Blog Archives
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: Civil War 2016
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is back with its latest installment of their ongoing franchise. And even though I watched this movie on opening night, I feel like everyone and their mother has already voiced their adoration upon this film, probably just because it was released in many other countries a week early. As a whole, Marvel films have been pretty high on my radar starting off with Avengers as the first MCU that was released since starting this site and most of the Phase 2 sequels were much better than the originals until they hit a bit of a snag with Age of Ultron that felt like they were too focused on setting up future films to worry about focusing on the current one. On that front, I felt like Civil War was a success, while it greatly helped to have knowledge of past films, Civil War felt much more self-contained than Age of Ultron. It has the fun aspect that permeates all of the Marvel films as well as some incredible action and some thought provoking themes, but it just didn’t quite knock it out of the park for me this time. And fair warning since this has just opened in the US, there may be spoilers ahead.
Read the rest of this entry
Danger Diabolik
Danger Diabolik 1968
There’s one genre of superhero movies that I don’t have very much experience in just yet and that is the 60’s era of Eurospy movies. There was a large number of these pseudo James Bond-esque spy movies that are all over the place. Some of them involve masked spies, some involved less heroic protagonists, some were based on European comics from the time, and then there’s this one that combines all three of those. Diobolik was an Italian comic created by Angela and Luciana Guissani in ’62 where it ran for several years before this film was optioned by noted producer Dino De Laurentiis (and many years afterwards). The film also has the recognition of being the last televised episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 excluding the recently Kickstartered reboot series. But knowing that, it was surprisingly much more entertaining and watchable than most movies featured on MST3K. It was incredibly bizarre at times, but the director Mario Bava had a great visual eye, and the film had a fun mix of comedy and innuendo befitting an Austin Powers movie without the overt winks to the audience.
Read the rest of this entry
Ben 10: Alien Swarm
Ben 10: Alien Swarm 2009
And now we come to the film that will likely wrap up this month of kids movies unless I happen to squeeze one more in tomorrow. I ran a Twitter poll of a few options to choose, and this was the movie that won. Now I am only slightly aware of Ben 10 as a concept, I know that it started out as a cartoon and has gone through various different series as well as a couple different live action movies and this was the latter of those, and probably not the best choice for an entry point into this universe. But surprisingly this was much less difficult to understand the overall basics of the world than the two Power Rangers films and that’s even including my past experience with the Power Rangers. Considering the fact that it was a made for TV movie, it was much better than I expected. There were some interesting concepts thrown around even though they were treated with kid gloves for the most part. What it did do the most was make me curious about the Ben 10 universe as a whole.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
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.
Read the rest of this entry
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 