Electric Man 2012

This movie marks the first time that a filmmaker has come to me and offered a screener for a movie that actually fits the context of my site. Even though it’s not really about the exploits of a superhero, instead it’s about the exploits of a comic book shop and a group of people who are focused on getting this important and rare comic book, issue #1 of Electric Man. The comic is a fictional precursor to Superman, and in mint condition goes for around $100,000. It takes place in Edinburg, Scotland and has a very English mentality to it. One of the ways that it was described to me was “Clerks meets the Maltese Falcon”, and while that’s not too far off the mark, it doesn’t meet either the comedy of the first, nor the mystery of the second. It has plenty of fun moments, and some interesting characters, but it doesn’t knock it out of the park.

The movie mainly follows the two owners of Deadhead Comics, Jazz and Wolf. Jazz is the more nerdy, levelheaded of the two while Wolf is the slacker/ladies man. They owe 5,000 pounds in repairs to the building or else the landlord is going to kick them out and sell it to a Kebab restaurant. Meanwhile, there’s a murder mystery surrounding an old comic book collector who was killed by his broke brother so he can sell this rare comic book to an American collector for a nice chunk of change. And on top of that, the comic collector’s daughter also wants to get her hands on the comic because she’s certain that her Uncle was behind the death and doesn’t want him to get it. Overall, the plot is fairly convoluted and yet it’s not really that hard to follow. There are some twists and turns, as you’re never quite sure who is really the good guy and who is really the bad guy, as the daughter doesn’t tell the whole story from the beginning.

As far as the humor goes, I thought it was generally fairly dry and slow paced. There were a handful of moments that I thought were truly funny, but they were few and far between. And it definitely doesn’t have the faster pace and rapid fire dialogue of a Kevin Smith movie. Instead, it’s much more laid back with a few fantasy cutaways. Even during what should be some of the action sequences, it felt very laid back and slow paced even when showcasing Wolf’s impressive bike riding stunt skills. I think there was also not really any true sense of danger. While the Uncle was shown killing his brother, he just tossed a toaster into a bathtub, and all of his interactions with Wolf and Jazz consisted of what felt like empty threats. The only weapon that shows up is the stun gun wielded by Edison Bolt, the American collector.

I think one of the strongest points in this movie is the relationship between Wolf and Jazz. They are at the heart of the movie, and are really the only two who feel like real people, aside from Wolf’s over the top movie character cliched libido, and the random women who will indulge it for him in a very 80′s sitcom fully-clothed-pull-the-blanket-over-our-heads representation of sex. There’s also the relationship between Jazz and Lauren, the comic collector’s daughter. There just wasn’t much chemistry between these two. Whenever Lauren kisses Jazz, it doesn’t feel like it was earned, it just felt like it came out of nowhere, and by the end, there’s a big question as to which way the relationship is going to go, and that’s mainly because it never really feels like the start of a relationship at all. It always just felt like Lauren was going along with all this as a means to an end, even though Jazz for his part was falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

The mystery behind the comic book itself was an interesting one with some nice twists and turns along the way. While most of the twists were either able to be seen a mile away, or explained via one of the characters after the fact, I thought it worked within the context of this movie. It’s not trying to be a full blown mystery, but as a comedy with mystery elements, it goes far enough to keep your interest up. I think one of the biggest downsides of this movie is that while it’s set in a comic book shop, and even has a scene in a small comic book convention, it never really feels like it’s paying homage to comic book culture. The only character that feels like a real comic book enthusiast is Edison Bolt, and all of that enthusiasm is generally used to poke fun at the character. There’s also a great motion comic style opening credits showing the inside of Electric Man #1, but aside from that, there’s really nothing. But I did get into the movie, and generally enjoyed myself, I just thought it could have been a lot better. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Iron Man and Hulk: Heroes United 2013

It’s the start of December, nearing the end of 2013 and this is the last superhero movie release of the year. It’s also the first straight-to-video release from Marvel using CGI animation rather than the mix of traditional and CG that they’ve used for their past releases. It ends up looking much better than many of the cheap and/or old CGI cartoons of past home video releases and TV shows, but it’s still quite obviously far from the level of a theatrical release and the cheapness of the animation does show. It also felt like it’s aimed at a younger audience with a lot of humor that tends to focus more on slapstick and childish attitudes. Even the voice work has an air of cheapness that doesn’t quite capture the essence of either of the characters. There are some fun moments in the movie enough that I don’t regret watching it, but it really felt a lot more mediocre than I was expecting in more ways than one.

The basic plot revolves around a couple of goons from Hydra capturing Hulk and the Abomination to try and create a weapon harnessing Gamma energy, but instead create a life form of pure energy that eventually calls itself Zzzax. Iron Man catches wind of it and ends up teaming with Hulk in order to stop the creature from devouring all the energy of the world. As with Planet Hulk, Bruce Banner doesn’t make a single appearance, instead it’s merely the somewhat intelligent and always angry Hulk through the entire movie, voiced by frequent voice actor Fred Tatasciore and quite probably digitally altered to make it sound deeper and more brutelike, which I don’t think worked in its favor. Meanwhile Iron man is played by Adrian Pasdar, who I typically enjoy but he is just not the right fit for Tony Stark at all, and I don’t think it’s helped by the writing. While both have experience doing voices for their characters in one or more of the Marvel TV shows, it’s a far cry from the live action versions. In this movie Iron Man felt much more like just a plain old jerk rather than a charming wiseass. The rest of the very small cast works out well enough with David Kaye doing a fine job with Jarvis.

The animation itself is a bit of a mixed bag. There are parts of it that does look very stunning. It’s remeniscent of a cell-shaded look, but there aren’t any hard lines anywhere, everything is nice and smooth. Hulk’s face is nice and detailed, and all the special effects regarding the lighting on the Abomination and all the electricity looks great. The biggest problem I had with it with all the time spent on the showyness of it, I thought the finess was lacking. What I mean is that the movement of the characters felt very stiff and robotic, and I’m not talking about the actual robots. And while a lot of the main characters looked decent, the Wendigos later on seemed almost like they were unfinished even as they were supposed to be dark and shadowy.

The plot itself was fairly simplistic with excuses for a whole lot of Hulk Smash all around while littering it with a bunch of childish jokes even though I will admit that a couple towards the end did get a laugh out of me. There were a couple more inspired moments towards the end of the movie, like when Hulk gets temporarily blinded by Zzzax while Iron Man is immobilized and Stark has to be the eyes for Hulk. There’s also a nice little geeky moment near the very end when we get to see Hulk actually get to partially don the Hulkbuster armor. But ultimately it felt like a never ending series of fights. Hulk fighting Abomination, Iron Man fighting Hulk, Iron Man and Hulk fighting possessed robots, Hulk fighting demonic Wendigo beasts, Hulk and Iron Man fighting Zzzax and Stark’s flying fortress. And to top it all off, there’s also a weird preachy message that only comes up a couple times, but when it does it’s totally hitting you over the head with a message about conserving and using renewable energy. It felt just as cheesy as those “Knowing is half the battle” segments in G.I. Joe except these were jammed right in the middle of the movie.

Coming off of the Avengers last year, it’s not a big leap to think that Iron Man and Hulk would be a brilliant pair up. There’s the great scientific comeraderie between Tony and Bruce over the scientific things, and they are also two of the most powerful when fighting enemies on the battlefield. And yet this movie uses none of that dynamic, gets rid of Bruce Banner altogether, makes Tony Stark much more unlikable and antagonistic towards Hulk, and makes Hulk into the more reasonable one on more than one occasion while making him an ineffective brute during the rest of the time. I may be coming down a little too hard on this movie, I didn’t suffer through it by any means, but I believe it was geared towards a much younger audience than I expected it to. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I suppose that has at least a little to do with coming off of a DC Animation high this past year which are geared much older. If you have kids that enjoy the Marvel movies, this should be a great treat for them, but it’s not the same as watching a Marvel theatrical movie only animated. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

2 Guns 2013

I’m continuing on my quest to watch the rest of 2013′s superhero and comic book movie releases before year’s end which brought me to this pseudo-buddy cop movie that may surprise you to find out that it was actually based on a comic book series from Boom studios. There’s nothing really special or extraordinary about this movie when comparing it to other, what I like to refer to as caper movies. The high point is definitely the friendly bickering chemistry between Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, but it’s a bit weighed down by the overly complex plot filled with double and triple crosses and you’re never really sure where anyone’s true allegiance lies. Violent fun at best, confusing at worst it was better than what I expected it to be, but I’m not surprised by those who didn’t click with this film.

I don’t often do this, but to try and convey the convoluted and complicated relationships between the characters I will do my best to try and explain them here, there will be spoilers but I honestly think they might benefit a first time viewing rather than spoil it, if you can even make sense of it all. Denzel Washington plays Bobby Beans among other similar names who is a DEA agent going undercover to break up a Mexican drug ring led by Papi played by Edward James Olmos. He’s sleeping with fellow agent Deb in an on-again-off-again almost relationship. While undercover, he’s working with Stigman, played by Mark Wahlberg, who is actually Naval intelligence who was framed for something and considered AWOL. Stigman is working with some of his Navy buddies led by Quince, played by James Marsden, who is also sleeping with Deb and is using Stigman to steal a couple million dollars from Papi stashed in a safety deposit box which is actually over 40 million dollars in bribes that Papi has been paying to the CIA led by Earl, played by Bill Paxton which Quince and Deb know about but no one else does.

If it sounds hard to follow, that’s because it is, and the movie doesn’t do a very good job at revealing the details in the best way possible and ends up leaving the audience in the dark almost as much as the characters are. And even when it gets to the ending, it’s a scene heavily featured in the trailer and even the poster of the movie so in a plot so full of “surprises” the ending has been telegraphed miles ahead of time. What does work are all of these situations that seem impossible to get out of, and yet our 2 guns manage to find a way out, either through luck or through their wits. While the motivations and inter-relationships between the characters are absurdly complicated, the actual action setpieces are quite fun and engaging, especially one that starts out as a showdown between the two with Bobby in Stigman’s apartment while Stigman is on a rooftop with a sniper rifle pointed directly at Bobby. And yet, a bunch of guys come into the apartment and Stigman ends up guiding Bobby out.

The comic book sequel is called 3 Guns.

The best part of this film by far is the interaction between Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. Stigman is always tossing out the insults with a wink and a smile on his face, but he also has the skills to back up his talk. Bobby is the more straight-laced of the two, but also has just as much competance without all the bluster. And behind it all is an obvious friendship and comeraderie even if they don’t always want to admit it. It’s very much a roughousing brotherly relationship and it works especially when they’re trying to one-up one another because it’s almost always immediately followed by some sort of trouble that they end up working together to get out of, just like the sniper rifle scene. The other characters are more of a mixed bag. Deb isn’t all that interesting until her last scene, Papi is probably the best villain and gets some of the best moments like the scene with the Bull. Quince doesn’t really have any personality at all which isn’t too surprising as the same is often said of Cyclops. And finally Earl feels like he should have been in O Brother Where Art Thou with that slimy southern accent that never really conveys the right sense of dread that his actions often do. Ultimately, I thought the film was worth watching for Denzel and Wahlberg alone, the plot tries to get in the way at times, but the two of them always manage to make the best of what otherwise would be an overly convoluted movie that tries to keep you guessing but doesn’t give you enough to work with in the meantime. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Wolverine 2013

I’m one step closer to watching all of the 2013 superhero and comic book movies of 2013 and this is one that I’m really disappointed that I missed out on in theaters since I’m a big X-Men and Wolverine fan though I’m not about to do any sort of X-Men marathon again any time soon. This is Hugh Jackman’s sixth turn at playing Wolverine, at least if you count his brief cameo in First Class and at least three more on the way with Days of Future Past coming out next year, Apocalypse announced for 2016, and another solo Wolverine movie very likely it seems that Hugh Jackman will be playing Wolverine until he is too old to pull off the mostly ageless mutant. This time around he’s put in Japan which is part of his origin story though this movie has it take place after the events of The Last Stand. He is brought there so a business tycoon named Yashida who used to be a soldier and was saved by Logan at Nagasaki during the atomic bombing. He is now dying and offers Logan an opportunity to relinquish his healing abilities and die a natural death. Things expectedly go sideways and Logan is left to protect Yashida’s granddaughter named Mariko while his healing abilities have been taken from him. Reminding me a bit of 2 Guns, there’s some good character interactions but it’s mixed with a heavily convoluted plotline. And I’d also like to note that I did watch the unrated extended edition for this review.

One of the first things that struck me as slightly odd even when I first started hearing about this movie was the fact that Wolverine’s love interest from Japan that I was familiar with in the 90′s animated series which I believe was also canon from the comic books was Yuriko, who is also known as Lady Deathstrike. And it felt like her character was split into two women for this movie named Yukio and Mariko. Yukio is the mutant who has the ability to see into the future, but the only future she can see is the deaths of those around her, and she is also a skilled swordswoman. Mariko is the granddaughter of Yashida, is not a mutant, but will be given control of the Yashida corporation over that of her father Shingen, and is being pursued by Yakuza during her father’s funeral. There is a very friendly, but not quite romantic relationship between Logan and Yukio while his relationship with Mariko starts off as him being her protector, but they become closer while they spend time on the run/in hiding from the chasing Yakuza.

The convolution comes when discussing the relationships between all of the characters. Shingen is resentful of his dying father because he’s not getting control of the company, and is resentful of his daughter because she is getting it, as well as all of the affection from his father. Mariko has an arranged politician fiance set up by her grandfather, and also a childhood love interest who is a member of the black ninja clan who is sworn to protect Yashida’s family. Yashida also has a mutant nurse/chemist who creates toxins both chemically and within her own body. The toughest part is that there is no clear villain to root against, as nearly everyone comes into opposition of Logan at some point in the movie, and yet they also nearly all are working with Logan at some point in the movie. I never really cared for the reptile Nurse whose name I forget and don’t care to look up, though every time she showed another reptillian trait I had the Nine Inch Nails song pop into my head. She didn’t really have any personality outside of being dangerously sexy, and also didn’t really have any notable motivation either. There ware a lot of so-called significant deaths yet none of them really felt that significant, especially since pretty much everyone dies in this movie, including quite a few bloody deaths which was actually refreshing to see in the typically PG-13 versions of Wolverine in the past. The action scenes overall were quite enjoyable, from the Yakuza at the funeral, to the bullet train sequence, and especially the black ninja clan fight towards the end.

One of the better moments in the movie.

What I did like about this movie was how the character of Wolverine was handled overall. Jackman as always does an excellent job both with the physical action sequences and the gruff-exterior-yet-fiercely-loyal-interior. He has great chemistry with both the almost sibling rivalry relationship with Yukio and the more suble relationship with Mariko which ultimately helps bring a catharsis with his memories of Jean Grey which appear in dreams and near-death visions throughout the movie. What I wish was a stronger element in the movie was the much-hyped fact that Wolverine spends a good deal of this movie without his mutant healing, and yet he he shot several times and is still mostly able to just brush it off and ignore it until things slow down. There are a few overly stylized moments where he feels the pain much more prominently which doesn’t entirely make sense because he’s always maintained that he feels the pain of all of his injuries, they just go away pretty quickly. So it doesn’t make as much sense that the first gunshot would make him pause so much, it’s not until those wounds start adding up that he would notice something is amiss, and yet he spends much of his time afterwards still acting as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Ultimately, I still enjoyed this movie for the most part, it’s a much better feature than either Origins or The Last Stand, but it doesn’t quite have the complete package like X2 or the original X-Men. It’s great to see Wolverine really let loose, but I would have liked to have also seen less of a mess surrounding him. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Legends of the Knight 2014

It’s not so rare these days to find interesting projects looking for funding on Kickstarter, it is a bit more rare to find projects that actually catch my own personal interest. But when I heard about this project, I was happy to make it my first Kickstarter donation, giving $10 so I could get a digital download when it became available. This is a project by Brett Culp which takes a different look at Batman. It doesn’t look at the character himself, but instead takes a look at the impact that character has had on the world itself through a handful of people and their inspiring stories of how they take one part or another of Batman’s philosophy or his story as a whole and use it to improve their own lives and the lives of others. It is a documentary which takes a look at about a dozen people across the country who all have a strong connection to Batman in one way or another. Through a series of interviews and plenty of Batman artwork and children dressed up as Batman, we get to see a slice of these people’s lives and how Batman has made their lives better. You can view the trailer and find out more information at their official website.

I’ve seen a handful of these types of documentaries now and even though there’s not really a whole lot of innovation as far as the filmmaking itself goes, it’s really all about the stories, and I have to say that the stories presented in this just over an hour doc are all generally fascinating. It leads off with someone most connected to Hollywood and that version of Batman with Michael Uslan who was the executive producer on every Batman film: live action & animated since Tim Burton’s. He starts off talking about a speech he gave to a graduating class at West Point Acadamy that ended with the phrase “We are Batman” which is more or less the overall thesis of this doc. It’s a simple phrase, but it communicates the right kind of message that everyone can follow the principles that Batman represents and the ideals he stands up for.

Some of the more compelling stories are the few stories told about the people who have overcome their disabilities or diseases including a young boy who got to be Batman for a day before the huge event that popularized the name Batkid in San Francisco earlier this year. There’s also the story of Daniel Scott who is a man born with only one leg and three fingers on each hand which are situated similarly to the Ninja Turtle’s hands, yet he uses Batman as his inspiration to not let his disability hamper his quality of life. And there’s also a writer for The Mary Sue who was born with Muscular Dystrophy and yet lives and works independently in New York. They’re all presented with very little schmaltz, but instead are more straightforward, talking directly to these people and their friends while showing bits of their day to day lives as well as plenty of their Batman memorabilia.

The segments that interested me the most were the ones that focused on using Batman and comics to help with teaching. Before watching this doc, I had actually heard about the college course out there called, simply “Batman” which is actually a psychology course that helps break down several psychological ailments through the spectrum of Batman’s rogues gallery as well as Batman himself and his own psychological trauma. While the versions presented in the Batman comics are extreme and exaggerated, they are excellent windows into these problems and a way to help understand them. There’s also a great moment by Michael Uslan where he talks about getting his own comics course accredited where he relates the story of Superman to the story of Moses in order to show the parallels to the literature and mythology in comic books to those of the literature and mythology of the past.

The look of the film is excellent, while there is a lot of talking head style interviews, there’s not much actual time spent just watching people talk, it’s much more interactive with video of the people doing some of their day to day activities intercut with people drawing Batman artwork, children role playing dressed as Batman, and other Batman artwork. The score is also quite beautiful for the most part, but towards the end of the documentary it was starting to get a little repetitive. It really is a beautiful documentary that will make you appreciate Batman as a character, a story, a mythology, and an inspiration that much more if you hadn’t already. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Captain Battle: Legacy War 2013

Continuing on in my quest to watch all of the 2013 releases I can get my hands on, and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to what I would easily call the worst superhero film of 2013, and I’m not talking about Iron Man or Man of Steel like some people might claim. No, I’m talking about an actually bad movie. This movie looks worse than most fan films I’ve covered on this site. The special effects look like they were done on a trial version of After Effects, with page wipes straight out of Windows Movie Maker, and make up that looks like it was done with magic markers. The movie attempts a story that’s much too big for the special effects or acting abilities of those involved. And on top of that, while it is based on an actual comic book, the timing of it is a cheap rip-off of Captain America, complete with a Red Skull analogue with the aforementioned red magic marker special effects makeup. It has plenty of moments of enjoyably bad moviemaking, and a handful of T&A, but for the most part it was simply a boring mess of a movie.

I won’t go into the details of the plot too much, because it really is basically Captain America with some tweaks. Sam Battle is a hopeless soldier who gets a mortal wound, but is luckily close friends with doctor Brandon Storm who has been working on a regenerative serum one could refer to as a super soldier serum as it were. Meanwhile, there’s a busty woman calling herself the Necromancer leading a ragtag group of Nazis on a mission to revive Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler to take over the world, but they need Storm’s knowhow combined with Necromancer’s magic to bring the plan to fruition. There’s also a subplot where Sam Battle learns that his father was a crimefighting vigilante that his reporter friend referred to as Captain Battle, and for some reason Sam keeps having these flashbacks of his father that he never knew about and would have been nowhere near at the time.

I’ve watched a lot of low budget short films in my time, and the best ones know where and how to use their limited money. This film had no idea how to spend however much money it had available. It opens on a supposed action scene where Battle’s father, whose identity we don’t find out until much later, is chasing or being chased by a group of people in ski masks. He is firing his gun at them, and when I say he’s firing his gun, what I actually mean is that the actor is pointing his gun out the car window while gun flashes and bang sound effects are added in post production while the actor makes no attempt to pull the trigger or feign any sort of recoil. This is contrasted by much later in the movie where two cops are involved in a brief gunfight where they completely oversell their gun’s recoil. Battle’s car then explodes via a cheaply overlaid stock fire effect before page wiping to the next scene. Not to mention when Sam Battle gains his powers, it’s shown by shifting the color palette to negative. Even the microphones are used poorly. Any time there are two people talking to each other in the same frame, one of them is loud and clear while the other is so quiet I can barely hear them. Even the fight scenes which don’t have to have a big budget to be done well are bizarrely done in slow motion. They weren’t even filmed in slow motion, they were filmed at regular speed and slowed down after the fact, giving a very stuttering and blurry version of slo mo where you can easily see how far from connecting any of the punches are. There’s also never any blood until the very end which has a close up of the body where you can clearly see the stake tucked under the victim’s arm like you would if you were making a film at nine years old.

The “Necromancer”, and her cleavage which is the real star of this show.

What they did spend their money on, apparently was busty women. And yet, even that isn’t done all that well. There’s one stripper scene fairly early on, which is even more poorly edited than the stripper scene that opens Barb Wire, which I didn’t even think was possible. Aside from that, the Necromancer herself shows off her well defined cleavage in every scene she is in. I will say that as far as acting goes, she delivers her lines as well as can be expected, although that’s pretty much all she, or anyone else in this movie does: deliver their lines. The default emotion for anyone in this movie is no emotion, and even when someone is supposedly getting mad, all they do is yell their lines before going straight back to normal. The Necromancer’s “army” of Nazis consists of three sort of buff guys that honestly look way too friendly and nice to be thought of as Nazis, even with their magic marker Swaztika tattoos.

A cover from the original, now public domain, comic book.

The plot makes no sense, there’s flashbacks to Battle’s father even though there’s never any resolution, besides the fact that his father is never even in the costume that his reporter friend claimed he wore all the time. There’s plenty of talk about raising Adolf Hitler even though his newly resurrected body disappears at the end without ever making an appearance. It feels like it’s set up for a sequel, but that just leaves this movie feeling incomplete and pointless. They never even explain what the subtitle “Legacy War” has to do with anything. There’s very little to enjoy here outside of watching something professionally made, released independently on home video, with such a poor level of production value. I don’t know what else to say. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Superhero 2013

What better way to bring in the Christmas spirit than to talk about an asian movie about a superhero who wears a pair of panties as his superhero mask and dresses like Borat was way too modest. Really though, this is a superhero spoof movie that’s much better than the awful Superhero Movie while going through a lot of the same types of conflicts and story beats, except in every case it turns it into something so ridiculously sex-related that it becomes absolutely hilarious. I’m sure some people won’t get the joke, but I thought that the level of seriousness this movie treated a superhero with a pair of women’s panties on his face was just the right amount of absurdity and obscenity to make me laugh hysterically through most of this movie.

The movie starts off just like the first Spider-Man movie, complete with the Marvel style comic flip featuring various Hentai Kamen manga pages before showing the credits through a series of web-like lacey elastic bands before going into the opening scene. Which starts oddly enough with a group of police officers tracking a bombing suspect into a house of ill repute where a dominatrix is doing her work, she is not happy with being interrupted and uses her talents on the lead police officer, when his backup is about to shoot her, he calls them off because he is enjoying the punishment, then there’s the voiceover “and that’s how my parents first met”. Kyosuke’s father is now dead, and his mother is still a dominatrix. Aside from that, he’s a typical Peter Parker, he’s in the Martial Arts club at school, but is the weakest member. He falls for the new girl in school, Aiko but is too shy to talk to her. Of course, she gets involved in a hostage situation at an office building where Kyosuke yells to the criminals that she’s his girlfriend, to which she adamantly denies. He sneaks in, defeats one of their members and puts his clothes on to sneak up on the others when he mistakenly puts a pair of panties on his face, unlocking his hidden potential and transforming him into Hentai Kamen, or as I will translate it to: the Masked Pervert, complete with anime spiky hair and for some reason a Spider-Man type mask that appears below the panties, topped off with a pair of fishnet stockings and a white pair of underwear which he soon pulls up over his shoulders to show off his bulge as much as possible.

The fighting scenes in this movie almost all consist of Hentai Kamen putting his crotch in the face of his enemies in as many different ways as possible. This is combined with some cheap looking computer effects to make him move in a somewhat Matrix-style and also adds shockwaves to many of the impacts. There is plenty of discussion about the types of perversion, and while there’s actually no nudity, surprisingly enough, the talk goes into quite a few details of some S&M type behaviors, including the fact that Kyosuke can only transform into Hentai Kamen using a used pair of panties. There’s a hilarious scene where he is badly dressed as a woman in a lingerie store and the clerk does a hilarious double take. The comedy is very broad and visual. It may sound jeuvenile to say this, but seeing the look on their faces when confronted with a giant twig and berries never gets old. And he is constantly making these ridiculous poses. It’s also interesting how they are able to change things up slightly throughout the movie because he keeps losing his panty mask and has to find a new pair, thereby giving him a new look every few fights.

Of course, Hentai Kamen wouldn’t be a superhero if he didn’t have some supervillains to fight against. His main nemesis is a bratty kid from a rival school who seems to go around to various schools to defeat their entire martial arts clubs to take it over for himself, but he also mentions some sort of buried treasure hidden under the school. He’s an annoying kid who gets defeated pretty early on before sending a variety of assassins after Hentai Kamen which are all various odd stereotypes with their faces painted as if they’re some sort of android. There’s the goody-two shoes who comes to the school and hits everyone who is even slightly violating any sort of school rule along with his little gang. He’s followed by the pleasant boy who is surrounded by awestruck girls and he makes everything around him sparkle. There are a couple others before what the subtitles basically refer to as “bizarro” Hentai Kamen. The main difference is that Bizarro HK wears his panty-mask inside out, supposedly denying himself the perverted pleasure of sniffing the panties and I can’t believe I justed typed that sentence.

Two of the assassins in this movie.

Aside from the plentiful dick jokes, there are also several moments that do get to take the air out of the superhero mythos, like the introduction of Bizarro HK who impersonates Hentai Kamen and goes around lifting the skirts of women on the streets and ruining Hentai Kamen’s “good” name, and Hentai Kamen has the chance to stop him, but it’s at the same time as his first almost date with Aiko at the pool, so he has a discussion with himself as Hentai Kamen over what’s more important to him, stopping Bizarro HK or going on the date. He also has several contemplative discussions with himself trying to decide if he was actually a pervert himself, or if he was just doing these perverted things in order to make himself into a hero. There’s no real answers to these questions as it’s all played for humor. Personally, I laughed very hard at most of this movie, there were a few slow parts, but it constantly surprised me with how far they took this concept, and how many different variations on the theme they could come up with, topping themselves each time. It is a complete mystery as to how this movie ever got made, but I had such a fun time watching it and laughed so much harder than any moment in the other parody I’ve seen, Superhero Movie. As a brief sidenote, my daughter snuck into the room at various points in this movie and also thought it was hilarious, calling him “underwear man” much to my wife’s and my dismay. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Justice League: War 2014

Taking a quick break from the non-superhero comic book adaptations I watched a couple brand new DC Animation releases: Justice League: War and JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time. My review of Trapped in Time will be up in a couple days, but first I’m going to talk a bit about Justice League: War which is the first Animated offering from DC’s New 52 timeline offering up yet another Justice League origin story, though I haven’t read any of the New 52. Fortunately, even though a lot of it is the same thing we’ve seen more than a couple times, it’s still a fun ride. After the very dark turn in DC Animation with Dark Knight Returns and The Flashpoint Paradox, War lightens things up quite a bit while not going all the way around to being too shallow. There’s still plenty of action to be had here and they sneak in a single swear word, but the blood is kept to a minimum. It was also a nice change of pace to add Shazam into the mix, as he’s not usually one of the regulars in these movies.


As I mentioned, this is another Justice League origin story, set up during a time where most superheroes aren’t exactly among the honored or trusted. People are protesting Wonder Woman and they’re scared of Batman. But darker things are afoot as minions of Darkseid begin popping up all over the world causing trouble before things break out into an all out invasion. Most of the heroes are already out doing their thing: Green Lantern’s got his ring, Wonder Woman’s hanging out with Steve Trevor at the White House, the Flash is working with Star Labs. But Cyborg gets the full-fledged origin treatment as a young football star whose scientist father doesn’t care about sports when the world is full of meta-humans who make football seem worthless. When his son gets blown up and attacked by an alien semi-organic parasite, his father uses his science to save him, turning him into a mix of human, robot, and alien organic technology. I actually quite like this version of Cyborg as it makes him a bit more interesting, and allows him some level of shapeshifting due to the alien tech. It’s also worth mentioning that besides one moment at the end, the operation scene is about as gory as this movie gets, with his body half charred and infested with strands of blue alien organism.

Every hero in this movie does get a fair amount of screentime, though Green Lantern and Batman probably have the largest roles, coming into the movie first and they spend most of the movie together, with their begrudging and constantly bantering parternship. Hal Jordan as GL is typically cocky and the source of much of the humor, though Wonder Woman does get her fair share of humorous moments stemming from her naivety about the modern world, such as a fun moment with a little girl and an ice cream vendor. Shazam also has some fun moments, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the character as it might be a bit of a surprise when the little kid that’s been running around suddenly turns into red, electric, Superman. He is also a welcome edition to the team because he both supplies another layer of humor alongside Green Lantern and Flash, and he’s one character that hasn’t been in a ton of these Justice League movies. In fact, he’s only been in Public Enemies and his own short fighting Black Adam, while the others are in almost every incarnation of the Justice League.

The animation as always is excellent, during the short run time, it’s near constant fighting and it’s broken up with enough story and comic relief that it doesn’t get tiring. There’s also plenty of variety to the fights, considering that there are several different heroes all with their own unique fighting styles. I quite liked the wide variety of Green Lantern’s constructs. There were very few repetitions and they all made sense within the context of the scene. The voice acting was also quite good, all the characters were just different enough that they didn’t make me miss Kevin Conroy, Nathan Fillion, or Tim Daly. And Michelle Monaghan was great in her role as Wonder Woman, she really pulled off both the fish out of water during the more comedic scenes, as well as the strong warrior during the battle scenes. In the end, I thought it was a fun introduction to the New 52, but while I liked it, I also didn’t really think that it did enough different to really warrant itself as yet another Justice League origin story, or should I say “Super Seven”? Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time 2014

This is a movie you might not have heard about until recently even if you follow DC Animation, it’s a bit of a stealth release, only popping up on people’s radars when it was included in Target’s mailer last week as it is a Target DVD exclusive. One thing I immediately found out about it was that it is something much lighter in tone than many of the recent DC Animated movies. It’s much more in line with an updated version of Super Friends so I was excited because it was something that I could watch with my daughter Jena without worrying if there was too much blood in it. I’m always a fan of a time travel story and this has some very fun moments without bogging itself down with the nitty gritty details of it. The movie mainly follows a couple soon-to-be-members of the Legion of Super-heroes 1,000 years in the future: Dawnstar and Karate Kid. But back in the present, there’s also plenty of the Justice League and the Legion of Doom with many of their classic Super Friends roster with the addition of Cyborg who was only in the tail end of the Super Friends. I had a lot of fun with this movie and so did Jena.

I’ve said how light this movie is compared to the recent DC movies, there’s the two younger heroes as the main characters as well as a bit of screen time for Robin. There’s also much more humor in this movie than any recent feature, my favorite moment is probably when some of the villains go back into the past to get rid of Superman on Earth when he was a baby in Kansas. And there’s a very Looney Tunes-esque sequence between the three heroes and four villains where the baby keeps getting passed back and forth which starts with Cheetah and Solomon Grundy in bad costumes convincing the Kents that the baby is actually their baby, and ends with the Flash returning the baby to the Kents by running alongside their truck only to have them find out that the baby has been replaced with a Toyman doll.

The heroes in the Justice League themselves don’t really get a lot of development outside of possibly Robin who gets a few moments to prove his worth. They are all mostly just there for backup to the two young heroes from the future, Karate Kid and Dawnstar. Both of these heroes I had never heard of before watching this, Karate Kid has supposedly studied all forms of martial arts and can use his Ki Sight to see the weak points in any person or object. While Dawnstar is a winged woman who has the power of light, or something like that. Her powers are never clearly explained, she is able to do a number of things like finding a person with a glowing ball of light, glowing really brightly herself, and shooting darts of light energy. She also has a somewhat monotone way of speaking, like she is fairly naive in the ways of how the world actually works, and she is also very unsure of herself. Karate Kid however is overly cocksure and headstrong which obviously makes them the quintissential odd couple, and it generally works for what it is.

The villains are very much a more classic group of villains, with Lex Luthor, Captian Cold, Black Manta, Bizarro, Cheetah, Gorrila Grod, Toyman, and Solomon Grundy. Of them all, Lex Luthor obviously gets the most screentime, and Bizarro gets most of the funny moments along with Toyman. The designs on all of them are a nice mix between the classic designs of the Super Friends, which I never really watched but am familiar with, and the more modern animated DC designs. It was great to see the classic looking Hall of Doom even though I don’t think they had the iconic moment of it rising up out of the water. There’s also the new villain: Time Trapper, which allows Lex to travel through time and is the center of the climactic battle towards the end of the movie.

Even though it doesn’t exactly have to make perfect sense, the time travel stuff was not very tightly scripted. When the past is changed, Time Trapper is allowed to remove paradoxes from the timeline, like removing the Justice League after they succeed in getting Superbaby off of Earth. But they don’t address the fact that the Justice League could have formed without Superman, and they all wouldn’t be in that situation if the Justice League hadn’t botched the plan which allowed Lex to get frozen and survive into the future in the first place. It was also a slightly jarring shift in tone during that climax when the humor goes away and things start to get fairly bleak. But it’s still bleak in the PG sense, not even really bordering on PG-13.

In the end, I had a lot of fun with it. The animation is great, the voice work is great. I haven’t seen many episodes of Batman: Brave and the Bold, but it was nice to hear Deidrich Bader’s voice for Batman as well as the narrator in the future scenes, it makes me excited to see the Lego Movie soon because I always thought Will Arnett’s voice sounded very much like Bader’s Batman voice. It was also interesting to see the teaser for a possible sequel at the end of the movie, as up until now DC’s animated titles have all pretty much been stand-alones. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of this style of animation right alongside the darker stuff at the other end of the spectrum. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Lone Ranger 2013

Today I get the chance to both catch up on a movie that I missed this past year, and also cover a movie that was based on a comic book property that’s not exactly a superhero movie, even though it comes pretty close to one. It was the biggest box office bomb of the year, and was critically panned with only a handful of exceptions along with a handful more that thought the movie as a whole was bad, but the climactic sequence at the end was a blast. There seemed to be a lot of controversy surrounding this movie and not all of it had to do with the movie itself. I wanted to be able to look past the backlash and enjoy what could have been Pirates of the Old West, and in a way it kind of was. But it felt much more like it was Pirates of the Old West 5, only they also had to fit in an origin story, and a wraparound story, and flashbacks, and even a brief dream sequence. When it comes down to it, I enjoyed bits and pieces of the movie, loved the ending, but overall it was a bit of a mess.

The movie starts off with one of the things I disliked the most, and that’s the wraparound of old Tonto telling the story to a kid who I coincidentally saw the day before when my daughter happened across the awful Spy Kids 4 where he played one of the new Spy Kids with a hearing aid. It’s meant to feel a bit like Kevin Arnold in the Princess Bride, but it didn’t set the right tone with me, especially when he starts the story in the middle with a bank robbery. In fact, the tone of the movie is something that felt like it was all over the place. There is quite a bit of death in this movie even though there is no blood. At least one time, the deaths are almost played for laughs, while later on in the movie the deaths are meant to be very morose and heavy when there is a massive battle where practically everybody dies. And yet while it is meant to be a big deal, it’s almost immediately forgotten for them to move on to the next action setpiece.

Tonto himself is a big piece of contention. Once again, it’s Johnny Depp playing a goofy character under heavy makeup. I didn’t think that the portrayal was racist, I mean there’s the whole scene with the regular Cherokees where they explain his backstory and how he is essentially traumatized to the point of being nearly insane. Which is yet another case of the wildly divergent tones in this movie. On one hand, Tonto is a goofy Cherokee with crazy antics. On the other hand, he’s doing these weird things because he caused the death of his entire tribe when he was a child. If you take that flashback to heart, it makes the things he does much less funny and much more sad. And yet except for a few moments, it’s immediately back to being played for laughs, and I do have to admit that they did make me laugh once in a while.

One piece of trivia that I read about this movie is that it is the first time that Tonto actually got top billing over the Lone Ranger. And unfortunately, that really carries over into the movie itself. Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger is too often played for a fool. Most of the movie, he’s just bumbling his way through the movie, stumbling on the overarching plot of the movie either through luck, or through the help of his preternaturally intelligent horse. It also bugged me that most of the audience watching this move above the age of 16 knew that the horse’s name is Silver, but they don’t go into the reveal until the very end with a really weak payoff. I thought the audience, and Silver, deserved better than that. There’s also the weird love story with his brother’s wife-later-widow played by Michelle Monahan. It never made any sense to me why she became tangled up in the whole mess. There’s also the oddness that he’s attracted to someone else’s wife in the first place, and even more so that it’s his brother’s wife. And there’s also a kid who doesn’t really add anything at all to the story either.

Silver does get a few Looney Tunes moments though.

Another problem I had with this movie is the convoluted plot. There are all these plot threads going every which way, and everyone seems to be connected to each other. There’s the evil outlaw villain Bruce Cavendish who is a bit of a cannibal, which is an odd choice for a Walt Disney film. He’s got a grudge against the Lone Ranger’s brother, and a past with Tonto. There’s also a bit of a mystery surrounding Cavendish’s earlier partner. There’s the business surrounding the fledgling railroad industry, a secret silver mine, a treaty between the Cherokee and the settlers, and all of these are connected to the main characters in several different ways. There’s also a betrayal early on by one of the other Rangers which has a bit of a weak payoff of little consequence. And there’s also a few scenes with Helena Bonham Carter as a madame with a fake leg made out of ornate ivory. Her character I really never connected with and didn’t think had a good enough reason to be included in the story at all.

I do have to mention what I did like in this movie, and that is near the end as soon as the William Tell overture starts, it brought a big grin to my face that didn’t really go away until the movie was pretty much over. The choreography between the trains, Tonto’s almost Three Stooges-esque antics, it all just worked in all the right ways. It’s just too bad I can’t say that about the two hours that preceded it. There were several more bits here and there that were fairly enjoyable, but they were too often mixed with things that either dragged the movie down, or jarred me into a different tone. It wasn’t awful, but I didn’t really care for it overall. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Lego Movie 2014

So I managed to make it out to theaters to see my first theatrical movie of 2014. It’s not exactly what you might call a “superhero movie”, but there are quite a few superheroes as supporting characters so I’ll let that slide. It’s almost more like a Lego version of the Matrix, complete with “the one” also known as “the special”, the master builders who can change the code by rearranging the Lego blocks, and-spoiler- a bit of a twist involving a second world outside the world. Aside from that, there’s a lot more laughs, a lot more heart, and a lot less violence. I loved it, my daughter Jena loved it, and my wife loved it. It’s a whole lot of fun from beginning to end.

I may I have mentioned this in my review of Lego Batman 2, but I grew up with Legos. I remember my first set was a racecar, but my next two were from the 80′s space sets so I was delighted when one of them were represented as a master builder in this movie. In fact everything in this movie with the possible exception of the Unikitty and Metalbeard are actual Legos that can be made. There’s also several moments when one the movie goes into a master builder vision mode where they can see numbers on the lego pieces, and Legos and Lego sets are actually numbered in a similar way. Even the special effects with the explosions, flames, smoke, and water aer all represented by Lego pieces rather than actual special effects, and I loved every minute of it. When I initially saw the trailers, I thought this might have been CGI that looked like it was actual Lego stop motion, but after seeing it, I’m pretty sure it was all done with actual Legos except for possibly the facial expressions. I especially loved the moment where a character that died comes back as an old school lego ghost, complete with glow in the dark effect and string to hold him up. It all plays very smoothly on par with any stop motion movie I’ve ever seen.

This was probably the third or fourth Lego set I ever got as a kid.

As for the story itself, as I mentioned, it plays very much like a typical savior story where there is a prophecy that foretells of a single person who can save the world. And when that person is found, they ultimately reject the prophecy, but in doing so end up fulfilling the prophecy in the process. But part of what made this film so enjoyable to me is that it poked fun at the story at the same time that it was going through the motions of it. This film is hilarious in so many different ways. Chris Pratt is great as the extremely happy, simple, and carefree Emmett. Morgan Freeman also gets plenty of moments to play off of his somber, meaningful, and iconic voice for some of the funniest moments in the movie. Will Arnett also plays up his role as Batman in the best way possible, really taking the air out of the character which is always a lot of fun, and he was the superhero master builder with the most screen time, though Green Lantern got a couple great lines alongside Superman. In fact, just the cameos in general were often a great moment of humor. Lego has its hand in so many properties, that it was great to see them all come together. Even though there were still plenty of other properties Lego has worked with that didn’t make the cut like any Marvel or Middle Earth properties. But there was a really great scene with a property not owned by Warner Bros and two of the three voices were reprised by their actual actors.

It’s hard to tell, but even the fireballs are Legos that are backlit.

There was also a bit of a twist to this movie that I totally wasn’t expecting, but when it happened, it made total sense and brought a lot of extra heart to the movie. Will Farrell plays a dual role, besides being Lord Business, he is also the Man Upstairs. In other words, at the end of the movie they break out of the Lego world and into the real world which is a basement where Will Farrell is a businessman who has this incredible basement Lego diorama. But he also has a young son who just wants to play with the Legos the way a child would – creating things willy nilly with little rhyme or reason while he wants to keep them all looking the way he wants them to. This Matrix-like twist was something that I wasn’t expecting, but realizing that the entire movie was basically the world as a child’s imagination in this basement filled to the brim with tons of Lego sets was a really smart move by the screenwriters.

I think I am probably the perfect audience for this movie. I had a smile plastered on my face from the opening credits. I loved seeing the world represented in Lego with all the meta moments like when the characters reference the words hanging in the sky which you could still see off in the distance when they first crossed over to the Old West world. Everything is Awesome is likely to be stuck in my head for ages to come, and at least for now, I dont have a problem with that. It made me remember and miss my giant box of loose Lego sets even though I never stuck around with it long enough to get any of their licensed sets, I just had mostly their generic space sets, though I only had a couple of the 80′s ones and moved on to the sleeker-looking but still generic 90′s sets along with some of their Castle sets and a few of their Town sets. But even if you didn’t play with Legos, there’s enough humor, action, and heart to enjoy this movie at any age. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Bad Samaritan Must Die 2012

Being a site that focuses on mainly superhero movies to watch and review, there’s not too many opportunities to recieve screeners for movies as most of the films are big tentpole films from major studios who aren’t that worried about the opinion of a small time niche movie critic. But once in a while I’m able to run across a smaller independent film that’s looking for more exposure as is the case with this film. If you’re interested in helping support independent film then make sure you check out the film’s official site at TheBadSamaritan.com where you can read some behind the scenes info, watch a trailer, and even buy the movie for yourself. As for what I thought about the movie? I admit that it took me a little while to warm up to it. But once I did, I enjoyed it for what it was. It’s a look at a vigilante as more of a cult leader, someone who gains a fiercely loyal following during a time when they feel like the best quality in a person is strength. It has some strong ideas, but as is often the case in independent cinema, it does struggle a bit behind the lack of a proper budget.

The Bad Samaritan is not about a hero. It’s not really even about a vigilante. There are two main characters that the movie switches back and forth between, as well as a couple different time periods. It’s England in a state of unrest, and the Bad Samaritan comes in, cracks a bunch of heads, actually seems to make a difference, and starts to gain a following. But it’s not just a following of fans that want him to keep doing what he’s doing, instead it’s a following that wants to join him in his violent crusade against the violence. One young girl in particular is a big fan and is only ever really known by her online handle of Orphan. She’s not quite an orphan, but her father is dead, and her mother is a drunken layabout, so she looks to the Bad Samaritan as a pseudo father figure whether or not she realizes it. When he rejects her, she decides that the only recourse is to kill him.

As far as the acting goes, The Bad Samaritan himself is played by one of the writer/directors and he does a fine job throughout the movie. The young actress who plays the Orphan is ok, but she doesn’t have the experience needed to convey some of the more dramatic scenes where she gets very emotional. Much of the film is also shown as news and reality footage, and while the acting in those scenes were quite stiff, they seemed to be intentionally stiff and worked well within the context of those scenes. There’s also the scene with the Bad Samaritan hanging out at the detective’s house which also gives us most of the comedic elements in the movie.

The Orphan, even though she misses out being on the movie poster.

I thought it was sometimes difficult to get a feel for the overall tone of this movie. At times it takes itself quite seriously, but there are also plenty of moments of dark comedy throughout, especially during the scene between the Bad Samaritan and the detective where they are just drinking, smoking, and the detective is wearing a ridiculous naked lady apron. There’s also some darkly funny moments during the action scenes where the Bad Samaritan is taking on a couple kids who are putting up a fair fight, or during the final scene where a hand gets lopped off he basically tells her to stop whining before finishing her off. I also liked the look of the Bad Samaritan with an almost flesh-like black mask attached to his hood with hook-like clasps.

I think what I did like the most about the movie is where it ends up. Even though it takes a little while to get there, which is an odd way to put it because it’s a very short movie overall. But as the Bad Samaritan gains popularity and a following, he holds his own rally filled with other people in masks while he starts spouting his propaganda filled speech filled with promises of strength and justice, promoting the idea of better city if they follow their own rules rather than the rules of the city. He is given a cult leader status, culminating in the full indoctrination of one of the youngest members of the meeting when things go wrong and some violence breaks out. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but I think it ends in the most appropriate way possible. It’s something that is fun to watch, and while I don’t generally talk about the special features as I often watch movies digitally, there is an interesting behind the scenes video as well as a couple earlier short films that are all quite entertaining to watch. If you’re a fan of B movies, or if you would like to support more independent movies, you could do a lot worse than to support this one. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Robocop 2014

So I once again managed to make it out to theaters to catch a new release this year which brings my total up to 3, and while I didn’t make any official goal this year, it’s bringing me well on my way of reaching last year’s goal of 10 theatrical viewings which I only made it about halfway. I had a few reservations about seeing it, it is a reboot and these kinds of reboots of 80′s movies have had a pretty hit and miss track record. The early reviews coming in were mixed, so I had some hope there. And when I watched it, I quite liked what I saw. But when I discussed it for an upcoming Lambcast episode, it didn’t hold up very well to dissection. There is a great cast here, there are some updates that work quite well, from the drones angle to the conservative news show host, and even some nice little callbacks to the original movie. But there are also quite a few missteps in the movie, like the fact that while the satire is on a different topic and scale than the original, it also carries much less of an impact, and the final act doesn’t carry any of the same punches as the original. There’s nothing wrong with the movie by any means, but it’s not much of an improvement and like most remakes, it wasn’t really needed in the long run.


If you’re not familiar with the concept of Robocop, it’s basically about an officer who gets nearly killed in the line of duty and a giant robotics corporation uses him to create a cyborg police officer in order to allow them to get a contract for their fully robotic soldiers. Unfortunately, the cyborg doesn’t fully comply with their plans and uncovers more than they initially realized. I was a fan of the original even though I didn’t rewatch it or any of the sequels in preparation of watching this one.

There were plenty of changes, but also some callbacks to the original. Some were better choices than others. Instead of the TV clips and commercials from the original, they are replaced by an ultra-conservative news/talk show hosted by Samuel L. Jackson which is apparently very similar to the O’Reilly Report from what I’ve heard as I’ve never seen it. I thought this was a decent choice, and this is where both the satire and humor are placed, and placed quite well. Another decision that I agreed with was the change in the progression of Murphy’s transformation. In the original, there is a short scene where we see what’s going on with him, but before long he is fully Robocop. Here, it’s more of a gradual progression, as they remove more and more of the man until he becomes essentially a robot in a human’s body, and then the human part of him finds a way as we have learned from Jurassic Park. The downside is that there isn’t a successful way to conclude this progress as there was in the original. Instead of the hidden directive, there is a red asset marker. And instead of the satisfying “you’re fired!” moment, there’s an internal struggle that’s overcome due to reasons.

Here’s the big guy just because I like him.

Another choice that I thought worked well in the original was how the wife and son were handled. He finds out that they are ok, but they have moved away and he has a brief moment where he returns to their house. Here, the wife and son play a much more integral role in the story and in the return of the human side of Murphy. Unfortunately, it’s one of the weaker parts of the movie as there is very little chemistry between Murphy and his wife which is partly due to the fact that much of it happens when he is supposed to be more emotionless as Robocop. But it also just doesn’t work as a storytelling method to keep things interesting. This extends almost moreso to the kid, as he isn’t given much of a presence outside of talking Red Wings games and standing wordlessly next to his mom, or staring mostly wordlessly at his robodad. The entire story arc where he solves his own murder is also extremely truncated and not all that satisfying. It’s also essentially unconnected to what used to be the greater plot surrounding Omnicorp itself, and now is much more like a completely unrelated plotline.

Another introduction in this movie that I did enjoy was Gary Oldman’s character. He plays the scientist responsible for integrating Alex Murphy into his Robocop body as well as the tinkering with his brain in order to make him more robotic and less human. I really liked his character even though I wish it had gone a little deeper into the questions surrounding the ethics of what he’s actually doing. It’s brought up a few times that what he’s doing is wrong, and whether he should be doing it at all, but it boils down to a slightly worried glance for a half a second before he decides to go through with it. And when everything starts going to hell in the third act, he has a complete change of heart that’s once again explained because of reasons. I also liked the look of all the robotics in this movie, from the Robocop-like drones to the callback to the classic look of the ED-209s, and I really liked how they showed Robocop’s internal software which was connected to the entire array of the city’s security cameras and the entire criminal database, which he is able to sort through using facial recognition in order to find the criminals he’s searching for on whichever mission he happens to be on. I also wanted to make a quick mention of some of the other actors who had somewhat smaller roles, but they worked well for what they were, Michael Keaton was great as the head of Omnicorp along with Jay Baruchel as his head of marketing, and Jackie Earl Haley had a fun role as the lead drone technician and pseudo-Robocop trainer, or tester. I especially enjoyed how he always referred to Robocop as “Tin Man”. Like many recent sci-fi movies, it’s a fun watch while it’s going, but when you start thinking it over, it just doesn’t quite hold up very well. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 2014

I just happened to stumble across this a few days ago and since it was pretty short at just about an hour long I decided to check it out as a bit of a sorbet between horror bites. It’s basically an extended TV show pilot though I haven’t read if it is going to become a show or not. The movie centers on Stan Lee as a caricature of himself, or at least the personality he portrays as his somewhat public persona. He stumbles upon a crashed ship of aliens, including two essentially space cops and five until recently captive fugitives which he eventually gets to sign a contract so he can use their likenesses in a new comic book sold as a reality superhero show. It originally aired on the Hub network and it is pretty obvious that it is aimed at kids, but there is a bit of fun to be had here and there aside from the cliché storylines and silly humor. I seriously doubt that it would be anything that I would find myself watching on a regular basis if it did become a full fledged cartoon series, but if there was another short movie like this I would check it out.

The movie is set up as a basic intro centered around Stan Lee’s comic book pitch that is about the events happening around him. Since the alien ship crashed, they are stranded on Earth for an indeterminate amount of time and the police aliens and captive aliens are forced to work together if they want to survive. But of course all of the fugitives have a sympathetic flashback explaining how they ended up on the wrong side of the law. Most of them are just petty thieves, and the “bad boy” of the group is probably a case of mistaken identity. It wouldn’t be a superhero movie if there weren’t any villains to fight and this sets up a couple different ones. There’s these lizard aliens who are known to destroy entire worlds, and there’s also the military led by an officer who gets his arm blown off and replaced with a cybernetic arm. The military is the more interesting of the two, though there of course has to be some aliens to fight so the heroes don’t have to hurt humans.

I suppose I should take a brief look at the actual Mighty 7. There’s the pseudo leader Strongarm voiced by the Lone Ranger himself Armie Hammer, who has super strength and his kind-of girlfriend/partner Silver Skylark voiced by TV’s Lois Lane Teri Hatcher, who has bird wings and her feet can become birdlike talons. There’s the bad boy Lazer Lord voiced by 80′s bad boy Christian Slater, who shoots energy beams from his hands and likes to wear sunglasses. There’s also Lady Lightning voiced by Mayim Bialik, who can run really fast, Kid Kinergy voiced by Sean Astin who is a bald telekinetic kid, Micro voiced by Darren Criss who can make himself really small, and Roller Man voiced by Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea who is very fat, but also nerdy smart and can roll around as a huge ball. I thought all the voice work was done pretty well and even though there are a lot of semi-recognizeable names in the cast, I never got any feeling of “stunt casting”. As for their powers, they all managed to have a place in the team somewhere, but aside from Strongarm, Lazer Lord, and Roller Man, the rest felt fairly superfluous.

The one thing that was different and fun about this movie was the involvement of Stan Lee, both because his voice is so recognizable, and also because it adds another element that’s not typically present in these kind of generic superhero team ups. His character here is often along for the ride, but he’s more interested in getting the story and getting them to sign the contract for him to use the story than he is in actually helping them save the day. While the jokes did occasionally feel a little forced and stiff, it was still a refreshing element, especially when at the end he used his caricatured ego to put his name above the rest of the heroes in the finished comic book. When all is said and done, it was a nice bit of harmless fun, but there wasn’t really anything beyond the surface level to really dig into. There are plenty of worse things to watch out there if it happens to come on, but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to seek it out. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher 2014

Last year when I watched the Marvel Iron Man anime movie Rise of Technovore, the best part of that movie were the bits featuring the Punisher, so while that movie was ok but fairly middling, I had quite a bit more hope for this one. But what I ended up getting was more of the same. I do think that the way this movie handles the Punisher as a character is much better than the way he is handled in any of the other live action movies, but I wasn’t as fond of how it handles Black Widow. There are plenty of well done fight scenes, but they had a little too much anime flair to them and some of the voice acting fell a bit flat except for one role who played it overly animated. The plot kept things interesting and while I didn’t like everything in this movie, there was plenty enough to keep me in through the end of the movie. A step up from last year’s Technovore, but only a small step.

The basic idea of this movie is that there is a villainous group called Leviathan who is capturing people and turning them into brainwashed super soldiers, so Nick Fury recruits the Punisher to investigate it alongside Black Widow because they are both non-powered and would be easier to take out if they became brainwashed themselves. Of course, the two of them aren’t told about any of this brainwashing business until they find out for themselves. Black Widow also finds out that a S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist that she was romantically involved with and presumed dead is now their lead researcher behind this super soldier business and was also the initial test subject. There are a few minor twists and turns as much of this information is revealed after-the-fact, but never really as a twist, more like it was something that Fury knew all along, but Black Widow and Punisher find out along the way. There’s also a few appearances by some familiar Avenger faces and a few less-familiar faces who I still haven’t found out their identities yet.

The best part of the movie is the interaction between Black Widow and the Punisher. Initially they might not seem like they would be a good fit for each other, but they do play off of each other quite well during the course of the movie. While Frank Castle is initially reluctant to go along with the mission and Black Widow is reluctant to bring him along, they of course eventually come to an understanding of each other. Thankfully, it doesn’t quite go so far as to be buddy cop territory, nor do they throw in a romantic subplot either. Instead, it’s more of a professional respect for each other and their methods. More than once does Black Widow disobey orders by letting Frank “escape” either to join her in the next stage of the mission or at the end of the movie when everything is wrapped up yet Frank is still wanted for murder. They do fight each other more than once, not only that but it never appears to be a playful fighting, but instead a full out brawl with each other.

Which does bring me into my biggest gripe about the movie and that is the style of fighting. While Black Widow and the Punisher are both extremely skilled fighters, the way that’s represented in this movie is through overly anime-stylized almost super-speed. There’s the quick movements with the white streak of wind as well as the lightning fast movements where they are in one place at one moment and another the next without any movement blur at all. It just never struck me as the way that the Punisher would move, and I also think that it was a little bit too much for the agile Black Widow. It was also a bit distracting the way that Black Widow was drawn with overly ample proportions, I know it’s fairly common practice, but it still felt a bit distracting this time around with her massive breasts.

Another slight complaint that I have with this movie is that during the end they essentially call in the cavalry, which would be the Avengers. Specifically Tony Stark, the Hulk, War Machine, and a couple others who I didn’t recognize at all. In fact, during a few points in that final battle scene, I wasn’t even sure which ones were the villains and which ones were the heroes. At one point I thought I recognized a character as Dr. Strange, but it turned out that he was one of the villains and I believe I heard them refer to him as Gravitron who I recognize from reading references to his origin appearance in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. As far as the voice acting goes, I thought in general all of the voices were fairly flat, especially Black Widow. It actually worked well for Frank Castle’s character, but it wasn’t quite as good in the other roles, especially Nick Fury who was supposed to be overly calm even in the face of some of these circumstances, but it felt more like he was about to fall asleep. But even with these flaws, it was overall a decent movie with more positives than negatives, and I would still love to see one of these that just completely focused on the Punisher without the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. getting in the way of things. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

300: Rise of an Empire

I was originally going to wait until this came out on home video, but I recently got the opportunity to go to a Winter Soldier pre-screening event. As this was the first time showing up to one of these events I thought that an hour and a half early would be enough time to be able to get into the showing. Unfortunately I was wrong, by well over 50 people wrong. Not only that, but the theater wasn’t doing a very good job at communicating how many people actually were in the line ahead of us and it wasn’t until about 10 minutes before the showing was supposed to start when they finally came to us near the back of the line and told us the bad news and offered us tickets to any other movie showing at the theater. Luckily there was a screening of 300 starting right at that exact moment so that’s what I went with. So on top of seeing an underwhelming movie, it also has the detriment of being the movie that I had to see instead of Captain America 2. I was a fan of the original 300 and even own it on DVD (though I don’t think I’ve re-watched it since buying it. While this still had involvement with Zack Snyder, the direction was passed onto Noam Murro who seemed to think the best way to follow Zack Snyder’s style was to increase the amount of slow motion moments of blood flying at the camera.

Also when I was originally hearing about this movie I was under the impression that it was a prequel to 300, then it sounded more like a sequel, and after watching it, it’s actually a bit of both. It is another side to the 300 movie, and the events of the first movie take place sometime during the middle of this movie. This side of the story focuses mostly on the naval battles between the small Greek forces led by Themistocles played by Sullivan Stapleton and his abs and the overwhelming navy of the Persian armies led by Artemisia played by Eva Green and her breasts. I will say that there were a couple high points in this movie and they were Themistocles and Artemisia. Eva Green totally sold every scene that she was in with the possible exception of the really weird kinda rape-y feeling sex scene between the two of them. It was also kind of interesting seeing the handful of moments where they used Gerard Butler’s Leonidas in moments referencing the events in the original 300, though I almost felt like they used CGI instead of bringing him back, and it’s quite possible that they did considering that they wanted him for a major role which he turned down.

Another thing that I did like in this movie were the actual naval battles including their tactics. I always enjoy seeing unusual battle tactics that work, and there are quite a few good ones showcased here which give the advantage to the smaller force over the larger force, though I never did get the sense that the Athenians were all just farmers and fishermen as they kept referring to them as, since they almost always fought just as well as the heavily trained Spartans from the first movie. I also quite liked the substory between Themistocles’s friend and his son who is just barely old enough to take part in the battle, though of course he is also an extremely skilled warrior in his first battle with no remorse against killing Persians. Not only that, but I never understood why Atermisia specifically sought him out as the one for her to personally kill, while the audience knows that the two of them are close friends, I didn’t get the fact that Artemisia was also aware of that fact, nor did she kill anyone else in that manner.

This movie really is a full of good ideas that then get undercut with bad plot points. For every element of the movie that I like, there is a subelement that I do not like. There are some amazing choreography in the fight sequences, especially the ones towards the end, but they are too often overrun with moments that move into Snyder-vision super slo-mo with the overly CGI blood spraying towards camera in a full-on slo-mo fountain. I also don’t really care for the voice over which also starts the movie in the middle of the story for no reason other than to have an “ohhh” moment when the movie catches back up to that point in the story. It also makes me curious if re-watching the original 300 will hold up as the stylish, well-made movie that I remember it being, or if it will be seen as a shallow slo-mo festival of blood and abs. Time will tell, so until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier 2014

This year is reminding myself of how much different the superhero movie schedule is compared to last year when there were about a dozen movies packed between the end of May and the middle of August, while this year has the movies much more spread out closer to one every month with Captain America kicking off the more traditional superhero fare as early as April (as opposed to the few comic book movies like 300 & I, Frankenstein and the few movies with a less direct superhero connection like Robocop and the Lego Movie) and yet this is also more of a far cry from a traditional superhero plot and instead feels much more like a conspiracy thriller along the lines of a dozen or so great movies whose names I can’t recall at the moment. There’s also a bit more of Captain America adjusting to life in the 21st century which I have been wanting to see ever since the first movie. In short, I loved every minute of it. Also, as a warning, I don’t always tread lightly around spoilers, though most of the spoilers I already knew or assumed before seeing the movie.

I don’t usually read too many reviews of a movie before I write my own but one thing I did read was how most reviews completely discount Black Widow’s role in the movie, instead merely giving her a line or two generally about her looks, but she is really the second major role in this movie. She definitely gets more screentime than Anthony Mackie’s Falcon and great chemistry with Chris Evans’ Cap. She has some great moments with Captain America and I enjoy where their relationship ends up, there’s definitely some playful chemistry in there, but at the end of the day, they come out as being good friends. The other strong female role I wasn’t quite as fond of in the nurse/S.H.I.E.L.D. agent neighbor of Steve Rogers played by Emily VanCamp. She has a couple nice moments, but I never really thought she felt like she fit in with the rest of the movie.

What really shines in this movie is the political thriller aspect of the plot. The way it weaves the conspiracy theories, double agents, and mysteries with the action scenes and superheroics is masterful. There is a corrupt element working withing S.H.I.E.L.D. that is first realized by Nick Fury who, battered and bloody, takes the information to the only person he feels he can trust, Captain America. Now Steve Rogers is faced with the task of not going headlong into battle against a clear enemy like Hydra of the past, but instead has to investigate and infiltrate the organization that he has become a part of. And I loved the way the infiltration scenes were handled, it reminded me very much of The Incredibles when Mr. Incredible was infiltrating the volcano lair.

There are a few things that Captain America is known for, and this movie really helps utilize those elements to their full effect. Something that I’ve been missing ever since the first Captain America movie is the “man out of time” element which this film finally delivers. I loved the notebook he carries of things from the past forty years that he needs to check out, I loved that he had a scene with the elderly Peggy Carter, his love from the past, and I also loved the scene where it almost bridges the gap when they discover that the Hydra scientist has created this rudimentary AI using a giant room filled with old tape drive computers and monochrome monitors. The other element of Captain America which gets a lot of use in this movie is his shield which he uses quite a bit in his many different fights, it’s no longer just a prop but an extremely useful tool and weapon which is amazingly done without looking completely silly.

There’s so much in this movie I haven’t even gotten to yet, there’s plenty of more minor characters, and I really enjoyed the roles they had in the plot. I loved the look of Bucky as the Winter Soldier, considered a spoiler by no one who even has passing familiarity with the original comic storyline like myself. I thought the way the brainwashing reversal was done worked well without being over-done. I also loved Nick Fury’s role in the movie and his great scene in the SUV where he gets a chance to show off some of his own skills which he hasn’t had much of an opportunity to do. And finally Falcon was set up as a great character, he meshed very well with Steve Rogers’ personality and his flight suit looked and worked great, and like Cap’s shield was not overly silly like it easily could have been. Robert Redford’s Agent Pierce was another strong character that fit right into the inner workings of S.H.I.E.L.D. as well as being a great villain which was something that most people assumed as soon as his casting was announced. I think the weakest part of the movie as far as characters go were the SWAT team made up of basically goons with very little personality or motivation, just some decent fighting skills.

Finally, I do want to mention the tie-in with the TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which I have been covering through the entire season. Last week’s episode was a nice lead up to Captain America without needing to see both to get the gist of it, but when you do see both it makes the entire story a little bit clearer. Agent Sitwell is the biggest link between the two stories, but the big question is how the events of Captain America will affect the rest of the season and beyond for the TV show, as S.H.I.E.L.D. is in the process of being dismantled as an organization, though of course there is still the smaller group of operatives who are still loyal to the cause and will likely be working with Nick Fury and the Avengers in some capacity. If anything, based on my limited knowledge of the comics universe I could guess that this will turn into the creation of S.W.O.R.D. which lends credence to the theory I saw a while back that thinks Skye will end up becoming Spider-Woman who is a major figure within S.W.O.R.D. Time will tell, and as always I’ll be there to see it when it comes out. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Graphic Horror: Afflicted 2014

Even though my blogathon is over, I like the tag “Graphic Horror” enough that I’ll be keeping it and using it right alongside “Almost Super” for horror movies that aren’t quite superhero movies, even if they are based on graphic novels and therefore included in my big list of superhero and comic book movies. When I saw the trailer and early promotional tweets about this movie I was very interested. It was a found footage movie very similar in style to Chronicle only with a horror twist to it, where these two friends go on a world trip and one of them catches something that starts to make him sick, but then gives him superpowers before taking a much darker turn. There was another element to the story that the PR wanted to keep a secret, but I didn’t go digging into what it was until they decided it wasn’t that big of a secret to keep once it hit its wide release and I found out that the superpowers were brought on because he is becoming a vampire. This actually made me a little bit more interested in the movie because I’m always a fan of vampire movies and I thought this would do for vampire movies that Chronicle did for superhero movies and I think I was right.

The movie starts out simply enough as most horror films do with two friends going on a trip. Of course, since this is a found footage movie, one of them wants to be a documentarian while the other has a cluster of blood vessels that’s basically a brain aneurism just waiting to happen so of course they want to document the entire year-long trip around the world. They don’t get too far into it before Derek, the one with the brain thing, hooks up with a girl in Paris, only to be found messed up in their hotel room, but he claims he is fine and doesn’t want to go to the hospital because he thinks if they find anything then it will end their trip. From there on in, he starts changing and the film starts changing along with it. It starts with Clif, the filmmaker, worrying about him and what’s going on, then it switches to wonder as he starts showing signs of the superhuman abilities of a vampire, before devolving into horror as the thirst begins to take control, and finally turning into an action/mystery as Derek tracks down the woman who gave him the curse in the first place.

One thing that immediately drew me into the film is the obvious camaraderie between the two leads who are also longtime friends in real life as proven by some of the footage of them in homemade films as teenagers. They are both quite likeable and adept at handling some of the more serious moments when they are dealing with the seriousness of what is actually happening to Derek. There’s also plenty of great use of the handheld cameras, especially the vest which allows them to strap a camera to their chest which provides some amazing POV shots later in the movie when Derek is demonstrating his newfound abilities like jumping two stories into the air. There is some stretching of the common question that happens with many found footage movies: “Why are they filming this?”, but when it gets to that point, I’m more interested in what’s happening to care. There’s also a great transition within the changing style of shots as the movie progresses. The beginning starts out like it’s a polished and fully edited version of the opening to Clif’s documentary. But as things go on, the shots get rougher, and it obviously gets darker as they spend less time in the daylight, and the edits become rougher.

There’s also some really amazing effects, makeup, and stunt work at hand here, the scar at the center of the poster image comes about after Derek’s first kill. Distraught about what he’s done, he tries to take his own life with a shotgun blast through his head. The vampiric look itself is also quite interesting. It’s not the more modern style of sexy vampires, though when he is well fed he does look completely normal, but when he starts getting too thirsty, he skin grows a motely pale, his eyes change, and his posture and manner of movement changes as well. It has definite inspiration from the classic Nosferatu, though the behavior is much more animal-like and instinctual, and Derek really helps to sell this stage of the process. On top of that the stuntwork for much of the vampire superheroic action look great, especially during the POV moments.

I initially watched this movie to review because of the superhero subtext in the trailer and the Chronicle connection that was heavily used in the Twitter marketing campaign and there was a few moments of that, especially at the end where he becomes something of an anti-hero like a vampiric Punisher which would be a really interesting direction to go if they ever happen to do a sequel to this movie. But aside from that, there isn’t much to go on, it’s much more of a vampire action/horror movie with a found footage and mystery angle to it. But I enjoyed it so much I just had to write about it, and something I always like doing on this site is giving attention to smaller independent movies that take a new look at an old genre which this movie absolutely did. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Sparks 2014

This is a movie that completely escaped my attention as it made the festival rounds last year and it even played near me in Chicago last April, but I did notice it when it came out on DVD as it appeared at my local Wal-Mart. Since it was a lower budget indie movie I had to look farther into it and contacted the writer/director and got to interview William Katt who is the executive producer and plays the main villain in the movie Matanza which you can view here. But aside from that, it is another different take on the superhero movie. It’s a film noir thriller set in the 20′s & 40′s following the story of Ian Sparks and his descent into the underbelly of the superhero culture. There’s plenty of twists and turns and things don’t turn out quite the way one might expect. It has a bit of a slow start, but once the action starts happening it goes on right through the end.

The story of Sparks is somewhat of a mishmash of several types of origin stories combined and tied together. There’s the meteor strike in Rochester which kills many people with its radiation, but there were 13 survivors who developed super powers and yet most of them kept their powers secret from the general public. Sparks himself was involved in a train crash which killed his parents and was doused with a mysterious chemical which gave him powers, though the full extent of those powers weren’t fully realized to him until late in the movie. And there’s also a small handful of costumed vigilantes that come into popularity which Sparks buys into. All three of these groups intersect throughout Sparks’ rise and fall as he follows the trail of Matanza as well as the person responsible for his parents’ deaths.

The two main leads in this movie are played by Chase Williamson as Sparks and Ashley Bell as Lady Heavenly and they both do quite well in their roles. They have nice chemistry with each other, both during the times when they are together and also the times when they are more at odds with each other. Chase handles both the confident hero at the beginning of the movie as well as the down on his luck hero scraping to get by as the movie goes on. It’s also great to see Clancy Brown as Archer, one of the more interesting characters that starts off as Sparks’ unseen protector and his role gradually changes through the course of the movie. I was also a big fan of Marina Squerciati as Dawn, the shapeshifting descendant of one of the Rochester 13 though that’s partly due to my love of shapeshifters as a whole. But the effects for those moments were some of the best and most seamless ones in the movie. And finally there’s William Katt playing Matanza, the villain who spends most of the movie unseen, but makes a big impact both with the build-up as well as his brief on-screen time.

There were a few minor issues that I had with the movie, I don’t usually talk about the costume design in a movie, but since this was a period piece I did pay a bit more attention to it and I thought most of the costumes looked great, especially some of the classic looking femme fatale designs for Dawn, and I also quite liked the simple, yet effective designs for the superhero costumes of Sparks and Lady Heavenly, as well as the interesting looking helmet for Jake Busey’s Sledge. What I was slightly distracted by though, was Sparks’ hooded sweatshirt which pops up from time to time and while they may have been around during that time, it didn’t feel like it was from that time period. I also wasn’t entirely sold on the framing device of Sparks telling his story to the newspaper. It felt a little unneeded at times, but I did enjoy seeing Clint Howard as the hard nosed editor in chief and I also liked the payoff at the end with the low man on the totem pole at the paper writing the story at the end.

What this movie really does best is getting to the heart of Sparks’ rise and fall. Sure, most of the big budget superheroes have problems, some of them will even go a bit on the darker side of things to accomplish what is necessary for the greater good, but Sparks goes beyond that, something along the lines of Tony Stark’s demon in a bottle storyline, at least from what I understand of it. There’s a point in this movie where Sparks hits rock bottom, and it’s tough to see, but it fits in perfectly with the style of this movie and the rest of what’s going on. Not only that, but it makes his eventual redemption come off that much more hard-earned. It’s movies like these that really make me enjoy writing for this site because this is one of those movies that I probably never would have given a second look to otherwise. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Son of Batman 2014

It’s time for yet another entry from DC Animation which almost always produce some of my favorite animated superheroes. This time around it’s a story that I wasn’t familiar with at all, which as the title suggests is about the son of Batman. If you’ve seen Dark Knight Rises, or are familiar with what’s happened in the comic books it’s not a big surprise that Batman hooks up with Talia Al Ghul who isn’t always as cutthroat as her father from what I understand. There’s also apparently some deal with how the kid is born in the first place in the comics but it’s mostly glossed over in this movie. Anyway, the League of Shadows is in trouble so Talia takes her son Damian to meet his heretofore unknown father who just so happens to be Batman for a little father and son bonding time. Of course, being raised within the League of Shadows isn’t without its downfalls and there’s also the matter at hand where Slade Wilson aka Deathstroke has killed Ra’s Al Ghul and Damian is looking for revenge and is not above killing, which obviously doesn’t sit well with Batman. Anyway it’s a fun movie and continues a similar look from Justice League: War and also a similar mix of blood and occasional humor which I enjoyed as usual.

Honestly the biggest hurdle for me to get past in this movie wasn’t a major one, but while it’s generally accepted that Batman has a superhuman level of fighting skills, strength, and pain tolerance, I had a much harder time accepting that a 10 to 12 year old boy has essentially the same level of skill and strength as his father. Fairly early on he’s fighting an extremely large and well muscled thug named Ubu and they have the typical moment where they clash sword against ninja claws and appear to be evenly matched in strength which I just didn’t buy. I can accept that Damian would be more agile and even more skilled than Ubu, but I just don’t believe that he would come even close in a strength match against this guy. And later on in the movie he basically has a knife go completely through his forearm and continues to fight as if it barely even happened. League of Shadows training or not, those moments were a little too far fetched for me.

Aside from the Mary Sue quality of Damian, everything else in the movie is exactly what I come to expect from a DC Animated feature like this. I enjoyed all of the voices in the movie. They kept Jason O’Mara from Justice League: War as the voice of Batman and I enjoyed him quite a bit in the movie. I thought Stuart Allan as the voice of young master Damian did well enough at playing both the occasionally petulant and entitled youth and the skilled young protege. I was a little surprised to learn that the voice of Slade Wilson was Thomas Gibson, who I know best as Greg from Dharma and Greg. He really pulled off the menacing arrogance that fit the character well. I also thought the animation looked great as usual. It always surprises me how much violence is able to be put in these movies, but I also always quite enjoy it, and there’s quite a few bloody battles throughout as well as a slightly gory scene involving Killer Croc. Unfortunately, I never quite clicked with the design of Batman’s mask. There was just something about it that felt a little too sleek to me.

What I did enjoy quite a bit from this movie was the interactions between the characters. I quite liked Damian’s growth throughout the movie even though it was fairly obvious how it would turn out in the end. I also enjoyed Talia Al Ghul here, she was able to kick some major ass, has some definite feelings towards Batman, but also still has that darker side inherited from her father shown especially when it’s revealed that she did drug him back during their night together. There were also a few very fun moments between Alfred and Damian as well as Nightwing and Damian. Though it never got funnier than the quick line “I’ll drive.” “No.” “But I know how!” “No!” as well as the call back. Throughout the movie there’s also a bit of a B story about a doctor creating mutagen to make half man half animal soldiers including a flying monkey at one point. Unfortunately, even though it is technically the driving force for a good chunk of the plot, it didn’t feel as interesting or as focused upon as Damian’s character arc. But it doesn’t detract from the overall enjoyability of this movie, and while I doubt it will make my top 10 animated DC movies, it’s still a solid entry and worth a watch as always. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.