15 February 2016
From the opening joke credits through to the knowing post-credit sting, Deadpool is hilariously, filthily, irreverently funny. Nobody is safe from ridicule: the producers are credited as ‘Ass-hats’, the director is ‘An overpaid tool’, Ryan Reynolds mocks himself and his career, the budgetary restrictions of the film are noted, the confusing timelines of the X-Men movies are referenced, the breaking…
20 November 2015
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 After Kick-Ass 2 and Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, it’s time for the last in my little series of disappointing comic-book movie sequels. I cared so little for The Amazing Spider-Man, I didn’t see it in the cinema and didn’t bother to compile my thoughts on it in its own post – I included…
19 November 2015
Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Yesterday’s Unsatisfactory Comic-Book Movie sequel was Kick-Ass 2. The next comic-book movie sequel that was a disappointment was Sin City: A Dame To Kill For – I can understand why it ended up on Netflix, like Kick-Ass 2 (Netflix UK does not get the best choice of films). Unlike Kick-Ass 2, Sin City…
18 November 2015
It used to be that, as a rule of thumb, sequels weren’t as good as the first film. The exceptions to this were so small that you could easily list them (The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Aliens) and stay confident in the generalisation. However, there was a slow turnaround in the fortunes of sequels so that it…
31 July 2015
If you are even slightly pop-culture literate, you’ll know that Ant-Man was going to be directed by Edgar Wright, from a script by him and Joe Cornish; it was a project that Wright had been developing for several years, only to leave at almost the last minute due to ‘creative differences’, to be replaced by the less stylistic Peyton Reed,…
5 May 2015
I felt sorry for Joss Whedon, the successful, talented, smart, funny, creatively satisfied man. A little bit. Not only did he have to follow up his own success by writing and directing the sequel to the third largest grossing film so far, but he also had to contend with the myriad of other factors involved in making a blockbuster film…
31 August 2014
[Note to self: moving house, filling it with flat-pack furniture and getting kittens really get in the way of blogging. Apologies for tardiness.] I don’t know if it was because of the cinema I was in (my first visit to Peckhamplex, the independent multiplex located in Peckham, obviously) or it was the film itself, but Guardians Of The Galaxy was…
23 June 2014
(I saw this film on opening weekend, so this is very late but real life has intruded: we are in the process of trying to buy and sell a house, so at least I have a decent excuse.) I still feel I have to pinch myself sometimes – I’ve been a comic book fan for a while now, but despite…
2 April 2014
Let’s start with the summary – Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the best second film of the Marvel studio films so far. It is better than Iron Man 2, obviously, and even better than Thor: Dark World. It manages the trick of bringing out what worked well in the comic books (in this case, the modern espionage/conspiracy style of…
3 November 2013
Do comic book sequels suffer from the problem that the origin story for superheroes is always the most interesting? This is the not necessarily unwanted problem that Marvel Studios now have, after the success of developing the films leading up to The Avengers and beyond. Iron Man 3 tried to close the circle for Tony Stark, but what to do…