Blog Archives
Filmwhys #14 The Untouchables and Chronicle
Apologies for the late post for this episode of Filmwhys. I had an issue with my usual recording program not wanting to record for whatever reason, so I had to find a quick replacement, and that replacement ended up being a trial version that only recorded in 5 minute chunks and also recorded an echo off of my microphone, so the clean-up editing took a lot more time than usual, but I hope I managed to remove all the annoyances and cover up the breaks as neatly as possible. Anyway for the actual episode, I talked with Ryan McNeely from 5 Word Movie Reviews who asks me why I haven’t seen the Untouchables, a great film from Brian DePalma about Elliot Ness, Al Capone, and the Chicago way. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen Chronicle, a unique take on both found footage and the superhero film from just last year.
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Almost Super: Demolition Man
Almost Super: Demolition Man 1993
I realized that it’s been quite a while since I’ve written one of these “Almost Super” reviews. And this past weekend I watched Demolition Man which had me thinking through most of the movie that it feels like it could easily be the prequel to Judge Dredd. It’s got Rob Schneider in it, and though it may be set in a utopian future rather than a dystopian future it has a similar feel to it. Well, a similar feel to the trailers that I’ve seen for Judge Dredd since I haven’t technically watched that one just yet. It also happened to be the Movie Of The Month over at the Lamb so I thought it would be a perfect movie to use my tag for movies that aren’t quite a superhero movie, but share a lot of the same qualities with them. Anyway, for the actual movie itself, Demolition Man was a fun little 90’s cheesy action movie with both Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes hamming it up with as many action one-liners as they can fit into their dialogue. It had a lot of really odd future ideas in it, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
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Batman: Year One
Batman: Year One 2011
After first hearing about these DC animated movies several years ago through Kevin Smith of all places (based on the fact that he has a one-liner in Doomsday referencing his well-known work on the scrapped Superman Lives script), watching several of them before starting this site and loving every single one of them through varying degrees, I’ve finally watched every single one of them that has currently been released. I still have to re-watch Gotham Knights and Justice League: New Frontier so I can review them, but I have seen all of them until Justice League: War comes out next year. You can expect a top ten list in the near future. But for now I’m just talking about Batman: Year One, based on the Frank Miller run about both eventual Commissioner Jim Gordon and Batman’s first year in Gotham. It shows how deep the corruption runs in Gotham from the outset but while it is called Batman: Year One, I almost think it should have been called Gordon: Year One, and I’d be perfectly ok with that. It has some weak points, but it’s still a great addition to the library of animated DC titles.
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Bounty Killer DVD Giveaway
Once again I’ve been contacted by the folks at Partners Hub to host a giveaway. This time it’s for a futuristic shoot-em-up independent movie based on a graphic novel called Bounty Killer. It’s out in limited release this weekend and comes out on DVD next month. Click the picture below to check out the Bounty Killer app and take a look at the trailer.
Super Inframan
Super Inframan 1975
Last month I decided to join in on a handful of blogathons and other projects. Some of them I got to in a reasonable amount of time, and this one was one of those that got pushed back a little bit too far. Over at Your Face, they have been doing a Shaw-gust blogathon during the month of August, reviewing films from the Shaw brothers, who are best known for their plethora of kung-fu flicks in the 70’s though they produced many movies outside of that range. These are the flicks known for their fight scenes and bad dubbing, almost any kung-fu parody from this era featured the badly out of synch lip movements and very rough translations, and that is how I watched my contribution for what ended up slipping into Shaw-tember, Super Inframan. And even though it predates them by many years, this movie totally feels like a handful of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers episodes strung together. There’s a lot of guys in rubber monster costumes, a lot of kung-fu, and a whole lot of jumping around. It’s got plenty of fun moments, and just as many wtf moments.
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Superhero Shorts: Lazy Teenage Superheroes
Welcome to another edition of Superhero Shorts, where I feature a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions with the creator. Today I’m talking with Michael Ashton who made a short film about a group of slacker teenagers who happen to have super powers. He did it for practically no money with his friends and did most of the impressive special effects work himself. As usual, you can watch it below, or you can watch it at the official website.
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Filmwhys #13 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and All Superheroes Must Die
It’s that time again folks, another Filmwhys episode has been released to the general public. This week I have guest Jason Soto of the site Your Face who asks me the question why haven’t I seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original one from 1974, a low budget horror movie that first introduced us to Leatherface. And in return I ask him why he hasn’t seen All Superheroes Must Die, which is pretty close to a superhero horror movie. I was also able to ask a few brief questions with the creator of All Superheroes Must Die, Jason Trost at the end of the episode.
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DC Animation Should Make a Theatrical Feature and it Should be The Killing Joke
I’ve said before to anyone who would listen that DC Animation should release a theatrical feature. They haven’t done one since practically their first all the way back in 1993 with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm which was more or less a spin-off of Batman: The Animated Series and had a fairly limited theatrical release. Since then, they’ve released several other spin-off movies for Batman: TAS, Batman Beyond, and Superman: TAS before releasing their first stand-alone Superman movie Doomsday in 2007 based on the Death and Return of Superman comic book arc. Their very next one, Justice League: The New Frontier would be their first PG-13 rated feature. In the following years, they’ve released 15 other straight-to-home-video animated movies based on other popular comic book runs as well as a handful of short films included on some of the DVDs. The stories they tell in these animated features are much more like what you would find in a Japanese Anime movie, these aren’t kids films, they are grown up stories based on well written comics. They are done on a direct-to-home-video budget, but it is used efficiently and often has some amazingly high quality animation, as well as a superbly chosen voice cast. Marvel is dominating the box office while DC is hit and miss, and I think a well placed animated movie could be a great selling point for DC.
Super Buddies
Super Buddies 2013
Since started this site, I’ve expanded my focus quite a bit. For the first half of the first year, I was limiting myself to only theatrically released superhero movies. I quickly included home video releases so I could review the great DC Animation titles and my list of movies to watch is always growing. And while I doubt I’ll ever expand it so much that I end up watching and reviewing Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, I did decide to watch and review this movie. It did help quite a bit that my daughter is already a fan of the Buddies series of movies and I realized that I haven’t really watched a lot of movies with her lately even though I would almost always mention Jena in the early days of this site. Now, this movie has a few things going against it right from the start. It’s a Disney, straight-to-home-video movie, it has talking puppies, and it’s somewhere around tenth in the long running series of Air Bud and later Buddies movies. I’m not going to go out and say that this is a good movie by any means, but when I look at it from the perspective of being aimed towards younger kids, you could do a lot worse than Super Buddies.
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The 5 Obstructions Blogathon: #3 Super
I don’t do a whole lot of blogathons on this site, but Nostra over at My Film Views often comes up with some great ones, so it’s no surprise that I decided to take part in this multi-month blogathon called The 5 Obstructions. Basically it’s a series of 5 challenges, 1 a month that creates a writing challenge, or obstruction. It’s designed to take bloggers out of their comfort zone and think outside of the box when it comes to writing. The first one was to write a review of a movie that was the opposite of how you really felt about the movie, a positive review of a bad movie or vice-versa. The second one was the easiest for me as it was merely to include an interview along with the review and while I regularly feature interviews, most bloggers don’t. And that brings us to our third obstruction: write a review that consists entirely of sentences copy & pasted from other reviews of the movie. I chose the polarizing movie Super, or at least I thought it was polarizing. As it turns out, every review I picked mainly out of sites that I follow were quite positive. I did make a small handful of changes to pronouns to help readability a bit, noted by [brackets] and all the reviews I pulled these quotes from are linked at the bottom for your reading pleasure.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 