Blog Archives
Filmwhys #26 District 9 & Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Welcome back to another episode of Filmwhys, episode 26 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast where my guest is Shala Thomas from Life Between Films who asks me why I haven’t seen District 9, the surprising sci-fi debut of Neill Blomkamp about an alien spaceship stranded above Johannesburg where the aliens get placed in a slum on the outskirts of the city and eventually become a hotbed of racial tension and xenophobia. And in return, I ask her why she hasn’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the Joss Whedon experiment in web content during the writer’s strike from several years ago about the rise of a super-villain done as a catchy musical.
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Filmwhys #25 Napoleon Dynamite and Defendor
Episode 25 of the Why Haven’t You Seen This Film Podcast with guest Simon Connolly, writer and director of the upcoming independent film The Last Superheroes and short film writer/director. You can see his short films and a couple previews for The Last Superheroes on Vimeo. He asks me why I haven’t seen a low budget independent film that went on to great success called Napoleon Dynamite about the life of an odd teenager in a small town seemingly stuck in the 80’s and his odd friends and family. And in return, I ask him why he hasn’t seen Defendor, a low budget superhero movie starring Woody Harrelson as a mentally handicapped person who believes he is a superhero like Batman, but stumbles on an actual crime ring that he is determined to take down by himself.
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Mount Rushmore of Independent Superhero Movies
When I saw the blogathon going on over at Two Dollar Cinema called the Mount Rushmore of Movies, I thought it was something that could be fun to join in on. I’ve posted my top 10 superhero movies so I didn’t really want to go that route, nor did I want to do something like choosing the Mount Rushmore of Marvel or DC. But since I recently watched Defendor, I thought I would honor a certain type of movies that I really enjoy and they all seem to fit together quite nicely. While I am calling this the “Mount Rushmore of Independent Superhero Movies”, as the most expensive out of the four movies was a moderately budgeted $30 million while the other three clock in at a much lower budget. They also all share the fact that none of the heroes actually have super powers, and they all have some type of mental or social disability. They are also all black comedies involving some dark subject matter while still trying to inject some humor or at least some levity to the entire situation. And on top of it all, I greatly enjoy all four of these movies and would like more people to see them, as only one of them were a commercial success.
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Defendor
Defendor 2009
This is the last of a small group of similarly themed independent superhero movies that I’ve come around to watching. Alongside Special, Super, and to a lesser extent Kick-Ass, this is definitely the one with the least amount of humor in it, but I think it’s coming to be the one that I like the most. It’s not exactly a big movie but it does have a nice cast consisting of Woody Harrelson as Arthur Poppington/Defendor, Elias Koteas as Officer Dooney, Kat Dennings as Angel/Kat Debrofkowitz, and Sandra Oh as the psychiatric evaluator. The way I like to describe the tone of the movie is if Forrest Gump was Batman. There is some humor in it, but the movie rarely uses Arthur’s mental disability as a source of humor, instead it uses it much more as a source of empathy. And instead of stumbling his way through significant moments in history, he stumbles his way through a local drug lord’s activities. It has moments of lightness, but also becomes a bit of a crime drama mixed with a bit of social commentary. If you can find it anywhere out there, it’s worth your time to check it out.
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Filmwhys Raw #4 The Bad Samaritan Must Die interview
Welcome to another episode of Filmwhys Raw, this time around I was able to talk with a couple filmmakers responsible for the superhero movie The Bad Samaritan Must Die which I reviewed recently. Click here to listen to us talk about the film, some of their earlier short films, their plans to make a sequel/prequel to The Bad Samaritan Must Die called Dawn of the Bad Samaritan, and some other tangents.
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My 2013 Superhero Movie Roundup
2013 has been a pretty good year for me, I caught most of the releases that I wanted to catch, found quite a few hidden gems here and there, caught up on plenty of classics, and started a brand new podcast that’s been going swimmingly. I’m going to avoid taking another look at some of the worst movies this year, instead of giving them more attention, I prefer to focus on the positive and the negative will eventually fade away. I’ve got a top 10 list of superhero and comic book movies and while I might have a couple that you would expect, I imagine that most of the list will be a bit of a surprise.
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Hentai Kamen
Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero 2013
What better way to bring in the Christmas spirit than to talk about an asian movie about a superhero who wears a pair of panties as his superhero mask and dresses like Borat was way too modest. Really though, this is a superhero spoof movie that’s much better than the awful Superhero Movie while going through a lot of the same types of conflicts and story beats, except in every case it turns it into something so ridiculously sex-related that it becomes absolutely hilarious. I’m sure some people won’t get the joke, but I thought that the level of seriousness this movie treated a superhero with a pair of women’s panties on his face was just the right amount of absurdity and obscenity to make me laugh hysterically through most of this movie.
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Captain Battle: Legacy War
Captain Battle: Legacy War 2013
Continuing on in my quest to watch all of the 2013 releases I can get my hands on, and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to what I would easily call the worst superhero film of 2013, and I’m not talking about Iron Man or Man of Steel like some people might claim. No, I’m talking about an actually bad movie. This movie looks worse than most fan films I’ve covered on this site. The special effects look like they were done on a trial version of After Effects, with page wipes straight out of Windows Movie Maker, and make up that looks like it was done with magic markers. The movie attempts a story that’s much too big for the special effects or acting abilities of those involved. And on top of that, while it is based on an actual comic book, the timing of it is a cheap rip-off of Captain America, complete with a Red Skull analogue with the aforementioned red magic marker special effects makeup. It has plenty of moments of enjoyably bad moviemaking, and a handful of T&A, but for the most part it was simply a boring mess of a movie.
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Legends of the Knight
Legends of the Knight 2014
It’s not so rare these days to find interesting projects looking for funding on Kickstarter, it is a bit more rare to find projects that actually catch my own personal interest. But when I heard about this project, I was happy to make it my first Kickstarter donation, giving $10 so I could get a digital download when it became available. This is a project by Brett Culp which takes a different look at Batman. It doesn’t look at the character himself, but instead takes a look at the impact that character has had on the world itself through a handful of people and their inspiring stories of how they take one part or another of Batman’s philosophy or his story as a whole and use it to improve their own lives and the lives of others. It is a documentary which takes a look at about a dozen people across the country who all have a strong connection to Batman in one way or another. Through a series of interviews and plenty of Batman artwork and children dressed up as Batman, we get to see a slice of these people’s lives and how Batman has made their lives better. You can view the trailer and find out more information at their official website.
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Is Marvel’s strategy a bad thing for superhero films?
The other day I came across an article whose argument was basically that the Avengers have ruined the Hollywood concept of a superhero movie. Essentially, the fact that all of the lead up movies to the Avengers were all connected-yet-separate and then there’s this big movie that tied them all together which became a huge thing. And now it’s happening everywhere. DC is doing it by bringing in Batman, Wonder Woman, and who knows who else in the second Man of Steel movie, Sony is doing it with Spider-man with two more sequels in the works and they just announced that their two spin off movies are about Venom and the Sinister Six. Even Fox is getting on board with The Wolverine teasing Days of Future Past which connects the First Class franchise to the first trilogy and have already announced Age of Apocalypse in 2016, not to mention the fact that they’re also supposedly tying the Fantastic Four into that universe somehow. The question is basically asking if the days of the stand-alone superhero movie are gone and these movies are becoming more like comic books, only a part of a much bigger whole that will only end when the money stops. Not only that, but it’s becoming the only model, and that’s a bad thing. Personally, I think it’s a good thing and for more reasons than just getting more superhero movies, which I’m all for too.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 