All Star Superman 2011

One thing that I enjoy about this site is when I go into a movie completely blind. I’ve done a bit of research and have had help to create a very inclusive list of comic book and superhero movies, and yet when I actually choose one of the movies I’ve never seen before, I don’t seek out synopses, or watch trailers, I like to go into the movies completely blind, and this was the case with All Star Superman. Many of the Superman stories I enjoy the most are the ones that try to get to the heart of his humanity, and yet All Star Superman really embraces his alien nature more than just about anything I’ve seen before. I have to admit that at first it was quite offputting, but by the end of the movie there was enough heart in it to win me over.

The main arc of the plot is that Superman is tricked into flying into the sun by Lex Luthor with the intent of giving him a yellow sun radiation overdose which will eventually kill him. The rest of the movie is more or less about how Superman faces his inevitable death, and not anywhere near the same way as his death at the hands of Doomsday. He spends his final months doing the things he always wanted to do, like reveal his secret to Lois Lane and various other things, but along the way he’s faced with what feels like dozens of opponents that keep getting in his way.

The biggest problem I have with this movie is its complete unrelatability. When Superman casually says that he is keeping a sun eater as a pet, and he feeds him little suns that he creates on his cosmic anvil, that is just so incredibly unbelievable that it had me laughing hysterically. And there are many moments in this movie that are just like this. Not only that, but it moves at such a fast pace that there is hardly any time to linger on any of these ludicrous moments, like when Samson and Atlas come by from the future to have an arm wrestling match, and also trick Superman into helping them defeat the Ultra-Sphinx, and a fight with Parasite in the Metropolis jail where Parasite looks kind of like No-Face from Spirited Away, and a visit from two other Kryptonians who over the course of maybe five minutes: take over Metropolis, defeat Superman, contract Kryptonite poisoning from the debris they flew through in space, befriend Superman as they lay dying, and submit themselves into the Phantom Zone to escape certain death. And this is only halfway through the movie.

He totally made her foot pop.

But when the fluff is stripped away, the core of the story is still an interesting one, with the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, and the antagonistic relationship between Superman and Lex Luthor. It’s unfortunate that Lois is so much of a weak character in this story, when Lois is told the truth of Superman’s secret identity, she finds it hard to believe instead of reasoning it out afterwards. Not only that, but when Samson and Atlas challenges Superman’s relationship with her, she gamely flirts with them, and finally when Superman does leave, her response is merely to wait for him to return. I do kind of like the fact that in this version, Lex more or less befriends and trusts Clark Kent. But at the same time, I disliked the extremely clownish and clumsy version of Clark Kent, tripping and falling over things practically every few moments. While I did enjoy the moments of oafishness in Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent, in this version it was a little too much slapstick. It just seems like every part of Superman and Clark Kent is taken to the extreme.

Lex Luthor is also taken to the extreme in this movie, his intelligence is used in several instances where he’s a super genius to the extreme, able to create ultra advanced technology and infiltrate Superman’s Fortress of Solitude even while in jail, he’s shown more than once to be at the point where he is ready to accept his own death, but at least one of those times it’s just part of his calculating plan. I’ve said it many times already, but nearly everything in this movie is taken to the extremes. There are many great moments towards the end of the movie, and I do have to admit that I did enjoy many moments along the way, but several of those were bordering on the “so bad/cheesy it’s hilarious” variety. The animation is excellent as always, and the voice work is great too, although I thought James Denton as Superman was often a little too stoic and emotionless, yet another reason why in the end, I found this movie a little harder to relate to than other Superman stories. Even Jena afterwards said “This is the stupidest Superman movie I’ve ever seen”, and when I asked why, she said “because it had too much weird stuff in it.” While I disagree about the stupid part, I couldn’t agree more about “too much weird stuff”. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Iron Man Rise of Technovore

This is a home video animation produced by a collaboration between Sony Pictures Entertainment and anime studio Madhouse. It’s a follow up to the 12 episode Iron Man anime series, though it’s a stand alone story that I was able to follow without having seen any of the previous episodes. There were four different Marvel properties that were turned into anime series, though I think Iron Man seems like it would be the easiest transition from Western Animation to Japanese Animation considering anime has a prevalence of mecha similar to Iron Man and some of his enemies. It ended up being an interesting mix of the two mediums with the obvious Japanese style combined with some of the more American personalities. I loved it for the most part, although I thought some of the philosophizing was a little slow and overly cerebral.

The main thrust of the plot involves a new villain who has control over microscopic nanotechnology called Technovores that can invade and destroy organic material and control or destroy electronics. He uses this technology to disrupt the launch of Tony Stark’s new satellite, seemingly toying with both Iron Man and War Machine, leaving Rhodey dead in the aftermath. With Tony the only surviving witness of the attack, S.H.E.I.L.D. wants to keep him under wraps until they can get things sorted out, but instead he goes fugitive on them to try and solve the mystery himself, at one point meeting up with the Punisher while being chased by Black Widow, Hawkeye, and an army of S.H.E.I.L.D. mandroid robots.

Always love these helmet cam shots.

Most of the action in this movie tends to be Iron Man fighting against S.H.E.I.L.D. itself more often than him fighting against the Technovore and his minions which is interesting because even though he’s still giving it his all, there’s a lot more playfulness to it knowing that they’re all friends in the end, and also easily gives the impression that this isn’t the first time, nor will this be the last time that he’s gone against S.H.E.I.L.D.’s orders. For Nick Fury’s part, I think he went a little overboard in places considering that he should know better, though I did enjoy Hawkeye a lot more here than I did in the Avengers.

This being an anime, it wouldn’t be complete without some overly philosophical posturing, and nearly all of the scenes with the Technovore have it in spades. It’s in these scenes where I also noticed a lot of cost cutting animation techniques such as just showing a character’s torso and lower jaw, or their face from the nose up, which avoids having to animate the lip synch. I know that it’s a common technique but it was a lot more noticeable in this movie partly due to the contrast between the slow, static scenes with the Technovore and the fast paced, laser filled action sequences between Iron Man and his opponents. I also thought the design for the Technovore’s armor was a little too anime influenced with it’s very bishounen aka androgynous look, and also the design change at the end was jarring and evoked a certain popular anime which I won’t mention as it feels like it might be too spoilery. Aside from the character design, I did really appreciate the character’s backstory which I also won’t mention here. I thought it connected to the Marvel Universe very well.

One other pleasant surprise for me in this movie was the Punisher. He’s in the trailers and I thought he also looked a little too bishounen at first, though when I actually saw him in the movie it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I also thought that Frank Castle’s portrayal in this movie was great, he’s very much a badass, but he also helps out Iron Man in his own way. I think the entire sequence with his character was my favorite part of the movie. I also enjoyed Pepper Potts in this movie, who is on a constant quest for an uninterrupted vacation from the duties of Stark’s assistant. The voice actors did a great job at capturing the playfully antagonistic relationship that works so well for me in the live action movies while still showing that the two really do care for each other. It’s worth a watch if your a fan of anime and/or Iron Man, it won’t make it into any of my favorites lists, but I did enjoy watching it. It comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray on April 16th. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroes 2013

You can watch this doc for free until June 14th at PBS’s website.

Wonder Women is more or less a documentary about the history of Wonder Woman and her effect on feminism in America. It’s interesting how closely Wonder Woman has been connected to the feminist movement throughout the years. The documentary is presented as a series of interviews with both figures connected with the Wonder Woman character, like comic writer Gail Simone and actress Lynda Carter, as well as figures prominent in the feminist movement like Gloria Steinem and the lead singer of Bikini Kill. All of the people represented in this doc are interesting to listen to and presented a lot of information I never knew about. And all of it is connected with plenty of artwork from Wonder Woman comics animated in a somewhat motion comic-esque way.

It’s presented in a very chronological way, starting off with the comic’s origins in the 1940′s during the second World War and it’s unique depiction of a strong woman even though there are plenty of bondage related imagery. As there are so few female superheroes, and even fewer lead female superheroes, Wonder Woman has always stood out as the premier icon for strong women. But throughout a large segment of her publishing time she became more focused on romance than fighting. It’s interesting that it was actually the feminist movement of the 70′s led by Gloria Steinem that led to the comic book writers to bring her back to her superpowered roots. The doc briefly covers both that feminist movement, as well as the later punk feminist movement of the 90′s which brought about the term grrrl.

I think one of the most interesting segments is when they talk to Lynda Carter who played Wonder Woman and Lindsay Wagner who played the Bionic Woman both during an era of strong female leads in television. There wasn’t much of a discussion about movies, except for one woman who did a study on strong female characters in action movies. Of course, a large percentage of them were villains, and many of them died, often in a self-sacrificial way to save the man they loved. It is still a pretty sad state of affairs when there isn’t a single female-led superhero movie that isn’t awful, and an even bigger shame that a Wonder Woman movie project can’t get off the ground. Even though there is a Smallville/Arrow-esque Wonder Woman series slated for next year, that’s never a guarantee considering the last Wonder Woman series failed to get past the pilot stage, and it’s existence probably came about after this movie was filmed as it wasn’t mentioned.

There’s not only talk about Wonder Woman and feminism in general, there’s also a handful of interviews with women, young and old, who have been inspired by Wonder Woman in their own lives. I hate to say it, but these moments are probably the weakest part of the movie and weren’t all that inspiring. There was the obligatory very young girl, and also an immigrant who was getting her second Wonder Woman tattoo. One of the highlights of the movie was the great animation throughout. It’s very simple, as it consists of pre-existing artwork except for one funny little segment at the end credits, but it helps to add a lot of motion, and the style of animation often is quite fitting of the original subject, whether it’s the classic Wonder Woman comics, or punk rock minizines. My one complaint about the movie is that it is very short, though I believe that the PBS version was cut down from the original runtime by about 15-20 minutes or so, but it covered a lot of ground and really has me wishing they would get on with it and finally make a Wonder Woman live action movie. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Superman Unbound 2013

This is the latest DC Animation home video release coming May 7th. I’ve been a fan of every one of these movies that I’ve seen and I’m still dying to get around to the handful I haven’t seen yet. This one continues their run of quality releases following the Dark Knight Returns, though it didn’t quite win me over as much as that one did. This follows Superman and his cousin Kara and their struggle with the Brain Interactive Construct that’s going through collecting the information of the universe as well as cities he keeps as souvenirs including Krypton’s capital city of Kandor, and now he has his sights set on Earth. Superman is the only one that can save the planet and he needs the help of his cousin. The quality of animation and voicework were spot on as usual, but there was just something in it that just wasn’t quite the story I was interested in.

There is one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of these movies, especially the different Superman movies, and that is that the designs of the characters are so different from movie to movie. I know that every comic book artist has their own style and brings something different to the table, but for whatever reason I feel like these DC Animation movies are all connected more closely than that. Probably because even though they do have different character designs, they still have the same Bruce Timm look to them that nearly every DC animation has had since Batman: The Animated series. But this Superman, and especially this Lois Lane look so completely different than the designs used in All Star Superman which I watched not too long ago. It’s also a little weird due to the inconsistencies in what’s going on, which again is the same problem in the comics. But in All Star Superman, he reveals to Lois that Clark is Superman for the first time and in this movie, they’ve been secretly dating for over a year. It does get the information out quickly and painlessly, but it is a moment that bugs me temporarily.

One thing I did like about this movie is that it’s the first one I’ve had the chance to see that featured Kara, aka Supergirl. She was actually quite an interesting character here, she was older than Kal-El, but due to how they got there (something about a wormhole somewhere), she is currently younger than Superman but with his powers. But she still has his same morals, just a little less humanity. One of the random thugs in the beginning spells it out pretty plainly “The skirt’s the bad cop?!” But when it comes to the Braniac probe that crashes to Earth, she quickly reverts back to the scared little girl she was on Kandor when Brainiac took the entire city away from her. I think that Kara’s arc was the more interesting one even though she didn’t get a whole lot of screen time. I especially liked the brief interaction between her and Martha Kent and the mention of her secret identity wearing a brown wig and glasses. I think Lois Lane also suffered from the interesting, but underutilized female role in this movie. She is ready to take the relationship between her and Clark to the next level, but Clark is the one too scared to come out with it publicly. As another random little sidenote that bugged me, I never understood why they gave her violet eyes.

I loved this moment though.

But the heart of this movie is really the battle between Brainiac and Superman. Brainiac in this movie is a robotic organism that exists to catalogue all the information of the universe. But instead of merely doing that, his programming decided that he needs to be the sole source of that information and any additional sources are redundant, so they are destroyed after they have been recorded and collected. He has found a way to miniaturize entire cities which he keeps in an analogue of the solar systems placemarking the planets that have since been destroyed. He is the entire ship and directly commands an army of android drones. Brainiac is presented as an unstoppable force, though his androids are pretty easily dispatched by Superman. There is a lot of dialog between Brainiac and Superman about the differences between Brainiac’s ultimate knowledge and strength of a thousand planets vs. Superman’s pitifully primitive planet and weak emotional attachment to it. I also wasn’t a huge fan of how he ultimately defeated Brainiac, in a vaguely similar method as used in War of the Worlds.

As always, the voice acting here is great. I thought it was interesting to hear Deidrich Bader as Steve Lombard, the rival almost Anchorman-ish reporter. He reminded me both of the character I remember him from on the Drew Carey Show as well as the fact that he played the voice of Batman in Brave and the Bold. Aside from that, I did enjoy both Lois and Kara’s performances and I though both Superman and Brainiac were passable. The animation as always is excellent, and for some reason I was still a little surprised at the occasional scenes of blood. Nothing gory, but it’s still a little shocking to see in a Superman movie. It’s another great release from DC animation, and while I had a few issues with it I still enjoyed watching it and I imagine you will too. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Lego Batman the Movie: DC Heroes Unite

This is a home video release by DC Premier and Traveller’s Tales releasing on Bluray and DVD May 21st, and it’s actually rather interesting because most of this movie is drawn from the Lego Batman 2 video game. Many of the scenes may have been reanimated to improve the quality and make minor corrections, and there has also been some new material created for the connective scenes, but aside from that it’s directly taken from the video game. While there have been many movies based on video games, I believe this is the first video game turned directly into a movie. I’ve been a fan of the Lego series of video games ever since the first Lego Star Wars games were released on the Playstation 2, they have a very irreverent sense of humor and a lot of meta jokes based around the fact that they are in a Lego world and Batman is no different.

The basic story of the movie is that Lex Luthor and the Joker team up to take out Batman and Superman and in the process win Lex Luthor’s bid for the Presidential election. Meanwhile Batman and Robin are trying to figure out exactly what they’re up to so they can stop them, preferably alone without resorting to asking for help from the seemingly everpresent Superman. The best part of the movie is the sheer number of references to past Batman projects. The entire opening credits sequence is a Lego version of the 1989 Batman opening, complete with the lucky circumstance that this movie was directed by Jon Burton, they even were able to use both the Danny Elfman Batman score as well as the John Williams Superman score. There’s also references to the 60′s Batman movie and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight.

Aside from the many classic references to previous works, there is also a great number of visual gags based on the fact that the movie exists in a wholly Lego universe. Robin often is rebuilding his vehicles, and the main plot device used by the villains is a deconstructor, which pulls apart anything made of shiny black bricks. When liquid chemicals are spilled onto the floor, they become translucent studs. Money is represented by solid plastic coins and bills, and even a fire is represented by plastic Lego fire. But one of the greatest Lego-centric gags is when two characters are changing clothes in a purely Lego fashion.

The voice acting in the movie is just as stellar, aside from using big name voice talent which they often do in the Warner Premier animated movies they went with actors more well known in the voice acting community since they were originally cast for use in the video game. Clancy Brown reprised his role as Lex Luthor from many of the animated versions of Superman. Christopher Corey Smith does the voice of the Joker in a passable imitation of Mark Hamill’s famous interpretation of the character. Troy Baker does a fine job as Batman, and Travis Willingham hams it up as the shiniest boy scout Superman.

The animation is also very well done as could be expected from a Warner Premier title, but the real focus still goes right back to the humor. And honestly one of the best things about this movie is how kid friendly it is. There are plenty of the references that adults will get, but there are just as many random jokes and slapstick that kids will enjoy. Early on, Two Face uses a random chicken as a weapon, and there’s a recurring theme of Joker creating larger than life self portraits within the chaos he creates. I also think it’s interesting how the character of the Joker is handled overall in this movie. It seems like it’s a pretty decent balance of chaotic lunacy and clown gags alongside an actually quite brilliant master plan that’s still presented in a very Joker-esque fashion. It was a fun movie and it made me laugh countless times during its short duration, it’s a great film to watch for a fan of Batman and especially anyone with kids or anyone who’s just a kid at heart. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Iron Man 3 2013

This is the latest in the juggernaut that is Marvel Studios releases, and especially movies with Robert Downey Jr. in a metal suit. The early reviews were mostly blown away by the new sequel and as I had to wait an extra week for it to come out here in the States, I was starting to chomp at the bit to watch the movie. Of course, once it hit theaters around my neck of the woods, there started to be a few more rumblings of failure and a lot more opinion that this actually wasn’t the best of the trilogy. There were plot holes, and weak moments and ill-fated twists, and when I got the chance to watch the movie… I wasn’t quite sure what I really thought about it. It had it’s action moments, and Robert Downey Jr. doing what he does best as he has done in the past three movies including the Avengers, but there were also those plot holes and other things tugging away at the sides of my brain. I decided I couldn’t quite give the movie justice until I gave it a few days thought and watched the movie for a second time. 2D every time all the time for me FYI. I had an article previously where I talked about the Curse of Three, and while the impact has dwindled a bit with the release of The Dark Knight Rises, it hasn’t completely gone away and I still think there are weak elements in this movie that can definitely hinder the watching experience for some and completely ruin it for others. And fair warning, there may be spoilers in this review, I will try to be non-specific where I can, but I’m not going to dance around them if I need to call them out.

Before I get into too many details, I do want to mention that I was on the most recent episode of the Lambcast over at the Lamb where we discussed Iron Man 3 shortly after I had watched it. Check it out right over here. After seeing it again, interestingly one thing that kind of bugged me the most was a continuity/editing error. During the final fight, at one point Tony gets his leg sliced off and you can clearly see that the leg of the suit had been severed, but when he falls, he still has both legs and it is actually one of the suits he is physically in instead of a remote suit. I really wasn’t very much of a fan of all the remote suit stuff as well as the couple times when it was a misdirect for the audience to believe that Tony was in the suit when he actually wasn’t, even if it was then played off as a humorous moment.

One of the things I do respect this movie for is the fact that it really tries to get to the central theme that the metal suit is not Iron Man, Tony Stark himself is Iron Man. He remains out of the suit, or at the very least in his prototype suit which isn’t fully functional, for most of the movie. He is being brought down to the level he was at during the first movie and has to rely much more on his intelligence rather than his technology. But this also creates this effect where not only is he intelligent and resourceful, he can also kick some major ass, and so can Pepper. I can understand that he has to have some fighting skills, because even though being in the suit boosts his strength, he still has to have the agility and reflexes to pull off the basic moves which the suit then enhances. Even though he doesn’t have any extreme martial arts throwdowns, he does have quite a few impressive fighting skills that I felt like it was a bit of a stretch for him to have. Why couldn’t he just rely completely on his intelligence and resourcefulness, does he also have to be able to take people out with relative ease without technological help?

Another piece of the movie that I felt was shoehorned into the plot was the whole Christmas angle. It’s mentioned only three or four times during the movie, and there’s one or two Christmas songs, but I never really got a feeling that the movie takes place during Christmas, and I also never understood how that was relevant to the rest of the plot of the movie. I also wasn’t really fond of the whole narration at the beginning where the movie kind of starts in the climax (at least the first climax) then becomes a flashback to what’s really the start of the movie. Just start the movie already. I will say that one element that I was the most worried about when he showed up turned out to be handled excellently: the kid sidekick. In many movies the kid sidekick can be the kiss of death, Short Round, little Anakin, the kid in Superman III, but little Harley was a great foil for Tony Stark. He really felt a lot like a real kid, one who was quite intelligent for his age and also lives in an insecure home. I absolutely loved two moments out of the kid; the first is when he’s asking a string of questions about the Avengers, and the second was when he’s trying to guilt trip Stark and Tony calls him out on it because “we’re connected”. I also felt that he got just the right amount of screentime. He played a big part during the time he was on screen, but once Tony left Tennessee, we only get a couple brief follow ups which is all we need.

The secondary characters were hit and miss in this movie, I thought both Pepper Potts and Rhodey had a little bit more to do than in previous films, but I still thought both of them got short changed. Rhodey only has a couple brief scenes in the first half of the movie and they are mostly played for comic relief. When he gets a couple chances to really show some action chops, he gets taken out way too easily, and even in the final battle he only gets a couple brief moments to shine. I think Pepper fares better, especially because she gets to don the armor momentarily and it’s an awesome moment where she’s able to save Tony for a change. And especially awesome in that it happens at least twice during the movie. It’s rare these days to see many strong female characters in superhero movies and it’s great that Marvel has two of them right now in Pepper Potts and Black Widow. But at the same time I hate that while she gets to play the strong, capable woman, she’s also relegated to being the damsel in distress as well as the bait. Sometimes in this movie it’s one step forward and two steps back.

I haven’t even gotten to the villains yet. One of the biggest love it or hate it moments in this movie is the Mandarin reveal. Since I don’t follow the comics and my only experience with the Mandarin was in the pretty poor animated Invincible Iron Man I was not at all mad about the bait and switch. I thought it was intelligent, funny, and amazing that it was such a surprise in this day and age. It really helped to quiet down all the early complaints about Ben Kingsley not being Asian. I did have a bit of a problem with the overtaking of the airwaves. With television being available through so many different sources, broadcast, cable, satellite, internet, it’s harder and harder to believe that someone can remotely take over every single station at once, it was especially annoying because it felt like this had been going on for months now and yet it was still a complete and total shock to everyone working at the television station? As for the lava-men-like Extremis projects? I liked the visual representation of how they glowed red, but I thought that the pseudo-science of how they actually worked was too implausible. Instead of nanobots, which is still fairly far fetched, they explained that it was an empty slot in the brain that they replaced with new DNA. The amount of energy needed to repair that level of damage and/or create that much heat needed to melt metal is not only massive, but very hard to imagine as something physically able to do by the human body. On top of that, Guy Pearce’s presence as a villain left something to be desired. I thought he handled the slimy businessman/potential suitor role fairly well, but he just wasn’t menacing enough in the end, and his plan was poorly defined. It is there, and can be explained, but it shouldn’t really have to be explained, it should be fairly simple and obvious.

He’s not the Mandarin that I used to know, even though I never knew any Mandarin.

Iron Man 3 had a lot of action, a lot of humor, and a lot of drama. But I don’t think it got them in quite the right combination. It’s still a pretty impressive Marvel movie with a lot of great moments, and I’ll never get tired of seeing Robert Downey Jr. playing Tony Stark, but at the end of the day there was just a lot to be desired. This movie had a lot to live up to after the massive success of the Avengers and the relative disappointment of Iron Man 2. And while I’m one of the fewer people that thought Iron Man 2 was a great movie, I think Iron Man 3 falls right around the same level if not a little bit lower. I’ll happily watch it again once it hits home video, but for now I’m waiting for Man of Steel. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

I will easily admit to being a Scooby-Doo fan when I was younger. I watched many episodes of the Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo as well as A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, alongside the older episodes. They were goofy, silly, campy, and fun, but I enjoyed them. I also watched plenty of other Hanna Barbera properties back when Cartoon Network was new and filled most of its programming slots with classic cartoons and only a handful of fresh ones. Among them was of course Blue Falcon and Dynomutt either in their own show or one of the many Hanna-Barbera mashups like the Laff-a-Lympics. Scooby-Doo has never really seemed to completely go away, there’s always some new TV show or an endless stream of straight-to-home-video movies like this one. But many of the newest episodes and movies have had a lot sharper sense of humor while still retaining some of the goofiness and campiness the classic fans love. This one is no exception, there’s a lot of smart humor alongside the typical slapstick antics of Mystery Inc. It feels like it’s been ages since I’ve seen an episode or movie about Scooby-Doo, probably not since the live action movie, but I really enjoyed this movie, especially because of all the little background references and such.

The basic plot isn’t much different from a typical Scooby-Doo plot. There’s a mystery with a monstrous villain causing havoc at a comic book convention. Although since it’s Hanna-Barbera and not Marvel/DC (even though it’s produced by Warner Premier who also does the DC animation movies) all of the background characters and cosplay costumes are of classic Hanna-Barbera characters, and it’s so much fun to spot all the lesser known properties like the Impossibles, the Herculoids, and the Wonder Twins alongside mainstays like the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Space Ghost. On top of that, they also homage the Adam West Batman by having the old actor who used to play Blue Falcon be a washed up star making a living selling autographs at these conventions. There’s also a reboot of the property in the works by a flashy female-Michael Bay type director making an edgy and dark version of the character. I also think it’s interesting that the voice actor who plays the new Blue Falcon was Deidrich Bader who did the voice of Batman in one of his several animated shows. I loved a lot of the satire about the Transmogrifier movie titles and the fact that she explains that she was allowed to make a movie where they just blow stuff up without having to worry about a plot.

If you’re a fan of the classic Scooby-Doo mysteries, there’s still plenty of the standard formula here to enjoy. There’s plenty of red herring characters to keep you guessing as to who the real villain is, since nearly everyone has their own possible motivations. There’s also a bit of the classic chase scene, as well as the typical moment where Scooby and Shaggy are trying to avoid waking something up and clumsily toss over a bunch of loose light bulbs which Scooby manages to catch. They also get the chance to play a little bit with the unmasking scene at the beginning of the movie. And of course there’s the scene where Shaggy and Scooby eat an inhuman amount of food. They are all Scooby-Doo mainstays that almost feel like they have to be there for it to be a Scooby movie, though thankfully they don’t linger on any of them.

Just a small sampling of some of the background cosplay characters in this movie.

The animation is pretty standard, it’s pretty comparable to the typical DC animated movies, and of course there’s the absolute ton of background touches. Every scene in the convention has posters and cosplay attendees in the background of nearly every Hanna-Barbera character imaginable. Including the ones I already mentioned, there’s also Atom Ant, Speed Buggy, Frankenstein Jr., Hong Kong Phooey, Harvey Birdman, Josie and the Pussycats, Magilla Gorilla, Top Cat, and several more. The general scenes about the comic book convention were pretty fun as well, with Daphne having an obsession with beanie baby-like collectibles, Fred is excited about the new Blue Falcon movie, and surprisingly enough it’s Velma who’s completely uninterested in the geek-fest.

It feels like it’s been a long while since I’ve seen a Scooby-Doo cartoon, but watching this immediately brought back memories of the classic cartoons, but with a lot more intelligent jokes mixed in with the classic camp. There is a whole lot to like in this movie both for adult fans of the original cartoons as well as kids who are used to a quicker pace and better animation. For her part, Jena really enjoyed the movie and sat through it twice. The first time with just me and her, and the second time because my wife wanted to see it as well. It’s also pretty short running just over an hour long. If you have kids, or are a fan of comic books and classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, it’s worth a watch. It was a total nostalgia fest for me, but it was also an enjoyable little movie on top of all that as well. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Justice League: Doom 2012

I figured it was time for me to take another trip into the animated DC Universe, this time it’s Justice League: Doom. It still surprises me how many of these things are out there and how many I still have yet to see. This movie is centered around a plot to destroy the entire Justice League using stolen plans initially created by Batman but altered by the Legion of Doom. Of course, this isn’t the LoD from the old Superfriends cartoon, though their base does emerge from a body of water during it’s initial reveal. The members of the LoD are very different, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. The action is up to the usual par, including the level of peril. The first thing I noticed with this movie was also that it included the voicework of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Tim Daly as Superman who really solidified their roles as those two during the 90′s animated series and various other works in the interim.

The essential plot of this movie is based around the newly created Legion of Doom trying to destroy the Justice League as well as half the planet. Each member of the JLA is handled separately after they’ve split up following a brief battle with the Ace gang. Each member of the LoD is chosen specifically as being a noted enemy of each JLA member. Martian Manhunter is paired up with some evil Martian who I’ve never heard of and have forgotten his name. The Flash has Mirror Master, Wonder Woman has Cheetah, Green Lantern has Star Sapphire, Superman has Metallo, and Batman has Bane. The one problem I had with this is during the final battle at the end, no one ever switches partners. Instead they stick with their own nemeses. One other slight problem I had was that because there are so many villains, the ones I wasn’t familiar with like Mirror Master, Star Sapphire, and the leader Vandal Savage were a little harder to get a feel for. Especially Vandal Savage who I had never heard of before and seemed like his only powers were intelligence and immortality, being mutated by a meteorite back when he was still a neanderthal, and amassing an immeasurable fortune over the passing centuries. It’s an origin that felt a little too far fetched for my tastes, and so did his plan of destroying half the world for some reason.

I will say that aside from the ending, I did enjoy watching the individual threats against the JLA play out seemingly successfully. I won’t go into full details into each one, but the way each of the traps were set up and sprung felt very ingenious. But my problem comes with when they were explained. As it played out in the beginning it worked for me, but when all the individual details were explained, several of them felt a little too meticulous and convoluted for their own good, especially Green Lantern’s trap which revolved around a very specific set of circumstances based around a psychological profile for him to react exactly the way that they needed him to. The ones that I thought worked the best were the more simple ones with a touch of cleverness in pulling them off like Superman’s and the Flash’s traps. I also thought it wrapped up a little too quickly and easily when it was revealed that all the plans were concocted by Batman as a failsafe.

The voicework as usual was excellent, it was a little bit of an adjustment for Bane’s voice which was a bit of a Luchador, but all the rest were handled very well and it was great hearing Conroy and Daly reprise their roles. I also thought it was great to hear Nathan Fillion reprise his role as the Green Lantern from the Emerald Knights movie. The animation was also up to the usual high standards of Warner Premier’s DC animation, especially during the many different fight scenes and action setpieces. Overall, it was another enjoyable movie, but I definitely had a handful of problems with some of the plot lines and villains. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Man of Steel 2013

More than any other movie this summer, the one I’ve been looking forward to the most was Man of Steel, and at least right now just getting home from the theater, it did not disappoint. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, but my hopes were high coming off of all the glorious trailers and the incredible cast. Even though it was treading on yet another origin story, I was willing to go with it. With Zack Snyder behind the helm, I was hoping for some visually amazing battles, and with Christopher Nolan overseeing the story, I was hoping for some real character depth. In my opinion, I got both. There may be some problems that come into my head after the fact, but at the moment I just had an amazing time at the movie theater, this review will likely have some spoilers so if you haven’t seen the movie. Go see it! Then come back and read my thoughts on it.

The opening sequence starts off with a bang, spending a lot of time on planet Krypton before it’s destruction. Russell Crowe as Jor-El is absolutely fantastic as the Kyrptonian scientist warning the council of the planet’s impending doom and even has a few great fight scenes. The visuals on Krypton itself are gorgeous. I loved the not-so-little creature designs and the look of the floating metal computers. Crowe’s later portrayal as the pseudo-holographic Jor-El was also just as great both with his moments with his son as well as the funny sequence in Zod’s ship with Lois, and his sort-of showdown with Zod at the end.

In these superhero movies, the strength of the movie is often determined by the strength of the villain, and this movie has two great villains. Technically there is essentially the same three generals as there were in the first two Superman movies. But instead of being named Ursa, the female second in command was name Faora, and Non was essentially just a large Kryptonian who was never even seen outside of his armor, he was just much larger than Faora. And like in Superman II, I think I enjoyed Faora more than Zod, especially the little face-offs with the Colonel. But Zod, while a little over the top at times had a great presence about him, and his actions felt justified based on the way Krypton was presented in the movie. Zod was born and bred to protect Krypton and its people as a soldier. I initially thought that the entire plan of terraforming Earth to become more like Krypton was an odd choice considering that it would reduce their abilities. But as a soldier with a singular focus, it makes sense that he would want Krypton back as close as possible to the way it was, because that’s what he knows and that is what he was sworn to protect.

The one thing that this movie gets right head and shoulders above any previous movie, and even many superhero movies in the past several years is the fight scenes. This is how Superman rolls yo. The super speed effect used here looks beautiful and feels more accurate. There’s no long motion blur, and yet there’s still a sense of movement from one place to another, it doesn’t feel like they’re teleporting, it looks like they are movie as fast as a Kryptonian should. On top of that, the level of collateral destruction is that of a Roland Emmerich disaster film. But where those movies were just about the spectacle, this movie has the spectacle as well as the story and characters to back them up.

There are a few changes to the Superman mythos in this movie, and I have to say that I agree with them. At least at this point in time. The first big one is that Lois Lane lives up to her star reporter title immediately. She tracks down Superman’s secret identity before he even has his superhero identity. I really like the way that the early part of the movie handled his young adulthood as a drifter who can’t resist helping people in danger with his abilities thus forcing him to move on. There was also the matter of Jonathan Kent, which was hinted at during the moment in the trailer where young Clark asks if he should have just let the kids in the bus die rather than reveal his strength to them and he says “maybe”. For this Jonathan Kent, the most important thing is to protect his family, and in order for him to do that, Clark must keep his secret at all costs. And that even comes into play during a later emotional flashback which I thought fit perfectly with the way Pa Kent was set up.

There is a bit of non-linear storytelling, though I felt it was kept to a minimum. It’s generally just several flashbacks at various points in his childhood. I also really liked all the little touches that fans of Superman can spot, like his childhood friends Pete Ross and Lana Lang, as well as various Lexcorp trucks in the background. I even recognized Lumbard as one of the reporters at the Daily Planet who was also in All-Star Superman. There were also a few other names that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place my finger on them. I really hope that this movie does well at the box office, because I feel this is a very strong start for a franchise. I loved it and can’t wait to see it again. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

This movie was sort of billed as a sequel to the animated Superman/Batman Public Enemies, although it really is a stand-alone piece with only a brief callback to President Luthor’s impeachment to tie it to the previous movie. I hadn’t really heard much about this movie compared to some of the other DC animation so I really didn’t know what to expect, other than Darkseid considering the title of the movie is Apocalypse even though they went with the traditional spelling of the word rather than the typical comic book spelling of Apokolips. But even with the Superman & Batman title, this really could have been called Supergirl: Apokolips, as she is the main focus of the movie and Batman doesn’t get much screen time at all. But I am a big fan of Supergirl as a character so I really enjoyed this movie and it quickly rose as one of my favorite DC animations. From the great tone that’s set early on to the amazing action sequences towards the end, it’s really an all around great movie and one to check out if you haven’t seen it yet.

I think the biggest selling point for me about this movie is by far the dialogue. There are so many great Whedonesque jokes in this movie that had me laughing, not only that but there is a great familial feel to the relationship between Kal-El and Kara. It’s helped by the fact that this is another movie where Tim Daly and Kevin Conroy reprise their roles as Superman and Batman. And they are joined by Summer Glau, probably best known as River from Firefly, as Supergirl. Another recent animated movie featuring Supergirl was Superman Unbound, and while I thought the character was great in that movie, Glau really knocked it out of the park in this one. I loved the early scenes where she was acting very naïve and speaking Kryptonian, something that I thought was an excellent touch and also something I can’t recall having been done that way before. There was also a great scene where she and Clark go shopping where she takes on the typical high school girl role, and towards the end when stronger emotions come into play, she handles herself just as well.

One complaint I often have with these movies is the runtime, they almost all clock in at 75 minutes which often feels extremely short. Many of the movies pack so much into the runtime that they feel like they are rushing through the story, trying to pack as much into the movie as possible so that it all feels too underdeveloped. I think this movie really hits that balance right. There is a lot of stuff going on, but it all feels like it’s given enough development that it doesn’t feel as rushed or as packed as some of the other titles, like All-Star Superman especially. There’s a few moments that are a little too obvious, but there are also some nice little surprises here and there.

Because evil = sexy. Always.

The voice acting in this movie is a real standout. Besides the three main heroes, the voices of the villains are quite good as well. My favorite had to have been Ed Asner as Granny Goodness, he just has such a great voice and channels the right tone. Darkseid is another great voice with a deep smooth undercurrent of menace and yet always calm. The rest of the characters were good as well, though there weren’t any other stand outs. Before watching this movie, my favorite action sequence in DC Animation was the battle between Batman and Superman in the Dark Knight Rises part 2, and while this doesn’t top that one, it comes in a pretty close second. Not only that, but there are two great action scenes, not just one.

While I feel like I can’t say enough good things about this movie, I actually find it hard to point out anything else specific to write about. There are a couple downsides to the movie, but I personally felt they were both minor. One is the character that becomes “evil” and uses it as an excuse to dress extra-sexy, although I think that this was at least set up earlier in the movie that she does have a tendency towards dressing that way when left unchecked by Kal-El acting as her father figure. The other is the over-awesomeness of Batman. He’s there alongside these other super powered beings and he holds his own in terms of strength rather than ingenuity. He does show some great resourcefulness as well, which I enjoyed, but I did have problems with some of the fighting sequences involving Batman. Aside from that, this has quickly become one of my favorite DC animated movies right alongside Dark Knight Returns and Under the Red Hood. It’s worth checking out if you get the chance to. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Tiger and Bunny: The Beginning 2012

This was originally a successful anime series in 2011, and then after its series run, they decided to take the first couple episodes, add some filler and a new third act and bill it as a movie. Now, I haven’t seen the series just yet, but based on this movie, I really want to. The basic premise is that 45 years ago people with special abilities started to appear that were called NEXT, many of those people started working with the government as a hero force. Now, it has turned into this psuedo-reality competition complete with corporate sponsors, a TV station that is dedicated to filming their exploits, and they even turned it into a reality competition complete with points for their heroic deeds. Overall, it felt like a pretty fresh take on the superhero genre and I thought it was quite enjoyable. And I did watch this movie in the original Japanese with English subtitles.

The main character of the movie is the “aging” hero Kotetsu who goes by the name Wild Tiger. He’s a bit of a typical down-on-his-luck/comical anime character. His wife is dead and his daughter is staying with his mother due to his unpredictable schedule. There’s the very cliched moment where he is running late to his daughter’s skating recital, or whatever it was due to the fact that his original sponsor has backed out and his new sponsor is creating the very first superhero team with newcomer Barnaby, who Tiger nicknames Bunny. Barnaby is a very aloof hero who is more concerned with playing the game to get the most amount of points and TV ratings than actually saving people or even socializing with the other heroes. He’s the hardest character to really empathize with because he spends most of the movie being a fairly unlikable character, even though he does have some redeeming traits and a tragic-yet-mysterious backstory. They both end up having the same power called the hundred power, which multiplies their strength and speed by a hundred times, but only lasts for five minutes.

The other heroes are a bit more of a mixed bag. The one that I liked the least is the hero called Fire Emblem. He is a horrifyingly gay stereotype who is more concerned with grabbing the other male heroes’ butts than with fighting crime, and is always making weird kissy faces. One other minor character that I really did like was Origami Cyclone who never really does any fighting, but is more concerned with being in the background while others are doing their heroics so that his sponsors get precious screentime. There’s also Blue Rose whose sponsor is Pepsi Nex and she has ice powers. She is also just as concerned with doing commercials for her sponsor as she is with heroing. There are a couple others including the top hero Sky High and the slightly oafish strongman Rock Bison. I also liked the fact that all the brands are actual brands like Pepsi, Bandai, and UStream.

I think the strongest aspect of this movie that I enjoyed was the fact that it reminded me a little of the Tick, in that it spent just as much time with the heroes’ lives outside of just the fighting crime elements. The most interesting parts of the movie are the struggles with the sponsors, or the TV show producer who equally gives them tips and information on what the criminals are doing, but is also just as concerned with things like postponing a capture so they can squeeze in a commercial break to increase the tension. There’s also a fun scene that reminded me a little bit of the Incredibles where Kotetsu is being shown his new suit created by a technician who talks so quietly there actually isn’t any voice actor for him, only subtitles, and he shows how much more durable Kotetsu’s new mech-styled suit is compared to his older spandex-type suit.

The villains of the movie are a bit more of a mixed bag. It starts off with a trio of generic robbers, then there’s a kid who’s just grown into his own NEXT powers to control any inanimate object he touches. Of course, the kid part of the equation doesn’t show up right away as he initially controls a giant iron statue. The final villain is the most interesting, at least as far as his powers go. He has the ability to switch places with any person that he can see. It’s a very unique ability and it works great in this context, especially regarding the way that the heroes eventually capture him. Really the only problem I had with this movie is the fact that it is subtitled, but there’s so much information flying around at parts with the reality show graphics which are mostly in English that it was hard to keep track of everything. But aside from that, I enjoyed this movie quite a bit and want to look up the series. It’s really worth a look if you’re a fan of anime. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Flashpoint Paradox 2013

While I haven’t been able to make it to the theaters these past couple weeks to catch up on a lot of the big superhero movies, I did manage to watch DC’s latest animated venture The Flashpoint Paradox which manages to continue The Dark Knight Returns’ trend of pushing the limits of a PG-13 rating with a very adult story and some graphic violence. That said, I’m a big sucker for time travel, and especially timeline altering movies. I always loved those episodes of Star Trek, and I even quite liked the first Butterfly Effect. This is right alongside one of those with a great alternate timeline brought about by Professor Zoom using his super speed to go back in time and alter something, and somehow the Flash retains his memories of his former life, but not his former powers. In this reality, his mom is alive, but Aquaman and Wonder Woman are fighting a war that’s about to destroy the entire Earth. The scale of this movie is pretty epic, the violence is devastating, the themes are mature, and it does great justice to the character the Flash. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, and it probably won’t be the last, but this has come close to being my favorite DC Animation once again.

The alternate timeline is an interesting one, going into a few minor/early spoilers in this reality it was Bruce Wayne who died that night in Crime Alley and his father Thomas who took up the call to justice as Batman. Though he’s much closer to the Punisher in terms of his violence, use of guns, alcoholism, and five o’clock shadow. Both Wonder Woman and Aquaman are waging a war against the rest of the Earth to spread the glory of Themyscera/Atlantis until they formed an alliance through adultery. And when Aquaman’s wife tried to take her fury out on Wonder Woman, she paid the ultimate price and Aquaman’s vengeance turned against the Amazons. There are a handful of others, but I’ll leave those for you to find out.

One of the things that struck me the most in this movie is the level of violence in it. It kicks off in practically the opening scene with Barry Allen as a young boy seeing his dead mother. It’s not that graphic, but I thought it was quite powerful, especially the transition into night when the police come and Barry is still standing in the same spot. Later in the movie when it comes to the full on battle scene between the technologically advanced forces of Atlantis, the powerful Amazons led by Wonder Woman, and the Resistance made up of lower tier superheroes there are some shocking deaths including a gunshot straight through a character’s head. Honestly, it makes me wonder about the ratings system. It’s rated PG-13, and while it doesn’t have any bad language, it has I think a similar level of violence that’s in Akira. And if it holds true to the typical nature of clueless retailers like Wal-Mart, it will likely end up in the family section next to the other more kid-friendly DC and Marvel animated titles.

This is a PG-13 image, right?

There are plenty of side-characters and alternate characters in this movie, though most of the lesser known ones (at least as far as I know) are unchanged. This is probably due to the fact that only a small portion of the audience recognize them in the first place, and an even smaller portion of the audience would be able to tell the difference if they had changed. A couple I recognized from my more limited background were Grifter from the WildC.A.T.S. and Deathstroke. I also recognized the name Etrigan the demon, but I know absolutely nothing about him. It reminds me a bit of Batman/Superman Public Enemies where they throw a bunch of characters into the mix, and fans of the characters will pick out their favorites, and those who don’t know the difference are kept in the dark, rarely even getting a name to go with the face.

The voice acting and animation are brilliant as always. Michael B. Jordan comes in to do a great version of Cyborg, Kevin McKidd works well as the beaten down Thomas Wayne, and Justin Chambers really holds the movie together as the Flash. And even though it’s a small role, it’s always great to hear Kevin Conroy as Batman in the true reality in the beginning of the movie, and Nathan Fillion once again as the Green Lantern. It was great to see something done well with the Flash and I think something along these lines would work well for the Flash movie that DC is promising in 2016. It has the right mix of sci-fi, action, and drama. I really enjoyed it and absolutely recommend it to anyone who is a fan of the Flash or DC in general. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

R.I.P.D. 2013

While I have heard all the generally bad reviews for this movie already, barring a couple, I went into this movie really wanting to like it. I felt like the MIB parallels would be there, but they wouldn’t really bother me. And while I was right about that part, the only problem I had was that the movie as a whole never really stood out as anything special. Not in the action department, the acting, the romance, not even the comedy. It was a generally mediocre movie that I do admit made me chuckle a few times so it’s not all bad. I’m also going to refrain from making any of the obvious play on words from the title of R.I.P.D. so there’s that.

The first thing I am going to do, and yet not going to do is compare this movie to Men in Black. Yes, it’s a sci-fi buddy cop movie with a grizzled old detective that’s ready to retire and doesn’t want a partner, yet he’s forced to partner with a hot shot young rookie, but isn’t that every other buddy cop movie out there too? Ryan Reynolds plays that hot shot young rookie who just recently got killed by his partner Kevin Bacon who seems to be playing a lot of these type of roles lately like he did in Super and X-Men First Class. He’s not a golden boy though because he did some under the table stuff on his partner’s suggestion so he gets convinced into opting out of the judgment gates in favor of a 50 year haul in the R.I.P.D. in order to get a favorable recommendation. Jeff Bridges plays a hard to understand lawman from the old west, and while the audience is initially led to believe that he’s one of the best. We later find out that he apparently has made many mistakes due to his much longer than 50 year term. For the most part he knows the way things go, but he ends up being not much of a mentor. It’s played a bit like he’s just been doing the routine since nearly everything that happens on this case is quite new to him. This actually makes for an interesting twist on the typical buddy cop system except for the fact that it’s never actually presented that way, it’s just something that I inferred based on the end result of the movie, and that just doesn’t work for me. If he’s supposed to be the know-it-all mentor that he presents himself as, there’s just too many things that felt like he should have known about that he’s never seen before.

Another thing this movie uses from the buddy cop genre is the comedy beats. One of the most frequently used is the fact that to everyone who isn’t R.I.P.D. their true identities are masked. So Reynolds looks like an old Asian man and Bridges looks like a supermodel. I found this funny in a couple instances, but for the most part I found it rather stupid. The point of having their identities be masked is twofold. One is so they can’t contact anyone from their former life, which makes sense until everyone from their former life is dead as would be the case for an old west sheriff. Two is so that they better blend into the real world, except for the fact that being a supermodel actually gets in the way of their investigations much more often than it helps them, and could have been used much better for comedy rather than using the annoyingly ever-present music cue of “Who’s That Lady” every time someone comes to hit on him.

I think one part that bugged me the most about this movie was the badly developed romantic subplot. Reynolds’ wife barely gets any screen time before his death, he tries to contact her once at his own funeral with no success, they think that Kevin Bacon is trying to sleep with her, but they spend nearly the entire movie apart. And the payoff at the end is very weak and doesn’t even make that much sense. She is the one that is sacrificed so that the dead can walk the Earth, thus fulfilling the “blood of my enemy” or similar quote from the ancient artifact. Another thing was that it was entirely too predictable. I do have to admit that I knew Kevin Bacon played the villain from the get go, but from the first scene where they make a big deal about his charm bracelet I knew that he was dead and that charm was what was keeping him protected from the R.I.P.D. And from the moment they put all the weird gold chunks in the evidence locker I knew that the plan was to gather all the pieces of this artifact at R.I.P.D. H.Q. And make a big assault to get them all in one go. On top of that, there’s too many plot conveniences like the macguffin artifact in question, but also the other artifact that happens to freeze all the R.I.P.D. officers while leaving the other deados perfectly unscathed. I also never got the part where they explained why as soon as someone villainous died and stayed on Earth that they became this hideously deformed creature with superhuman size and strength, it almost felt like I was watching a CGI version of the Toxic Avenger.

There were a few things that I enjoyed about this movie, I did like the chemistry between Reynolds and Bridges once they started getting into it. I liked the relationship between Bridges and Mary Louise-Parker, I guess you would call her the R.I.P.D. chief of police and I also quite enjoyed her character overall and wish she would have gotten a bit more screen time. I think the comedy was hit more often than miss for me, but I also don’t think there was enough comedy in the movie overall. I didn’t have that much of a problem with the CGI, though it did look more dated than it should have, it reminded me a lot of the giants in Jack the Giant Slayer, though the fact that the deados were somewhat etherial and unreal in concept probably helped me to give it a little more leeway. It wasn’t an awful movie, and from what I have heard I should have expected less, but I still hoped for more. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

For a little while, I’ve actually wanted to allow other people to share their opinions about superhero movies more than just in the comments section. And while I’d rather not post someone’s opinion on a movie that I haven’t seen or reviewed yet because I am still adamant in my quest to watch and review every superhero movie I can find, I thought it would be interesting to get someone else’s opinion on a movie that I’ve already reviewed. I’m sure sometimes it will be quite different, and in some cases it will be very similar. If you’re interested in sharing your opinion on a superhero movie, just let me know, especially if your opinion differs from my own. But today’s opinion comes from someone with similar tastes as me, and I often use him as a good estimation of whether or not I will like a movie more than just the general critic consensus and he’s got plenty of reviews under his belt over at Today I Watched A Movie.

I promised Bubbawheat several months ago that I’d do a guest review for him, and I’m just now getting around to it. In our discussion about which movie I should choose, my original idea was to go for a comic-based movie that he hadn’t done yet, but he suggested that if I offered a second opinion on one he HAD already done, then that’d be much better.

I decided to tackle a DC animated direct-to-video movie, since they’re usually a little too short to be featured on my own website. When I happened across LEGO Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite (what a ridiculously complicated title, eh?) at Redbox, I was pretty excited to find out that Bubbawheat had already written about it, because that meant that I would get to write about it, too!

My love for LEGO began way back in elementary school, when I found out my best friend had an entire room of his house dedicated to them. There had to be tens of thousands of them in there. I see people complain all the time about how bad it hurts to step on LEGO, but I’m pretty sure my feet were trained to withstand the pain thanks to all the hours I spent up there, as well as with my own sets at home.

I didn’t get an entire room of my house to use for LEGO, though. I couldn’t even play with them in my own bedroom. Our house had a lot of shag carpeting, and my mom didn’t want any pieces to get lost down in there and sucked up in the vacuum, so every day after school I’d push my giant Rubbermaid boxes filled with LEGO down the hall to the living room to play. Unfortunately, I also had a younger sister who, since the living room was considered fair game for everyone, was free to steal the exact pieces I was looking for to finish my Aquanauts secret base.

As I got older, I stopped playing with them, and I eventually gave them all away. Even so, LEGO still hold a special place in my memory, and they always will. My mom actually gave me a set last Christmas for old times sake because she “missed buying them” for me each year. So now there’s a little LEGO mining truck sitting beside my computer as I type this up.

I have to admit my first reaction to The LEGO Movie that’s coming out soon was a negative one. I thought it sounded pretty stupid…that is, until I saw the trailer. Ever since then, my inner 8-year-old has been jumping up and down in the back seat of my mind yelling, “Is it here yet? Is it here yet?” I’m so glad I get to use my movie review blog as a cover to go see it on opening day.

Anyway, to hold myself over until then, I decided to give this LEGO Batman movie a shot. I have to say, I’m glad I did. Normally I take notes during movies and flesh them out a little afterwards for my reviews on TIWAM, but this movie captivated my attention from beginning to end, and as a result, my text document was still completely empty when the movie ended!

I knew this movie would probably be funny, but I didn’t know I was going to be laughing the whole way through. It had an unexpected silly playfulness to it. Underneath all of the witty dialog and the brick-based sight gags, though, was a pretty smartly written story that showed they had really put some effort into it. I read in Bubbawheat’s review that it’s basically just all of the cutscenes from one of the LEGO Batman video games strung together. I’m not very familiar with the games, but I would have had no idea that’s where this came from if I hadn’t read his review before watching the movie.

All of the characters were played up as stereotypes of themselves. Superman often referred to himself in the third person, usually while bragging about how great he was. Batman tried his best to keep to himself and be serious all the time. Robin, however, was the breakout character for me. The way he constantly tried to act cool, only to be reminded quickly of how dumb everyone else thought he was, completely stole the show.

Probably the best thing about the movie was the way they utilized LEGO in almost everything, from buildings to vehicles, and not always in the way you’d expect it to be. (There was a chandelier near the beginning of the film that was made out of LEGO skeleton arms, for instance.) What I especially loved was the amount of detail that went into it, with many of the bricks having scratches and scuff marks. My only wish is that EVERY building had been made from LEGO, but that’s a minor complaint at best.

Like I mentioned earlier, the length of this movie is partly what kept me from giving it a shot on my own blog. It turned out to be the perfect length that it needed to be, however…even though I did find myself wishing it wouldn’t end.

All in all, it was a silly, fun, nostalgic time, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to talk about it here. Until next time, I’ll turn things back over to Bubbawheat. Thanks for reading, and be sure to follow Flights, Tights and Movie Nights if you don’t already!

I’ve viewed and reviewed a lot of DC Animation movies, but I haven’t gotten around to nearly as many Marvel Animation features. There aren’t quite as many of them, and they aren’t quite as high quality as their DC counterparts, but they are still often times an enjoyable diversion. I saw Planet Hulk for the first time a couple years ago when I was on a big animation kick and was going through most of the Marvel and DC Animated titles that were out at the time, and of the Marvel releases, this one was my favorite, even though there was one major problem I had. This movie is Planet Hulk, and of course the Hulk is the main character in it, but it is not the Hulk that I’ve come to know. The story is not what I would expect the Hulk to fit into, and I don’t recognize any name in the voice cast outside of Kevin Michael Richardson. But it still manages to be a fun watch and worth a look while you’re waiting for the next DC title to come out.

One of the biggest hurdles for me to get over while watching this movie is that the Hulk is not the version of the Hulk that I’ve come to know through cartoons, TV shows, and movies. While the movie tries to ease you into it, there’s a mention of Bruce’s name at the beginning, and Hulk quickly goes on a rage induced rampage. But shortly after he lands on this alien planet, he stops being the pure being of anger and fury. Instead, he has many moments of clarity, intelligence, and compassion and all of this without a single appearance by Bruce Banner. It’s something that takes some getting used to, and it was well into my first viewing before I stopped wondering when he was going to change back into Bruce. On my second viewing, I was much more ok with it since I knew what I was getting into from the very start. But it’s still an odd thing to take away one of Hulk’s defining characteristics. He still has his moments to say “Hulk smash!”, but the moments that are usually reserved for his alter ego are instead handled while still being a giant green creature.

The general story is that he is sent into space heading toward an uninhabited planet where he can no longer do any harm, but ends up on an alien planet, captured into slavery, forced to become a gladiator, and also happens to be the prophesied savior of the planet. It is a very familiar rise to power from the absolute bottom plot with a sci-fi twist. There are a few times when the gladiator tropes are tweaked a little, or at least pointed out as comic relief, but it’s generally a story told many times over. Even so, I thought that core of the story was adapted into the Hulk’s story fairly well. He becomes the reluctant hero quite well, and the supporting characters are all generally interesting. From the scrawny outcast bug named Miek to the big rock creature that would normally be the muscle of the operation if the Hulk weren’t there. But the more interesting characters were on the opposing side, the Red King is a great almost Lex Luthor substitute, he even has the giant suit of robotic armor he wears to fight the Hulk. And his powerful martial arts mystic bodyguard who he saved when she was a young girl, her village overrun by spike zombies.

I think another one of the downsides of this movie is the predictability. As soon as Hulk gets captured and brought to the gladiator arena, it’s pretty clear how it’s going to end up if you’ve seen any gladiator movie at all, or sci-fi shows that have a gladiator style episode. Hulk is the powerful new gladiator that quickly gains the acclaim of the audience while challenging the corrupt king who can’t simply kill him or risk losing favor with the people. There’s a revolt, a traitor, an escape, some deaths, and everyone who’s still alive ends up happy. But while it is very stereotypical, I still enjoyed how it was done. The characters are engaging, the action isn’t bad, although it could be better. I’m very tired of seeing the hero get eaten by a giant worm/snake only to destroy it from the inside. There’s got to be a more interesting way of taking one of those things out by now. There’s also an odd choice of a cameo with Thor and Beta Ray Bill, who if you’re like me and aren’t familiar with the comic books, Beta Ray Bill is basically a horse-faced Thor. Don’t ask me. But aside from these standard plotlines, I still enjoyed the movie and I think it’s one of Marvel’s better animated releases. Whether you’re a fan of the Hulk, or gladiator movies, though Hulk is definitely no Maximus. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Kick-Ass was a great hyper-violent superhero satire directed by Matthew Vaughn back in 2010, a few years later nearly everyone returns for the sequel minus the director. I was a big fan of the original Kick-Ass and had high hopes for the sequel following some fun looking trailers and the addition of Jim Carrey to the cast, despite his public disapproval of the film’s violence a couple months ago. The original had a nice commentary about some of the realities of real-life superheroes contrasted with some balls to the wall stylish action scenes involving an 11 year old girl and a not insignificant amount of blood. The sequel tries to bring back what worked in the original, but only hits its mark about half of the time. It’s still a good movie and it’s great to see Hit Girl back to kick some ass, but it just never reaches the original in terms of flair, humor, or message, and when it comes close it feels more like a rehash of the original rather than a return. There are a few possible surprises in this movie which I will mention so here’s your obligatory spoiler warning if you haven’t seen the movie yet.

The first Kick-Ass was ostensibly about the rise of the first superhero, but the sequel isn’t entirely sure what it’s really all about. There’s the rise of the first supervillain as well as the first supergroup. There’s also plenty of talk about retiring the concept of the superhero, but it never really settles on a message and has a hard time juggling the three main characters effectively. There’s a frequent jump between Chris D’Amico who is struggling with his parents’ deaths and uses that to become the first supervillain, the Motherfucker, Mindy McReady who is struggling with her desire to fit into high school life at the behest of her adopted father when she really wants to be Hit Girl like she has been trained all her life to be, and Dave Lizewski who is struggling with boredom and the desire to fit in or something like that. Dave’s motivation is the weakest of the three which is kind of odd considering that he’s the title character.

While I’ve gone on about some of the weaker points of the film, I did enjoy it overall. I liked a lot of the moments with Chris D’Amico coming up with really bad supervillain names, and was quite surprised with newcomer John Leguizamo as his… I’m not actually sure what to call him, mob contact, consigliere, pseudo-father figure, whatever. Mother Russia is also a stand out character as she is really the only one that gets any action scenes, and the her introductory one is really the best scene in the movie with the best comic book action, nothing else really lives up to the over the top violence that was scattered throughout the first movie. I also enjoyed Hit Girl’s performance, mostly when she was actually being Hit Girl rather than trying to be Mindy McReady. The mean girls sideplot felt tacked on and irrelevant to the rest of the movie, and while I enjoyed her moments of puberty for lack of a better term, as well as her eventual revenge, the execution of the latter felt a little too Saturday Night Live, and I mean that in a bad way.

Another of the best parts of the film were the moments with Jim Carrey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes, while he doesn’t have as much screen time as I would have liked, what he does have is very memorable. The entire squad of Justice Forever were pretty enjoyable with the exception of Night Bitch. It felt like she was just filling in the role that Katie played in the first movie, she was completely uninteresting and had absolutely no development. She just had a silly and crass name with no reason for it, a revealing outfit, and felt like she existed only to have sex with Dave and be beaten and almost raped by the Motherfucker. I haven’t followed the controversy too much surrounding that part of it, but I do think that the way they ended up handling it was vaguely funny. The real shame is that she wasn’t a fully fleshed out character in the first place. The much better relationship was between Dave and Mindy, it’s a very complex one where Dave initially trains under her and gets his ass handed to him repeatedly, and eventually becomes somewhat of a father figure to her, or at least an older brother figure. And Mindy not surprisingly develops more romantic feelings for him and finally acts upon them at the end of the movie even though I get the impression that the feeling are almost entirely one-way. I also liked the brief moments with Dave and his father, and how that relationship develops over the course of the latter half of the movie, even though how it ends up is fairly predictable, I think it works nonetheless.

The final moment where I really felt let down in this movie was the climax which ends up being a giant group of wannabe supervillains fighting a giant group of wannabe superheroes. Hit Girl faces off against Mother Russia, and just like in the first movie against Frank D’Amico, she’s in over her head and gets defeated, the only difference is this time she saves herself rather than getting saved by Kick-Ass. And at the same time, once again Kick-Ass and Chris D’Amico are facing off, although this time they are both much better at fighting, which is odd because while Chris makes a play at wanting to train, he ends up giving up so it should be very one sided in Kick-Ass’s favor. There’s also absolutely zero casualties from the minor characters which is completely ridiculous because the majority of the villains should have firearms at their disposal while the heroes have none, yet I don’t even think there was a single shot fired in that brawl. There were plenty of good ideas here in the sequel, but I think only a few of them connected in the way that they should have, and the rest of it felt too much like a lesser rehash of the first movie with different characters, it’s still worth a watch, but it’s not a must-see. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Super Buddies 2013

Since started this site, I’ve expanded my focus quite a bit. For the first half of the first year, I was limiting myself to only theatrically released superhero movies. I quickly included home video releases so I could review the great DC Animation titles and my list of movies to watch is always growing. And while I doubt I’ll ever expand it so much that I end up watching and reviewing Dora the Explorer: Superbabies, I did decide to watch and review this movie. It did help quite a bit that my daughter is already a fan of the Buddies series of movies and I realized that I haven’t really watched a lot of movies with her lately even though I would almost always mention Jena in the early days of this site. Now, this movie has a few things going against it right from the start. It’s a Disney, straight-to-home-video movie, it has talking puppies, and it’s somewhere around tenth in the long running series of Air Bud and later Buddies movies. I’m not going to go out and say that this is a good movie by any means, but when I look at it from the perspective of being aimed towards younger kids, you could do a lot worse than Super Buddies.

The plot is nothing to speak of, it’s got a lot of standard ideas in it, there’s a crash landed alien with five powerful objects and a villain alien who wants them to control the universe. There’s also a series of comic books that turn out to be real stories based on the alien, and the Buddies are the ones who find them, become superheroes, and eventually save the day. The first thing I noticed was the fact that John Ratzenberger is in this movie as the chubby kid’s grandfather, I can never get over it when there are actors that I’m familiar with in such substandard fare as a home video talking dog movie. There’s also the voices of Tim Conway, and Amy Sedaris. I suppose I should mention the set up for the Buddies because unless you have a young child, you’ve probably never seen one of these movies. Each dog and their kid owner have distinct and very narrow personality types. There’s Mud Bud, who’s always dirty and never passes up a chance to roll around in mud, his power ends up being able to make himself and those around him invisible and intangible. There’s Buddha, who is very zen-like and gains the power of telekinesis. There’s Budderball who’s always interested in food and for some reason he ends up with the super strength. There’s B-Dog who’s the hip-hop dog, and the most annoying one who likes to say “dog” as much as possible and gains the power to stretch himself like Mr. Fantastic. And finally Rosebud, the only girl of the bunch who is always wearing pink and gains super speed as her power.

The movie sets itself up at a fairly reasonable pace, starting off with the Budderball’s kid’s birthday which is superhero themed since he’s fascinated by the comic adventures of Captain K-9 & Kid Courageous which seems to have a product placement tie-in with Puppy Chow since the macguffin “Rings of Inspiron” are included as toys in bags of dog food. Because dog food is like cereal for dogs, right? And the dogs soon find the “real” Rings of Inspiron and discover their new powers which alerts the author of the comic because the comic book is actually a true story about this alien Captain Negatron, which totally sounds like it should have been the villain’s name, and his nemesis Drax, which totally sounds like it should have been the hero’s name. Drax is alerted too and also is trying to find the rings. There’s some superheroics, some childish comedy, and the Buddies save the day.

Aren’t they just so adorable you could just puke?

The humor is something that’s always subjective in movies like these. I found it way too childish for my tastes, there’s a lot of broad slapstick, situational comedy based on the Buddies’ personality traits, and surprisingly minimal juvenile potty humor. That last one was something I was surprised and relieved by, as I have seen a couple of the other Buddies movies which often has very juvenile fart jokes for no reason. I was also not a fan of Sheriff Dan who is a complete buffoonish moron. I’m often not a fan of the idiot character, but I was especially annoyed by Dan’s completely oblivious and borderline mentally challenged actions. There was a couple moments with Drax that I thought were slightly humorous, like when he mispronounces “earth” like “ear” which reminded me a little of Megamind, though without the comic timing. The aliens themselves weren’t that badly done, they were handled similarly to all the talking animals, there was a person wearing an oversized alien suit complete with big bulging head, and they just animated the face and ears of the alien, which I think worked well for this kind of movie, though I have to say that the female alien at the end of the movie was a little too bizarre looking with her full head of bright red hair.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, this is not a good movie by any means, and there were very few moments that actually clicked with me, but it’s not a movie to suffer through. On top of that, my daughter really enjoyed it, and the message behind the movie is actually a good one. Something that gets mentioned a couple times, and even plays into the finale of the movie is the line “you don’t need super powers to be a superhero.” Which is a good message in and of itself. And when you look at a couple recent movies that don’t have that great of a message attached, like Planes where the main character has to change everything about himself to win the race, or Monsters University where Mike works as hard as he can to fulfill his dream and ends up settling for the next best thing. I wouldn’t recommend seeking this movie out on your own, but if you have a young kid, and they enjoy talking animal movies, you could do a heck of a lot worse than Super Buddies. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Batman: Year One 2011

After first hearing about these DC animated movies several years ago through Kevin Smith of all places (based on the fact that he has a one-liner in Doomsday referencing his well-known work on the scrapped Superman Lives script), watching several of them before starting this site and loving every single one of them through varying degrees, I’ve finally watched every single one of them that has currently been released. I still have to re-watch Gotham Knights and Justice League: New Frontier so I can review them, but I have seen all of them until Justice League: War comes out next year. You can expect a top ten list in the near future. But for now I’m just talking about Batman: Year One, based on the Frank Miller run about both eventual Commissioner Jim Gordon and Batman’s first year in Gotham. It shows how deep the corruption runs in Gotham from the outset but while it is called Batman: Year One, I almost think it should have been called Gordon: Year One, and I’d be perfectly ok with that. It has some weak points, but it’s still a great addition to the library of animated DC titles.

I hate to say it, but Batman/Bruce Wayne really is the weakest character in this movie, and part of that is the voice actor Ben McKenzie who gives Bruce Wayne and Batman a very stiff manner of speaking and doesn’t seem to be used to doing voice acting in general. Batman also is at an odd level of training, he has just come back from 12 years abroad, apparently part of his training, and he is shown able to kick down a full sized tree, yet has some difficulty with his first stint as Batman fighting three teenage thieves. There’s also the extremely melodramatic epiphany where he gets the idea for Batman as a giant bat breaks through a window in his mansion to land on the bust of his father and screech at him. In general the fight scenes with him are very well done, especially the sequence with the SWAT team, partially because it doesn’t involve much speaking.

But luckily Batman is really only half the story, if that. There is a reason why Bryan Cranston is top billed in the credits and it’s not just because he’s a bigger star than Ben McKenzie. Jim Gordon is the real heart and soul of Year One and is by far the best part of this movie. Cranston completely nails the role, not only that, but if you weren’t told that’s who did the voice I doubt you would be able to place his voice unless you just did a Breaking Bad marathon. Even when he doesn’t always do the right thing, you are always rooting for him. The one problem I did have was what little I thought I knew from the Batman mythology is that Jim has a daughter named Barbara, but in this version of the story his wife is named Barbara and she is pregnant with his son. Knowing this, I was fully prepared for something to happen to his family and… well I’ll just leave it at that. I thought it was actually a great way to add drama to this story because you know that both Batman and Gordon come out on top in this story, but Barbara and his son could very well be casualties.

Aside from Gordon, there’s also plenty of colorful villains without having to resort to any of the costumed cadre of Batman villains with the sole exception of Catwoman who has a small role. I wasn’t overly fond of her redesign as a buff, somewhat butch prostitute with fighting skills that equal Batman’s skill in these early days. There’s also the corrupt cop Flass who starts out partnered with Gordon and continues to try and get Gordon to go along with the bribing and recreational beatings that most of the other cops partake in. And the ringleader is the current Commissioner Loeb voiced by Jon Polito who has such a great voice for this kind of role, and there’s a lot of interesting character bits like his fascination with old childlike things such as having a giant clown painting in the back of his office which obviously evokes the image of the Joker, as well as a ventriloquist’s dummy which reminds more hardcore fans of Scarface/the Ventriloquist, and a fun little throwback to Huckleberry Hound.

I do almost wish that this was Gordon: Year One because one of the storytelling techniques they use quite often is the voice-over, which they do for both Gordon and Batman depending on who they’re focusing on at the moment. I would have preferred to only have one of the characters get the privilege of voicing their thoughts while letting the other character remain more mysterious, and who is more mysterious a figure than Batman? But aside from my misgivings on Batman himself, I still greatly enjoyed this movie. The animation is wonderful as always, the score hits in all the right places, and nearly all the voice actors are perfect in this. It has a lot of things going for it, and is of course worth a watch like all the other DC animated titles which I can now say I have seen them all. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Bounty Killer 2013

I was actually first made aware of this movie through a company that offered to allow my site to host a giveaway for the movie. I thought it looked like a lot of fun, had a couple recognizable names in it, and it was based on a graphic novel, so I decided I would give it a shot and I was not disappointed. It’s got great action, a great visual feel to it, and even a bit of T&A. There’s even some interesting twists and turns along the way to keep things interesting. The acting’s not going to win any awards, but that’s not surprising for this type of movie, it has a great grindhouse feel to it, but it’s much more stylish and sleek with either a decent sized budget, or someone who knows the right way to stretch a small budget. It looks great, sounds great, and I had a great time watching it.

The movie takes place in a dystopian future where the big corporations went to war against each other, for some reason, and left the world a desert wasteland. A council came together to bring a sort of order to the world by taking out these corporate leaders and gave rise to Bounty Killers, which are exactly what they sound like, bounty hunters who put the dead into dead or alive, oh and there is no “or alive” in the equation anyway. Bounty Killers are the celebrities of this future and the hottest celebrity is Mary Death. And her rival/occasional begrudging partner is Drifter. Things go sideways when a bounty is placed on Drifter’s head calling him out as a previous executive and he goes on a dangerous journey to confront the council and appeal his judgement.

The plot is surprisingly complex for a movie of this type, but everything is pretty clear as the movie goes along and there’s plenty of action set pieces along the way. Every ten to fifteen minutes it seems there’s another bloody gun battle, and they are all pulled off with plenty of choreography and plenty of blood and gore. Whether it’s Mary Death using her boot spurs to slice open someone’s neck, a white collar criminal getting his head smashed with a giant chain, or someone’s head getting split open with an axe. The death scenes are almost always looking for a different and interesting way to split someone apart, with the most amount of blood possible, and it’s all done with that grindhouse style where it’s not about the horror gore, instead it’s more about spewing all sorts of bright red blood.

The characters themselves are pretty well developed with intertwining backstories that come with occasional flashbacks. There’s no surprise that Drifter and Mary Death have an on again, off again relationship with occasional bouts of trying to kill each other. Drifter is the typical man of few words who has a mysterious past, and Mary Death is just about the same. There’s also a comic relief in the form of what they call a gun caddy who is a fan of Drifter while everyone else has moved on to Mary Death. Unfortunately, he is the worst part of the movie, he is constantly yelling and getting himself into trouble, and he has the most annoying voice. And while he is supposed to be comic relief, he ends up being annoying more often than he is being funny. He does have a few good moments to shine, but they are few and far between and most of the time you just wish that he would end up on the wrong side of a shotgun.

The visual design of this movie is one of the highpoints for me. The scene transitions are done with animation that throws a nod to the graphic novel style and helps sell the fact that it is actually based on a graphic novel. Another high point are the Gypsies, a Mad Max inspired group of chaotic anarchists living in their camps in the desert. Their faces are all painted similar to the Day of the Dead and each and every one shown in this movie is absolutely gorgeous. Their vehicles are also designed with great art designs on the side and one of the most ridiculous ideas for a stagecoach I’ve ever seen. It’s basically a Winnebago with two motorcycles attached to the front of it that they ride on the top with reigns tied to the motorcycle handles as if they were horses.

It’s probably a good time to bring up the humor in this movie, which I absolutely loved. From the ridiculous stagecoach that I already mentioned, to what they end up finding inside the refrigerator, a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Yes, in the future the surviving beer of choice and the holy grail of beers as it were is the hipster’s choice of PBR. Honestly, even the entire premise of having the villains of this movie be guys wearing nice suits and ties just trying to make a white collar living behind a desk. It feels like a hint of the whole 99% movement, but still with enough cheek to it that it’s more humorous than social commentary. There’s also a couple familiar faces that are pretty fun to see when they show up, including Gary Busey as one of those white collar criminals and Beverly D’Angelo as the madame of a brothel called the Thirsty Beaver that used to be a regular haunt of both Drifter and Mary Death, but is now basically deserted after her best girls left for another town. And while he’s not quite as recognizable of a character, I also enjoyed seeing Abraham Benrubi as Drifter’s informant that helps them get across the radioactive badlands, also helping play up the whole PBR angle which they use to acquire his services.

Bounty Killer never takes itself seriously, and that’s something I loved about the movie. But when it does get down to business, it lights up the screen with flashy, frenetic, and ultra violent action sequences that are worth the price of admission alone. It’s not a deep movie by any means, but if you’re looking for a fun way to spend an hour and a half that reminds me a little bit of Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, only better, than this is very much a worthy choice. I had a blast with it and am glad I got wind of it and was able to give out a free copy of it to a lucky winner. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Dredd 2012

I’m not entirely sure how I ended up missing this movie last year, along with pretty much everyone else that missed this movie during it’s fairly poor theatrical run. I did actually watch it earlier this year before watching the Stallone Judge Dredd but I decided not to review it mainly because I watched it on my small laptop and the visuals, especially the slomo visuals were something that the little screen couldn’t appropriately capture. So instead I waited until I got around to watching it on my bigger screen TV so I could more appropriately judge the movie on the ever-important visuals and I was happily willing to watch it due to the interesting plot and characters. It is a far cry from the Stallone feature, both in quality of special effects, as well as the overall tone and level of violence. It is a very violent and bloody movie along the lines of what could be a Punisher movie, but it’s generally never excessive or reveling in the gore. And more to the point, especially for fans of the original character Dredd: he never takes off his helmet.

At the very start of the movie, there is the introduction of a character that actually does come from the comics even though I thought at first that she was designed specifically for the movie. Recruit Anderson is more or less the complete opposite of Judge Dredd, and yet the movie never feels like a stereotypical odd couple buddy cop movie. Where he is the seasoned veteran, she is the innocent young recruit who scored 3 points below a passing grade to become a Judge, and yet is still given consideration because she is a powerful psychic. Dredd is straight to the point, by the rules, hardened by the life of a Judge. Anderson is much more inclined to go with her instinct, and is very naive to the world of a judge and taking lives, though she quickly acclimates to the position over the course of the movie.

The plot of the movie is more or less Die Hard in a future skyscraper/apartment complex, with Dredd and Anderson getting trapped within the Peach Trees complex that’s completely controlled by a single gang led by ex-prostitute and now drug-kingpin Ma Ma. While it takes place in the future, the vision of the future is very near-future. There are still things like smartphones, like early on during a crime scene investigation there is a crowd of bystandards and a few of them are videoing from their smartphones like we would be doing today. The motorcycle and weapons technology is advanced, but still very reminiscent of something that we could be seeing today. The buildings and weapons are made up of nice clean, futuristic lines, but when you get inside and take a closer look, everything is dirty, grimy, and run down. A dystopia full of crime and only a handful of Judges to try and keep things from falling into complete and total chaos and anarchy. Of course, within the context of the movie, we only get to see a portion of this future, but there is enough here that gives a more complete vision of what this future holds.

Slow-mo shockwave from a door explosion. Somehow manages to make an undulating stomach look oddly mesmerizing.

One of the selling points of this movie are the several scenes involving the future drug Slomo, which causes the user to experience the world around them in super-slow-motion and their experience is visually shown to the audience with some very stunning scenes including explosions, shattering glass, water droplets, and several moments of slow-mo gore. It’s hard to tell for sure, but I get the impression that these scenes were done through a combination of high-speed cameras and a bit of digital enhancement, but I did think that they were done wonderfully for the most part. But I also think I could have done with about 2 or 3 fewer slow-mo scenes overall as it occasionally became tiresome. I also quite liked the visuals used to show when Anderson is using her psychic abilities, they were generally subtle, and yet obvious enough that you could quickly tell what exactly was going on.

Even with such a serious and dark movie as this, there are a few moments of humor, and I thought they were done effectively, without going the route of Rob Schneider in the earlier version. And as the main villain, Madeline Madrigal otherwise known as Ma Ma, I thought she was fairly interesting but kind of petered out towards the end. She’s set up as being a crazed and violent drug kingpin, yet we don’t really see very much of this except via a story of what happened to her previous pimp, which also gets called back to during a psychic trip into one of her henchman’s heads. She also has a reluctant tech-guy henchman whose eyes were pulled out, presumably either by her or by her command, and replaced with cybernetic eyes which don’t actually appear to do anything interesting aside from looking cool. But overall these are fairly minor nitpicks and the movie as a whole is quite engaging and action packed from start to finish with two main characters that feel like real characters that you care about and are interested in seeing succeed. And count me among those who would love to see an eventual sequel down the line, I would very much like to see Mega City One on screen again. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.