Blog Archives
Sparks
Sparks 2014
This is a movie that completely escaped my attention as it made the festival rounds last year and it even played near me in Chicago last April, but I did notice it when it came out on DVD as it appeared at my local Wal-Mart. Since it was a lower budget indie movie I had to look farther into it and contacted the writer/director and got to interview William Katt who is the executive producer and plays the main villain in the movie Matanza which you can view here. But aside from that, it is another different take on the superhero movie. It’s a film noir thriller set in the 20’s & 40’s following the story of Ian Sparks and his descent into the underbelly of the superhero culture. There’s plenty of twists and turns and things don’t turn out quite the way one might expect. It has a bit of a slow start, but once the action starts happening it goes on right through the end.
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Filmwhys Extra #7 Sparks
Filmwhys Extra #7 Sparks
Welcome back to another episode of Filmwhys Raw, I mean Filmwhys Extra. I do plan on bringing back a regular episode soon, but in the meantime I was privileged to have the chance to talk with William Katt who is probably best known as the lead in the 80’s superhero TV show The Greatest American Hero and is now working with writer/director Christopher Folino on his recent film Sparks: The Origin of Ian Sparks which is currently out on DVD, and my review of the movie will be posted soon.
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The 100 Essential Superhero Movies project needs you!
Just after finishing up my last blogathon this past March, I stumbled upon an idea that I really wanted to do for yet another blogathon here at Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights. When I first started this site I had a list of 100 theatrically released superhero movies that I wanted to cover in that first year, and while I did reach my goal of watching and reviewing 100 movies, I didn’t stick to that list because there were some other direct-to-DVD releases that I wanted to watch and in many cases they are just as good and often better than the theatrically released ones. So what I wanted to do was to come up with a list of 100 superhero movies that are essential viewing for a superhero fan up through the end of 2013. This isn’t just a list of the 100 best superhero movies because that might be an easier list to come up with, but these are 100 movies that are important to the category of superhero movies as a whole. Some of the choices are quite easy to make, but I’m down to the last 20 movies and this is where I need your help.
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Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014
This year is reminding myself of how much different the superhero movie schedule is compared to last year when there were about a dozen movies packed between the end of May and the middle of August, while this year has the movies much more spread out closer to one every month with Captain America kicking off the more traditional superhero fare as early as April (as opposed to the few comic book movies like 300 & I, Frankenstein and the few movies with a less direct superhero connection like Robocop and the Lego Movie) and yet this is also more of a far cry from a traditional superhero plot and instead feels much more like a conspiracy thriller along the lines of a dozen or so great movies whose names I can’t recall at the moment. There’s also a bit more of Captain America adjusting to life in the 21st century which I have been wanting to see ever since the first movie. In short, I loved every minute of it. Also, as a warning, I don’t always tread lightly around spoilers, though most of the spoilers I already knew or assumed before seeing the movie.
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Superhero Shorts: Resignation
Welcome back to another Superhero Shorts where I feature a superhero themed short film and ask a few questions from its creator. This time around I’m talking with Joshua Caldwell, director of a multimedia web short called Resignation about a very well known superhero who decides to walk away from the responsibilities shouldered upon his hero persona and instead sit back and let the events unfold around him, no matter what the outcome may be. You can watch Caldwell’s director’s reel below, or visit ResignationSuperhero.com to get the full multimedia experience of the Resignation short film. You can also visit his blog Hollywood Bound And Down for more information on Joshua and his podcast.
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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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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 