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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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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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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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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Filmwhys #12 Rope and Planet Hulk
It’s time once again for another episode of Filmwhys, or the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film podcast where I have a returning guest for the first time, webnovelist Stefan Gagne from Pixelscapes who asks me why I haven’t seen one of Hitchcock’s more experimental films, Rope which is only the third Hitchcock movie that I’ve ever seen. And I ask him why he hasn’t seen one of Marvel’s animated offerings, Planet Hulk.
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Kick-Ass 2
Kick-Ass was a great hyper-violent superhero satire directed by Matthew Vaughn back in 2010, a few years later nearly everyone returns for the sequel minus the director. I was a big fan of the original Kick-Ass and had high hopes for the sequel following some fun looking trailers and the addition of Jim Carrey to the cast, despite his public disapproval of the film’s violence a couple months ago. The original had a nice commentary about some of the realities of real-life superheroes contrasted with some balls to the wall stylish action scenes involving an 11 year old girl and a not insignificant amount of blood. The sequel tries to bring back what worked in the original, but only hits its mark about half of the time. It’s still a good movie and it’s great to see Hit Girl back to kick some ass, but it just never reaches the original in terms of flair, humor, or message, and when it comes close it feels more like a rehash of the original rather than a return. There are a few possible surprises in this movie which I will mention so here’s your obligatory spoiler warning if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
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Planet Hulk
I’ve viewed and reviewed a lot of DC Animation movies, but I haven’t gotten around to nearly as many Marvel Animation features. There aren’t quite as many of them, and they aren’t quite as high quality as their DC counterparts, but they are still often times an enjoyable diversion. I saw Planet Hulk for the first time a couple years ago when I was on a big animation kick and was going through most of the Marvel and DC Animated titles that were out at the time, and of the Marvel releases, this one was my favorite, even though there was one major problem I had. This movie is Planet Hulk, and of course the Hulk is the main character in it, but it is not the Hulk that I’ve come to know. The story is not what I would expect the Hulk to fit into, and I don’t recognize any name in the voice cast outside of Kevin Michael Richardson. But it still manages to be a fun watch and worth a look while you’re waiting for the next DC title to come out.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 