Blog Archives
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania 2023
I’m doing what I can to keep this blog alive. It took an extra week but I did go out to the theaters to see the latest MCU movie and I have a few opinions. Even though this was the worst critically performing movie after the Eternals (which I still haven’t seen but plan to… eventually) it has a high audience score so I was fairly certain I would still enjoy it. I did, though there were a few issues that bothered me after the fact, but not while watching the movie. I think some of the character complaints were valid and the ending was a little weak but the visuals were fantastic and the humor has its own little niche that’s similar to Guardians of the Galaxy while still having its own tone unique to Ant-Man and Peyton Reed despite the rocky start. Like with many of the middle MCU films where it’s a superhero film crossed with another unique genre, this still gives us something new with a revolution story mixed with a sci-fi twist. I thought it was a fun continuation of the Ant-Man character and I hope we get some more down the line. And as with every new movie reviewed here, I will be diving into spoiler territory beyond this point so you have been warned.
Read the rest of this entry
Thor: Love and Thunder
Thor: Love and Thunder 2022
It’s time for yet another new Marvel movie and while I did manage to get out to see this movie opening weekend, I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write about it until now. I did however speak my thoughts on a recent Lambcast so you can hear more of my opinion along with 4 other Lamb members. I went into this movie hearing a fair mix of things, several people compared it negatively against Ragnarok so I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get into. For the most part, I loved this film in a similar manner as Ragnarok and while I do see the complaints, they didn’t detract from the film too much for me. Not only that, but I felt like this had a much better emotional throughline for several of the characters. And since this is a new release, I’m always compelled to issue a spoiler warning and there are several things to spoil that have been left out of the trailers so be warned.
Read the rest of this entry
Dark Phoenix
Dark Phoenix 2019
This is apparently the swan song for the Fox version of the X-Men that really started the modern era of superhero movies and re-started with 2010’s First Class, and is now lumped into the Disney conglomerate so future cinematic X-Men will likely be tied into the MCU. It’s also one of the few 2019 releases that I wasn’t able to make it out to see in theaters even though this was a generally lighter year for superhero and comic book movies, or at least the year was heavily front loaded with several releases in the early months of the year. In general, I’ve been a fan of nearly all of the X-Men movies aside from the ones everyone hates. But I’ve also generally enjoyed the more recent ones that have been pretty middling to most audiences. I don’t think they handled every character very well, but they did do a few things right in this movie and I enjoyed more than I disliked. And while this is still a relatively new release, I will be discussing the plot in its entirety so there may be spoilers.
Read the rest of this entry
RoboCop Prime Directives: Crash & Burn
RoboCop Prime Directives: Crash & Burn 2001
I’ve finally come to the end of this four part miniseries and it’s going to be difficult to really say too much that I haven’t said in the previous reviews. There were a few more ultraviolent moments as well as some entertaining bits. The interstitials felt almost nonexistent compared to the previous two episodes though they did have some good moments through the end credits. The budget really showed in this episode with the climax using the most of the extremely limited budget and without a great, compelling story and characters to back it up, it really fell pretty flat. There were some nice callbacks here and there but it was mostly just an uninteresting finale to a dull miniseries.
Read the rest of this entry
RoboCop Prime Directives: Resurrection
RoboCop Prime Directives: Resurrection 2001
I’m continuing through the four part RoboCop miniseries that originally aired in Canada and I’ve noticed that it really is starting to feel much more like a series rather than four connected movies. In a way the actual story of the movie is getting better as threads are starting to thread deeper and the characters are getting farther along on their arcs. On a different day, I might actually not consider this on my list of movies, but today I’m feeling generous. The third part has a few less interstitial interruptions and the ones they have aren’t as entertaining as the one in Meltdown but I’m definitely ready for this series to be over with the next installment.
Read the rest of this entry
RoboCop Prime Directives: Meltdown
RoboCop Prime Directives: Meltdown 2001
It’s been a while since I watched the first episode of this four part miniseries that originally aired in Canada as the library only carried the first volume. But I’ve currently got a 1 month trial of Amazon Prime and all four episodes are on there so I thought it would be the perfect time to finish this series up. I didn’t remember a whole lot about the first episode but I remembered that I didn’t care for it enough to re-watch it so I just jumped right into this second episode. While the main storyline is nothing to write home about despite being much more violent than the earlier RoboCop sequels, the satirical news and commercial breaks mixed in really caught me in just the right way and made this a much more enjoyable movie because of them.
Read the rest of this entry
Men in Black International
Things have been slowing down a bit here, but I’ve still managed to make it to the theaters once again to catch the latest non-Disney Marvel movie that wasn’t Dark Phoenix. Ok, so technically it’s an extra step removed from being a Marvel movie since it’s the latest sequel in a series of movies that were originally loosely based on a Malibu comic that was purchased by Marvel comics. But this is kind of a rebootquel as it reboots the series with two new leads replacing Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but still connects it to the previous three movies with references to Agents J and K as well as Emma Thompson as Agent O. The film was fun enough but it had a difficult time capturing the wonder of the first film while tossing in an undercooked mystery. And as this is a new release, I will be discussing the mystery in full so here’s your spoiler warning.
Read the rest of this entryAvengers: Endgame
Avengers: Endgame 2019
Even though it’s only been out for a little over a couple weeks, it feels like everyone has already seen this movie considering that it’s about to top Avatar to become the second highest grossing movie in the US of all time. The MCU in general has become the biggest franchise of all time in short order, offering up 22 movies over the course of only 10 years, and while most of the films follow a similar overall formula, the specifics of each film tends to vary wildly among secondary genres. The MCU films are safe, and yet they still manage to take chances, whether it’s giving unknown characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy a chance to shine, or what it does in this movie: it spends time to show the audience how the characters react to loss. This film feels like a culmination of all the previous MCU films in more ways than one, it revisits moments from earlier movies, and it generally offers closure for the majority of the original six Avengers in a rather satisfying way. And while the official spoiler has ended, I am still offering my typical spoiler warning from here on out.
Inspector Gadget 2
Inspector Gadget 2 2003
This is one of those movies that’s been sitting in my Netflix queue for well over a year and I’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on it because I knew it was going to be pretty bad. But me being me, I was in the mood for a bad movie so I finally watched this one. Now, I was a big fan of the cartoon series when it was on Nickelodeon, but I never watched the first live action movie because I also suspected that it was kids movie trash. And while I did initially have some slight reservations on whether to actually consider this a superhero movie, I figured that there is a direct line from Cyborg to Robocop to Inspector Gadget. The best argument I heard against is that he is typically more of a spy than a superhero crimefighter, but at least in this movie, he’s a straight up cop. With super powers. So I think he’s just barely over the line. As for the actual quality of the movie? It’s straight to DVD Disney sequel trash that never got a laugh out of me and barely resembled the cartoon it was based on.
Read the rest of this entry
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Ant-Man and the Wasp 2018
It’s taken me a little while, but with the next MCU movie coming out next week I thought I’d finally catch up with the only Disney Marvel movie that I missed last year. I actually quite enjoyed the first Ant-Man and I was looking forward to this one but for whatever reason I just never got around to it until now. It followed up with the fun of the first movie without going quite as far into the comedy realm as Thor: Ragnarok though it is a little heavier on the comedy than most MCU movies. But what this film really has going for it is the positivity between the characters. There are villains including one who’s the prototypical bad businessman jerk like Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2 or even Darren Cross from the first movie, but there’s no unnecessary negativity outside of the antagonist/protagonist conflict which is actually refreshing. Especially with Scott Lang’s family issues with being a divorced father. It’s a fun movie that expands what is possible with the Ant-Man tech and it’s always nice to have a mostly stand-alone story with only post-credits connections to the other movies.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 