Blog Archives

FTMN July Update

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve written a more or less general blog post just to give an update on the state of the site. Things are moving along more or less smoothly where I have been shifting towards more themed months to help guide my superhero and comic book movie watching. Last month has just finished up with my June-ing the Cult where I checked out quite a few obscure and cult films, several suggested by my cult movie blogging friends and others chosen by myself. Now let me tell you a little bit about what I have planned for the next month and possibly beyond.
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New look, & Top 5 Most Original Superhero Movies

As you can probably tell, at least if you’ve ever been here before, I’ve gone and given this place a little bit of a makeover. I recently took part in a Brutally Blog Blustering over at the LAMB where you submit your blog, and people give constructive criticism anonymously. One thing that many people mentioned was the disjointed URL, so while it is a bit long, I couldn’t think of anything else more appropriate than FlightsTightsAndMovieNights.com. I will continue to renew Bubbawheat.com because I’ve had that name for more than half of my life at this point, and I doubt I’ll be changing it any time soon. I also went and made a more comics appropriate background that is hopefully not too distracting and looks good on most screen dimensions. I even adjusted my header image a bit to give it a more consistent and comics related font, as well as adding a few randomly changing taglines. If you’re wondering, there’s four. Which one do you like the best? I will be making a couple more tweaks to how my sidebars and pages are set up over the next week or so, but nothing too major. While several people complained about my lack of a blogroll, oftentimes even while praising my Follow Friday, I will be making a page collecting all of my Follow Fridays into a blogroll page of sorts. But enough about that, this week’s topic is a list of the five most original superhero movies. There’s tons of superhero movies out there, but so many of them are basically different takes on the same formula, or one of a select few formulas. But every once in a while, a movie comes out and does something completely different. It may not always work 100%, but I respect their efforts for trying.

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Kid friendly superheroes, LAMB talk, and other ramblings

It’s Tuesday, so it’s blog time. I’d like to get a little plug out of the way first. I started this blog because I enjoy writing, I enjoy movies, and I wanted to do something a little more different than just an average movie review blog, so I picked comic books and superheroes as a specific genre that’s become a lot more popular, yet doesn’t seem to garner as much attention from movie bloggers from what I can tell. As someone who’s never really blogged before, or even read that many movie reviews before, I kinda dove headfirst into the blogging community to see what else is out there, and to make my name known in the process. One of the things I found is a community of movie reviewers called the LAMB, which stands for Large Association of Movie Blogs. It’s a really great community for movie blogs with a ton of members and I will hopefully soon be one of them. So if you’re interested in reading or writing movie blogs, click the link on my sidebar which I did tweak a little bit to fit this site better and check them out. I’ll be doing my first review inspired by one of their features next week. They are featuring Sam Raimi the director, so I’ll be watching his first superhero movie on my list, Darkman, since I’d prefer to watch his Spiderman movies a bit closer to the release of the new Spiderman movie.

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What makes a good villain?

I’ll start this off as I tend to start off all of these blog posts, with an update. I had planned to watch Zoom and Sky High with my daughter Jena, but then we took a trip to the video store and I saw the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle trilogy staring at me. I left it up to her to decide between Sky High and TMNT, and she picked TMNT. So the next three reviews will be the original live action Turtles movies. I will leave the animated reboot for another time for now. Another thing that surprised me a little bit is that when I checked some of my site stats, I saw that these editorial style blogs tend to be more popular than most of my movie reviews. Huh. I’m also considering adding another post per week focusing on just a trailer for a movie, either upcoming or classic. Let me know if you’d be interested in reading that by commenting below. Enough of the update, let’s get to the question in the title, shall we?

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Lousy SMarch Weather

I spent a lot of today trying to come up with another good topic. I felt like I had a pretty good streak going for these blog posts discussing black superheroes, women superheroes, and what makes a superhero in general. But I didn’t end up coming up with something that I was excited about and kinda ended up being defeated more than once this month. First by not watching Ghost Rider in a timely manner and instead watching the Blade TV pilot, and second by not coming up with a good blog topic and instead just writing a general update. But fear not, I have managed to fit Ghost Rider into my schedule and it will be Thursday’s review. I’m sure all both of you out there were sweating it. Also, I’m nearly one quarter into my original goal of 100 movies reviewed this year. Tuesday’s review was number 24.

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Here comes February!

It’s the last day of January already, I’m not going to make a big deal about how far along I am, I did that a couple weeks ago already. This is just more of a general update. Thanks for everyone who made suggestions early on, it helped me pick out several movies for January and I got to all of them except for X-Men First class. Sorry Josh, I’ll get to that one eventually. I’ve got all my movies picked out for February but I don’t have a strict schedule. Nine of the movies fit a special “guess the theme” for the month, and I also hope to watch and review Chronicle and Ghost Rider which come out this month as well as the first Ghost Rider to get ready for the new one. If you’re counting along, that’s 12 movies in 4 weeks, so every Tuesday this month will have a bonus review until I start falling behind or if I can’t get to the new movies. I hope to also continue these impromptu blog posts every Tuesday for updates and whatever else is on my mind at the time.

I’ll say right now that the “guess the theme” for next month should be pretty easy to guess and there is a fabulous no-prize to go along with it. Also if you’ve been following me on twitter I believe I already said what the theme is a couple weeks ago. But it’s been interesting so far, the most recent movie I watched was Hancock a couple days ago. I had forgotten how good the first half of that movie was, and the last half wasn’t quite as bad as I used to think it was. I’m not sure if I’m going to start on the Blade Trilogy or watch something more family friendly next.

There was one other thing that I was thinking about in the back of my mind, even though I’ve got plenty to watch for this year I bought the 5th and 6th seasons of Tales From the Crypt a few days ago. I realized that it fits with the overarching theme of this blog: video entertainment based on comics. It’s pretty far off from what I’ve narrowed down to focus on for this first year but I have high hopes that I will continue this blog after the first year, expanding into DVDs like all the animated Marvel and DC movies, and probably television shows. But then I wondered, what is the best way to go about doing a retro review for a television show? If I did an episode at a time, that would be way too many posts, especially for a long running series like Smallville. If I did one season at a time, that would be way too many episodes to watch for each post to keep it at two posts a week. Maybe I could just focus on however many episodes I’m able to watch in a week, plus a movie for the other post. But then again, I suppose I’m getting way ahead of myself. Right now I just need to focus on the 9 more movies I have to watch for this month. But if you have any thoughts on the matter, or if you want to guess next month’s theme, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Stay tuned for Thursday’s review of Catwoman to launch February’s theme. Until next time this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Should I watch Chronicle?

Even with having a Tuesday bonus review, I thought I’d still write up a short blog post like I’ve been doing every Tuesday. As far as a quick movie update/preview goes, I just got done with watching my rental haul, and I bought a bunch of movies for this month and later this year. I think I’ve spent a total of about $60 for the purposes of this blog. Aside from rental fees though, these are all movies that I bought because I enjoyed them in the first place, or a couple that were cheap and I was pretty sure I would like them. Coming up in the next couple weeks is my reviews of Super, Kick-Ass, Catwoman, and Spawn. And I picked up the Blade Trilogy, Hancock, Ghost Rider, and the Incredible Hulk to watch soon.

But the question of the blog is Chronicle. I only just recently learned about this movie from the City of Heroes message board. It looks pretty interesting, but the question I have is should I include it in a movie review blog about superheroes? Just going from what I see in the trailer, and a couple minor things I’ve heard online about it, here’s what I’ve got: It’s set pretty much in the real world using the “found footage” style like Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch Project. It involves three teenagers who gain superpowers in the traditional superhero sense of the word. They get telekinesis, invulnerability, flight, and possibly other similar minor powers. They don’t become superheroes with this ability, in fact at least one if not more of them become more or less a villain. There is the chance that one or two of the other kids step up to become a hero and stop him, but there are no costumes or secret identities.

So what do you think? I believe it comes out February 3rd. I already have more than enough movies that I plan to get to in the entire month of February. It does look like an interesting movie that I wouldn’t mind watching regardless of this blog. But that’s the question of the day. Do you think I should review Chronicle in this blog? Or do you think it looks too sci-fi, too unheroic, too anything to fall into the realm of superheroes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Until Next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.