Blog Archives
Are Awards Important if You Don’t Watch “Awards Movies”?
Recently another film critic was in the news, it seems that lately the only time that film critics get in the news is whenever they go out of their way to shine a negative light on film criticism, whether it’s calling 911 during an industry screening, or yelling vulgarities during an awards ceremony. I’m one who rarely pays attention to any of the awards shows. When I was younger, I used to always watch the MTV Movie Awards for a couple reasons. One was that it was almost always an entertaining show, and two was that the movies that were getting awarded were the movies that I was very aware of and if I hadn’t seen them, I had really wanted to see them. Now I don’t even bother with that awards show. Some time during this past year the conversation was brought up about watching all of the Academy Awards Best Pictures winners. Several people on Twitter were discussing how many they had seen, and when I counted up my tally, I had about half a dozen, and they were all also commercial blockbusters as well. So what is my point exactly? I’m not entirely sure, but there is definitely a disconnect between the general public, and most film critics, whether amateur bloggers or professional critics, and in my opinion most of the time the only difference between the two is one of the two gets a paycheck.
Timecop
Timecop 1994
I think it’s funny that the last time I participated in The Lamb’s movie of the month it was Demolition Man, a 90’s sci-fi movie that featured an 80’s action star and someone getting frozen and shattered, and this time around I watched a 90’s sci-fi movie that featured an 80’s action star and someone getting frozen and partially shattered. Anyway, this is one of Jean Claude Van Damme’s biggest movies from that era and with good reason. It came out a year after Demolition Man, but it tried to be a much more serious movie than the former. There is a heavily sci-fi mumbo jumbo plot, but instead of just jumping forward in time to a utopia, there is quite a bit of jumping back and forth through time with the occasional alternate timelines, and surprisingly I thought they were actually fairly well thought out and intriguing. It also featured Mia Sara who I remembered from the Ridley Scott fantasy movie Legend and she has a bit of a sex scene in the beginning of the movie that I wasn’t quite expecting. Overall the movie wasn’t quite as much 90’s cheese as I was expecting, and while it’s not the greatest sci-fi action movie by any stretch of the imagination, I had a really great time watching it and it was better than I was expecting it to be.
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Superhero Shorts: Superman vs. Hulk
Welcome back to another edition of Superhero Shorts where I take a look at a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions of the filmmaker. Today I’m talking with Mike Habjan and his animated fight sequence between Superman and the Incredible Hulk which he has been working on for several years now and still isn’t fully finished. You can watch the most recent section of the fight below, or you can see all of his animations on his YouTube Channel, or through the playlist which I set up.
Filmwhys #21 The Seventh Seal and Batman: The Movie
Welcome to another episode of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest John LaRue of The Droid You’re Looking For asks me why I haven’t seen The Seventh Seal, a classic Ingmar Bergman film with Max Von Sydow best known for the scenes where he is playing a game of chess with Death. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen Batman: The Movie, the classic theatrical production spun off of the first season of the campy TV show from the 60’s.
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Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies 2009
Happy New Year! There hasn’t been a lot of voting in my “what I should watch in 2014” poll, but the winner in both the poll and the comments was non-superhero movies. So at least here in January, I’ll be watching some more varied movies that are still based on comics. But today I’m doing what I thought I did a couple months back until I realized that there was still a DC animated movie that I had yet to review, even though I had seen it before my website days. Public Enemies was the first of these movies to really focus on the Batman/Superman team up, and while I didn’t like it as much as Apocalypse, I still had a lot of fun with it.There’s a ton of cameos of various supervillains and some lesser known heroes, but it brings back the ever familiar voices for Batman, Superman, and Lex Luthor which is always a good sign even if it has a couple odd patches here and there.
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The CK’s Not-So-Secret-Santa Review Swap
There’s a blogathon that was started over at The Cinematic Katzenjammer in July called the Not-So-Secret-Santa Review Swap, I didn’t get around to joining it back then, but when it came up again here for Christmastime, it sounded like an interesting change of pace. Considering that my site isn’t exactly the best place to showcase the movie I received as my “gift”, Love Actually, I considered hosting it there, but instead what I will do is also point out some of the review gifts related to my site like Dredd, including the one I handed out, Bounty Killer. I hadn’t heard very much about my movie, Love Actually, before this year where it seems to have exploded into my own blog feed with equal parts of love and hate over the movie. It’s a very unusual type of movie, it interweaves many different stories about love, set at Christmastime, and it is not a family film by any stretch of the imagination with plenty of swearing and some nudity. There’s a couple different ways to look at what the film is trying to do which is probably colored by what you ultimately think of the film as a whole. It is a look at many different types of love and relationships, but it also includes several unhealthy relationships. The stories are all generally separate from each other, but they are also connected in several different ways. It’s a very atypical holiday movie, and yet it ends with everything coming together the same way every other holiday movie does. And which side of the fence am I on? Personally, I didn’t care for it very much.
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What Do You Want To See Me Watch in 2014?
With the new year right around the corner, I’m not sure what movies I should move onto to start the year off. And it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these polls so I thought I would throw it out to you readers to guide some of my movie watching, though I am going to shortly watch Timecop for the Lamb’s Movie of the Month since it is, in fact, based on a comic. I broke it down into a few categories, from the black and white classics like the old Dick Tracy movies and original Lone Ranger, to finishing up some of the schlocky 80’s movies like John Ritter’s Hero at Large, Super Fuzz, and the Swamp Thing movies. I’ve also got a few foreign movies I could go to like the Gantz sequel, or the Zebraman movies. The first Gantz was very good and I had a blast with Hentai Kamen, so it’s always fun to check out more asian movies. There’s also plenty of non-superhero movies that are based on comic books like A History of Violence, or Josie and the Pussycats, or American Splendor, three very different movies based on very different comics which are always good for a bit of a change of pace around here. Even if a choice doesn’t win, I’ll likely take it into consideration and watch movies from that category sooner rather than later. And if you have any specific examples you’d like me to watch, or a category I haven’t listed, feel free to leave a comment and let me know. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
My 2013 Superhero Movie Roundup
2013 has been a pretty good year for me, I caught most of the releases that I wanted to catch, found quite a few hidden gems here and there, caught up on plenty of classics, and started a brand new podcast that’s been going swimmingly. I’m going to avoid taking another look at some of the worst movies this year, instead of giving them more attention, I prefer to focus on the positive and the negative will eventually fade away. I’ve got a top 10 list of superhero and comic book movies and while I might have a couple that you would expect, I imagine that most of the list will be a bit of a surprise.
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Hentai Kamen
Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero 2013
What better way to bring in the Christmas spirit than to talk about an asian movie about a superhero who wears a pair of panties as his superhero mask and dresses like Borat was way too modest. Really though, this is a superhero spoof movie that’s much better than the awful Superhero Movie while going through a lot of the same types of conflicts and story beats, except in every case it turns it into something so ridiculously sex-related that it becomes absolutely hilarious. I’m sure some people won’t get the joke, but I thought that the level of seriousness this movie treated a superhero with a pair of women’s panties on his face was just the right amount of absurdity and obscenity to make me laugh hysterically through most of this movie.
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Filmwhys #20 Double Indemnity and the Pumaman
Welcome to yet another episode of Filmwhys, aka the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast. I’m trying to get into a more regular schedule having a new episode up every two weeks on Saturday, and hopefully there’s something extra I’m working on coming in the new year. This episode my guest is Will from Exploding Helicopter who asks me why I haven’t seen Double Indemntiy, the great film noir thriller from the brilliant director Billy Wilder and in return I ask him why he hasn’t seen The Pumaman which doesn’t have quite as good of a pedigree, but was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a so-bad-it’s-good movie with a low budget, cheesy acting, and a crazy plot.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 