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Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
“It’s not my Batman, but it is my Joker!” That’s what Tyler said as soon as the Joker appeared the first time, and it pretty much holds true. Batman Beyond isn’t nearly as much our cup of tea as 90s Batman was, but it does appeal to see Gotham still moving forward beyond their superhero’s ability to guard them.
A lot of people has seen Return of the Joker, and the title outlines it pretty well, so there isn’t any need to get into that. Batman is Batman, and Batman is cool. I did get a fair bit of complaining from Tyler about Terry not being as Batman as he could be (“It’s like they’re trying to turn him into Spiderman.”) and the attempts to make Batman appeal to a younger crowd (I’d have to agree with him here). It doesn’t necessarily detract from the movie, and we knew it was a different Batman,but change is scary to fogies like us.
Going beyond our whining about change, it was a fun movie to watch! I love Ace the Batdog and the homages to original Batman villains (especially Grandma Harley, heheh). Puzzling together the whole Joker revival was fun as well.
Most of you guys have already seen it, but why not watch it again? You can watch Return of the Joker here.
Defendor
A lot of people told me they didn’t like Defendor. Even my dad warned me against it, “It’s not worth your time. You’re not missing much.” So I have to give stock to that…but I like this movie.
It’s touted about as a comedy, which I can’t agree with at all. I found the movie to be sad with a few laughs shoved in. The laughs, though, just seem to make the movie a bit more depressing. Defendor is a special needs man who works as a construction worker during the day and defends people at night using improvised weaponry that he designed. His main goal is to find “Captain Industry”, a nonexistent villain who plagues Defendor’s mind.
He’s taken advantage of by a hooker he saves from a cop and it whittles back his grounding in reality a little more every day. However, Defendor is also supported by one of the grateful people he saves.
It’s a bittersweet movie. I can’t recommend this to anyone looking to laugh, but I can recommend it to people who appreciate a moving story.
Mystery Men
One of my favourite movies from my childhood (to be honest I wonder if I should have been allowed to watch it) and subsequently one of the movies that has influenced my tastes in comedy. Mystery Men is a movie about your average superhero team and is very purely comedic.
It’s a group of people with really absurd powers: farting, silverware throwing, getting angry, shoveling, invisibility (when no one is looking), wisdom, and a possessed bowling ball. They take on a supervillain to rescue the most popular hero of the city. It’s a simple story of this underdog group beating the odds and earn their place on the pantheon of Super Heroes.
Both Tyler and I rather liked the movie. It doesn’t take itself seriously and lends itself very well to being simple entertainment.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil
Suggested by an anon, and thank you for that. We absolutely adored this movie!
It was really fun to see a horror movie from the other side and see all of the most ridiculous horror tropes get covered (and subsequently made fun of). The two main characters, Tucker and Dale, are two really average country dudes who end up having just the shittiest luck. Tucker sunk all his savings into a vacation home formerly owned by a psychopath and he brings Dale along to help spruce the place up and hang out. On the way, they bump into a group of idiotic college kids with issues. Especially Chad. That guy gives rapist/psychotic vibes out through the entire movie and freaked me out (I don’t like people like that, they make my skin crawl!).
Through an unfortunate turn of events, Tucker and Dale find themselves rescuing Allison, the female lead, from drowning and take her to their cabin to hopefully resuscitate her. The college kids who witness this believe they’re going to kill her and…well…it doesn’t end well. The belief just gets perpetuated by the most terrible coincidences.
The version we watched (and that will be linked) is an unfinished version of the film. For us, it just made it better. The best way to sum up our opinion would just be to quote Tyler: “It’s like people were listening to us talking during horror movies and made that into a horror movie.” Every really weird theory we’ve ever come up with or reason that the killer was in such a way just felt justified here.
Cold Creepy Feeling
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This is a B-movie if I’ve ever seen one (and I’ve seen plenty). No plot, terrible pacing, terrible effects, terrible actors…hilarious consequences.
The “story” surrounds a married couple from LA with no money buying a ranch, sleeping in it for one night, and then deciding it’s haunted after they wake up from terrible dreams. You know, after getting drunk and being bitten by a tarantula (during the gratuitous sex scene). Everything is filmed on a handy-cam and there is a rich amount of artsy environment shots that probably take up to fifteen minutes of the movie.
The deciding factors of the house being haunted are meeting one strange person (therefore everyone is weird), a bad dream, a “cold creepy feeling”, and a Yahoo Answers where people all sit on the same couch and tape their answers. It’s 3 AM and the dude just happens to have a psychic friend that he calls up to come over the very next day (because she apparently doesn’t have a life?). A seance and exorcism is performed over the female lead, who is having a fucking seizure.
There are so many terrible moments. The worst part is, I’ve just listed the entire movie. It’s 88 minutes long, 20 minutes dedicated to driving to the house, maybe 40 minutes to sleeping, 5 minutes to gratuitous sex, 7 minutes of haunting…whatever.
Did I mention that the entire thing is like a terrible porno premise, complete with shitty music? It seriously sounds like one of those cheap electronic keyboards with the built in beats.
If you don’t have the patience for awful B-movies, I don’t advise you watch. Your time is better invested in actual horror or YouTube videos (which are often filmed much better than this movie).
You can watch
a Yahoo Answers readingCold Creepy Feeling here.
Captivity
At first glance, this movie is a handy-cam version of Saw and takes after the wave of borderline torture porn that horror became during that period. Shockingly enough, it’s not. It’s a legitimately unsettling movie for the first half and a tense film for the second half. I like to summarize the entire situation as the worst dating service of all time.
Plot surrounds a popular model kidnapped by a mysterious figure. He drops her into his cellar and psychologically tortures her and introduces her to the temporary man of her dreams. She quickly proves to be a rather indomitable spirit and bluntly refuses to play the game until her new sweetheart’s life is on the line.
Then PLOT TWIST. I am reluctant to spoil it (though the movie is from 2007), so I encourage people to watch and find out.
Captivity is not for the squeamish. It’s not very gratuitous with its nudity, either. There are two nude scenes, one with implied sex and one with her putting on a dress and blurred out slightly. I was legitimately surprised they didn’t trounce the female lead about like a hunk of meat.
Tyler and I found ourselves shutting up and actually watching for the brunt of the flick…we had a hard time finding humour in it. It’s actually a very good film and my only complaint is the epilogue. It’s mildly amusing and gives decent closure but at the same time, I wondered if it was totally necessary.
Tyler comments:
“It was kind of nice to find a film that stopped us from talking for once.”
“Storyline and everything like that is kind of meh…but as far as being downright fucking disturbing it did a good job.”
Dreamworks Dragons: Riders of Berk
Episode 1: How to Start a Dragon Academy
What’s this? Something not a movie? Yes it is! I am unashamedly in love with the film, so it’s only logical that I end up watching the TV series, right?
For those of you looking for a just-like-the-film experience, you might be a tad disappointed. The animation is lacking that final coat of paint that makes a TV series a movie. Despite that, I found it rather good for a TV adapted series. If they changed the voice actors, I didn’t even notice. It’s really close.
This episode in particular visits the hardships of having dragons in every nook and cranny of Berk and introduces what I assume is the premise for the rest of the series: a Dragon Academy. It also introduces who I assume will be the antagonist: an old Viking cabbage farmer named Mildew. He’s old, he’s bitter, he just wants to see the dragons gone.
I have to point out the nod to the book series that HTTYD is based off of: Snotlout trying to show off his “impressive” dragon training skills by simply yelling a command as loudly as he could. Such a little detail made me quite happy.
I hope you enjoy the series as much as I will! The episode presented here has a link to the next episode in the annotations at the end, so if Riders of Berk is to your liking, keep an eye out for that!
(if this episode is taken down, please let me know so that I can find a replacement!)
Please take the time to tune in to Cartoon Network on Tuesdays at 7:30/6:30C. The show starts on September 4th! I’ll be watching with y’all.
The Abandoned
A horror movie about…DOPPELGANGERS! Doppelgangers aren’t exactly common horror fodder, so it was exciting to see how this one handled it. I’m not sure if I was altogether pleased, but it did better than expected. The same could be said for the entire movie; that is to say, I had low expectations that were exceeded.
The film delivered a rather interesting plot: Fraternal twins finding each other in rural Russia while seeking out the truth about their parents. They both see their doppelgangers and end up getting twisted up in Weird Time Shit. The timelines looping about are rather shaky, leaving much to be desired, but the handling of the doppelgangers themselves I found rather appealing. They had an “I’m rubber, you’re glue”/dementor thing going on that I questioned, though.
The movie itself is rather tense, with shockingly few jump scares. As the movie went on, it legitimately got creepier…until the climax. The climax was mildly silly, but…we were actually cheering on the protagonist. Marie was an actual strong female character with a head on her shoulders. For once, we were seeing a reasonable woman who fought back in a realistic fashion and was seriously motherfucking brave. I was taken aback. Nicolai was pretty cool, too, but seriously, Marie was cool.
A few things I noted: the movie opens with a lot of jump cuts implying that more than one of Marie was about, heavily foreshadowing the doppelganger element that would be presented later on. It was rather well done, if not confusing at first. Another bit is still in the beginning and peppered throughout the rise of the film: the flashback/dream sequences. Especially the dream sequence. What the hell did those have to do with anything? Another is that this is a partially bilingual movie, again without subtitles. There isn’t enough to complain, since the protagonist understands about as much as we do and the movie is primarily English.
Final note: When the clock strikes midnight, it’s more fun to imagine that everything is being tossed around by an anal poltergeist.
Tyler Note: “It was a good movie, but I wish I understood more of it. I kept feeling like I was missing something.”
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
This movie is over my head. It sailed straight over and continued to circle over my head, taunting me. It’s a good movie, but I think it may warrant a second or third watching in order to really understand everything. There was a lot of symbolism, blatant and subdued (ie, Tony’s mask with the elongated nose).
When we first turned on the movie, my first thought was that it reminded me of Titus. The thought was removed almost immediately. The Imaginarium surrounds the theatre troupe led by a former monk with the ability to send people into his mind and show them the wonders of their own imagination. The monk gambles with the Devil (apparently, more than a few times), and this is what the plot basically is.
A gamble with the devil to win his daughter’s soul.
The characters themselves, I found to be rather unlikeable (but for Percy. Percy was fantastic) with a few exceptions. Most had those moments where you sit and watch and wonder why the hell would you DO that!! almost immediately followed by oh, that poor lad/lass. They were very human characters in an unfortunate situation.
To be honest, beyond “holy shit what the fuck is going on” I haven’t got much to say.
You can watch the movie here (Youtube, with ads) or here (ad-free).
Ender Chest
