Blog Archives
Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo
Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo 2006
This month of animation is almost over and with this movie I have now officially seen every single DC Animated movie ever made, not counting some multi-part TV episodes that were later released as a movie. This was the last film before transitioning into their Warner Premier made-for-home-video and it also happened to come right at the end of the Teen Titans run. I’ve only seen a handful of Teen Titans episodes, and quite a bit more of the later series Teen Titans Go, and honestly this felt a little bit like a transitional moment between the two series even though it was hot off the heels of the first series and years before the second. While the overall story was serious, there were plenty of moments that used a very anime style of comedy in the animation, something that is widely used in Go, but I don’t recall it being used much in the original Teen Titans. The movie was fun, the villain was interesting, but my biggest complaint was that it only used the Tokyo setting for a large number of cliched stereotypical jokes without any real respect to the culture.
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Batman vs. Robin
Batman vs. Robin 2015
April has unintentionally become animation month here at Flights, Tights and Movie Nights as I take a look at a couple home video releases as well as catch up with the last couple Marvel animated movies I haven’t gotten around to yet. Batman vs. Robin is the latest DC Animation release that was originally touted as their first original story, though it is apparently partly based on the Court of Owls by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo as well as a sequel to last year’s Son of Batman which was a decent, though fairly mediocre effort from the studio. It has a much stronger underlying theme of what being a father and being a son means, though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Road to Perdition which I had just recently watched. It was still a mighty fine effort with some nice performances, impressive action sequences, and a few twists and turns along the way. And FYI, Batman vs. Robin is currently available via digital download, and will be released on DVD this Tuesday, April 14th, and as a warning I will be delving into the film in its entirety, including any spoilers.
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5 Obstructions #1: Batman & Robin
Obstruction #1: Write a good review of a bad movie
When I saw this blogathon I immediately thought it was a great idea, in fact, I even had the idea for the first “obstruction” a while back. For full details, check out the overview post over at Nostra’s My Film Views. But basically the idea is five writing challenges inspired by a movie that challenged the filmmaker to make the same movie five different times, each time with a different challenge, or obstruction. For the first obstruction, I figured I could easily find a bad movie that I’ve seen recently and I decided to make that challenge into a “sell out” review. That is to say I am writing this review as if I had been paid by the filmmakers to give it a good review, and I figured the best place to use that marketing double-speak is for the film Batman and Robin. Enjoy.
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Batman: Under the Red Hood
Batman: Under the Red Hood 2010
Even before starting this site, I was a fan of DC’s animation studio and had watched most of their earlier releases like New Frontier, Doomsday, and Gotham Knight. They were all pretty good and I enjoyed watching them as I did some of the Marvel releases around that point like Ultimate Avengers and Planet Hulk. All of them were good. Under the Red Hood is great. It’s interesting that I watched this after Superman vs. the Elite because they both deal with slightly similar ideas, and yet Under the Red Hood takes those ideas and instead of using some random anti-heroes/villains that were never heard of before or since, they take characters much more rooted to the core of the Batman mythos and break down the story on a completely personal level. I must say that this is the best one of these movies that I’ve seen so far. There are a couple weak spots, but it’s pretty impressive overall.
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