blog Archives
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014
This year is reminding myself of how much different the superhero movie schedule is compared to last year when there were about a dozen movies packed between the end of May and the middle of August, while this year has the movies much more spread out closer to one every month with Captain America kicking off the more traditional superhero fare as early as April (as opposed to the few comic book movies like 300 & I, Frankenstein and the few movies with a less direct superhero connection like Robocop and the Lego Movie) and yet this is also more of a far cry from a traditional superhero plot and instead feels much more like a conspiracy thriller along the lines of a dozen or so great movies whose names I can’t recall at the moment. There’s also a bit more of Captain America adjusting to life in the 21st century which I have been wanting to see ever since the first movie. In short, I loved every minute of it. Also, as a warning, I don’t always tread lightly around spoilers, though most of the spoilers I already knew or assumed before seeing the movie.
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Filmwhys Raw #6 Play Ball!
Episode 6 of Filmwhys Raw where my guests are John LaRue from The Droid You’re Looking For and Todd Leibenow from Forgotten Films, and this was my chance to participate in Todd’s blogathon going on right now, the Big League Blogathon and since it was difficult to fit a baseball movie into the focus of my superhero site, I decided that we would spend this podcast talking about any and all things related to baseball in the movies.
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Graphic Horror: 30 Days of Night
30 Days of Night 2007
This Graphic (Novel) Horror blogathon is coming to a close and I’m finally coming around to one of the movies that first came to mind when I was thinking about movies that I should cover. I saw it back when it was still fairly new and quite enjoyed it, but hadn’t seen it since then and have never seen the sequel. I always thought it was an interesting concept for a vampire movie. One of the vampire’s biggest weaknesses was the fact that they couldn’t be out in the sunlight, but in the Arctic Circle there’s a full 30 days of night without any sun, not only that but according to this story the town basically cuts itself off from any other town South of it for the duration of the darkest part of winter so this clan of vampires can essentially feed at will for a full month without any fear of being discovered and stopped by a larger force from outside of town. There are also plenty of great visuals along the way that really had a graphic novel feel to them, whether or not they were actually taken from the pages of the original comic.
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Superhero Shorts: Resignation
Welcome back to another Superhero Shorts where I feature a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions from its creator. This time around I’m talking with Joshua Caldwell, director of a multimedia web short called Resignation about a very well known superhero who decides to walk away from the responsibilities shouldered upon his hero persona and instead sit back and let the events unfold around him, no matter what the outcome may be. You can watch Caldwell’s director’s reel below, or visit ResignationSuperhero.com to get the full multimedia experience of the Resignation short film. You can also visit his blog Hollywood Bound And Down for more information on Joshua and his podcast.
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Graphic Horror: Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight
Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight 1995
The Graphic (Novel) Horror blogathon is coming to a close, but not before I manage to eke out a couple more horror movies here in March. Also, if you haven’t checked the main page for the blogathon recently, there are a couple updates with folks out on different blogs who have contributed their own articles so be sure to check them out. I was a big fan of the television show Tales From the Crypt, and even though it was around the time when this movie came out, I probably didn’t catch it in theaters, instead finding it when it came to home video and agreeing with the general consensus that the movie wasn’t nearly as good as most of the episodes made for HBO. I especially found it interesting in this viewing that I had a hard time finding good screenshots to take as there is rarely anything interesting happening on screen and the creature effects are mediocre at best. The movie eschews the show’s typical morbid twist and instead relies on a macabre fantasy/action plot with demons and a fun wraparound with the Cryptkeeper tying it in with the television show. There are moments of fun in this movie but they are few and far between.
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300: Rise of an Empire
300: Rise of an Empire
I was originally going to wait until this came out on home video, but I recently got the opportunity to go to a Winter Soldier pre-screening event. As this was the first time showing up to one of these events I thought that an hour and a half early would be enough time to be able to get into the showing. Unfortunately I was wrong, by well over 50 people wrong. Not only that, but the theater wasn’t doing a very good job at communicating how many people actually were in the line ahead of us and it wasn’t until about 10 minutes before the showing was supposed to start when they finally came to us near the back of the line and told us the bad news and offered us tickets to any other movie showing at the theater. Luckily there was a screening of 300 starting right at that exact moment so that’s what I went with. So on top of seeing an underwhelming movie, it also has the detriment of being the movie that I had to see instead of Captain America 2. I was a fan of the original 300 and even own it on DVD (though I don’t think I’ve re-watched it since buying it. While this still had involvement with Zack Snyder, the direction was passed onto Noam Murro who seemed to think the best way to follow Zack Snyder’s style was to increase the amount of slow motion moments of blood flying at the camera.
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Graphic Horror: Alien
Graphic Horror: Alien 1979
This is something that I haven’t done very much since starting my Filmwhys podcast, and that is to go back and watch an essential movie that I hadn’t seen, only I didn’t do it to talk about during an episode of Filmwhys. (Instead I’m talking about it here in a review) Before now I had seen Aliens a few times, and somehow skipped ahead and watched AvP in theaters, but never went back to watch the original even though there’s always the debate over which is the better movie: Alien or Aliens. For my part, I don’t think I’ll ever like this one as much as Aliens, but it is still a great movie that I really enjoyed. And for the record, I did watch the 2003 Ridley Scott director’s cut of the movie instead of the theatrical release, although I didn’t go back and check to see what the differences between the two versions are.
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Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher
Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher 2014
Last year when I watched the Marvel Iron Man anime movie Rise of Technovore, the best part of that movie were the bits featuring the Punisher, so while that movie was ok but fairly middling, I had quite a bit more hope for this one. But what I ended up getting was more of the same. I do think that the way this movie handles the Punisher as a character is much better than the way he is handled in any of the other live action movies, but I wasn’t as fond of how it handles Black Widow. There are plenty of well done fight scenes, but they had a little too much anime flair to them and some of the voice acting fell a bit flat except for one role who played it overly animated. The plot kept things interesting and while I didn’t like everything in this movie, there was plenty enough to keep me in through the end of the movie. A step up from last year’s Technovore, but only a small step.
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Filmwhys #26 District 9 & Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Welcome back to another episode of Filmwhys, episode 26 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Shala Thomas from Life Between Films who asks me why I haven’t seen District 9, the surprising sci-fi debut of Neill Blomkamp about an alien spaceship stranded above Johannesburg where the aliens get placed in a slum on the outskirts of the city and eventually become a hotbed of racial tension and xenophobia. And in return, I ask her why she hasn’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the Joss Whedon experiment in web content during the writer’s strike from several years ago about the rise of a super-villain done as a catchy musical.
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An FTMN Thank you for 100,000!
I wasn’t originally planning on doing one of these posts, sure I would share the news on Twitter and whatnot, but I didn’t think I needed to write a blog post about this milestone. But I was thinking about it a couple days ago and there were things that I’m grateful for that I wanted to share with my regular readers, and I thought that this milestone was a perfect time to do just that. So first off, I want to say a big THANK YOU to all of my readers that have helped me reach 100,000 views. I really enjoy watching all these movies, writing about them, and talking with all of you in the comments, on Twitter, and on various podcasts, both mine as well as others. So on this milestone, I wanted to share some of the things that I’m pleased about when it comes to what brings people to this site.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 