Author: unshavedmouse

Novelist and screenwriter based in Dublin.

“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.

This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.

“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.

But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.

It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?

Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.

All kidding aside, I’ve seen nine of this legend’s movies and five of them are on my all time greatest list.*

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Summer Wars (2009)

So, here’s a little interesting factoid about me. If you ever meet someone from Ireland with the surname “Sharpson”, they are related to me. Like, immediately related. There are, at the time of writing, eight Sharpsons in the entire country. When I was growing up, there was my Dad, my three brothers, and me (my mother being a strong independent woman who refused to change her maiden name even for the sake of boosting the stats). That was it. My grandfather emigrated to Britain from Cyprus and then moved to Ireland in the fifties.

And, along the way, he anglicised his name to Sharpson, a name that had never existed in the country before then. So, we’re what you might call a rare breed.

Now, contrast that with my wife, whose family is as old as the hills, vast as the oceans and ~~mad as~~ lovely, lovely people. I say this not just as a way of banging out an intro to a review of a movie that I don’t really have much to say about other than “it’s good, I enjoyed it”, but to explain why the main character of Summer Wars, Kenji Koiso resonates with me.

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Starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, baby!

Man, now I know why Mario does it!

What a rush.

My upcoming novel, Knock Knock, Open Wide just got a gob-smackingly generous STARRED review from Publisher’s Weekly:

Transporting readers to a blood-soaked Ireland, Sharpson (When the Sparrow Falls) delivers modern horror at its best. One stormy night in 1979, Etain comes across a faceless corpse on the road; days later, she’s found half dead near a burnt-out farmhouse, her shattered mind a blank. Then, one of her twin daughters disappears in 1989, and soon after, her husband is found dead in a suspected suicide. By 2003, the only person still looking for an explanation to this mysterious series of events is Etain’s surviving daughter, Ashling, a university drama student who’s just entering into a passionate love affair with a woman. Ashling’s convinced, however, that what she remembers of her sister’s disappearance can’t possibly be true: it involved a popular children’s TV show about a goat puppet that would only come out of his box if someone had been very bad. According to everyone else who watched the show, the box never actually opened—but Ashling remembers it differently, and the more she investigates, the more she comes to fear that what’s inside is no cuddly puppet, but something old, crafty, and hungry. Sharpson does a masterful job of weaving together the three timelines, handling each story with tremendous sensitivity and skill while supplying genuine scares. By turns tender and terrifying, sexy and stomach-turning, heartwarming and heartrending, this folklore-steeped exploration of generational trauma is a high-water mark for the Irish horror novel.

“Well. Obviously you’re going to accept this with humility and good grace…”

“WHO DARES SPEAK IN THE PRESENCE OF MY GENIUS?! MOUSE RULES ALL!!!”

“Just what I had in mind. Everything dead on Earth, except us. A chance for Mother Nature to start again.”

More fool me, I guess.

I went in to this full of kindness and forgiveness in my heart.

I was prepared to embrace this movie like a loving father welcoming back the wayward prodigal. Of course this movie isn’t as bad as everyone says. Of course it’s really a delightfully camp romp. Of course the backlash was just a combination of toxic fanboy insecurity and subtle and not so subtle homophobia.

And this fucking movie turned and sank its fangs into me like a snake in a parable.

Yup. I was wrong. I dunno what I was thinking.

Conventional wisdom is always right and independant thoughts are weird and stupid.

Batman and Robin really is that goddamn bad.

I know, I know. Great to be back here on Planet Sensible. I don’t know why I ever fooled myself into thinking that this movie was So Bad it’s Good rather than regular old So Bad it’s Actually Bad. But rest assured, this is no Rocky Horror Picture Show. This movie is not fun, and it’s not even camp. It’s a grindingly cynical and mechanical attempt to be fun and camp and it fails utterly.

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“I wish that mattered, Janet.”

Alright, firstly I want to discuss a resolution that I’ve made. Like many movie critics (and after eleven years that still feels presumptuous to say, thank you imposter syndrome) I’ve noted that the CGI in Marvel’s recent output has been of inconsistent quality. This inevitably comes across as a criticism of the VFX artists who worked on these films, which is horribly unfair. As has become more and more clear in recent years, the problem is not with the artists but with Disney’s tendency to over-work their artists while micromanaging every visual aspect of their films to the point that the effects teams often have very little time to do their work to the standard they would ideally like. So, I’m no longer going to say “the CGI is shit” in these reviews. Instead I will say “the studio is shit”, just so we all know who’s really at fault here.

Will I have cause to make use of this new paradigm when reviewing Ant-Man 3?

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“You see, I’m both Bruce Wayne and Batman, not because I have to be, now, because I choose to be.”

Well, what totally planned and intentional synergy. It’s Pride month and just in time to talk about how Joel Schumacher made Batman gay.

Amongst many Bat-fans, the Schumacher Batman films are looked on as a dark age and I would argue that, much like the real dark ages, that’s entirely unfair.

Okay, mostly unfair.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Joel Schumacher is a better director than Tim Burton. Objectively, he’s not. Burton’s Batman films (Returns in particular) are beautiful gothic wonderlands. Schumacher’s vision for Gotham, by contrast, is a grimy industrial hellscape inexplicably drenched in garish neon. It’s ugly and weird and gaudy and kinda cheap looking. But ask yourself, is that really such a bad artistic choice for a Batman movie?

In fact…I’m just going to say it, Joel Schumacher came closer to capturing the feel of Bronze Age Batman than just about any other live action director. Doesn’t mean his films are the best necessarily. But I think the man deserves more respect than he gets, i.e., any amount of respect.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

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Hoodwinked! (2005)

I won’t lie guys, that exclamation mark frickin’ terrified me. Unless a movie is a prestigey old-timey musical, an exclamation point has no place in its title. You know what other independently produced CGI movie has an exclamation point in its title?

“They worshiped the dragon who had given authority to the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can wage war against it?”

Fortunately, Hoodwinked! is not as bad as The Abomination and it’s not even the worst movie I’ve reviewed this year (although that is more an indictment of the year than an endorsement of the movie).

So what is Hoodwinked!?

Gah, see, this is the problem with having an exclamation point in the title. It looks like I’m screaming in panic.

Now Hoodwinked! was a movie that I was tangentially aware of. I’d never watched it, but I’d occasionally see it across the crowded room that is the modern animation landscape. And it would wink at me. And I would pretend I hadn’t noticed because it looked like the ugliest fucking Shrek rip-off I had ever seen and there wasn’t enough booze in the world for me to go home with it. But, like anyone who creates content on the internet for long enough, soon enough you find yourself doing things you never would have imagined doing. I watched Hoodwinked!

I have questions.

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Trouble in the Hood

Hi all, sorry, the Hoodwinked! review is going to be a little late this week because I feel…like…death. Hopefully just a 24 bug but it’s laid me flat on my tail. Review should be up in a few days. Thanks for understanding.

Mouse.

“You’re just jealous, because I’m a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask!”

Funny story. Back when my brother and I were doing our YouTube channel we had an impression-off where we had to pull random characters out of a hat.

I pulled “Charlie Kelly from It’s Alway Sunny in Philadelphia” which I had never seen before. However, my flustered confused, panicky, high-pitched rambling attempts managed somehow to translate into a near pitch perfect impression of a character I knew absolutely nothing about.

Segue. Tim Burton’s Batman.

Somehow, despite neither reading, understanding or even particularly liking Batman, Tim Burton’s sensibilities as a director were such a perfect fit for the character that he created probably the most influential depiction that there has ever been.

And it was huge, a box-office, critical and merchandising golden god that conquered all before it. Now, Burton had not enjoyed his time directing that film, so Warner Brothers offered him the one thing no Hollywood director can refuse; pure uncut Grade A coc…I mean, COMPLETE CREATIVE CONTROL.

“Whatever you want, Timmy Baby, you got it. You want to rewrite the script, you rewrite the script. You want Jon Peters demoted to executive producer? We can have him killed if you want ha ha ha! (seriously though, we have ways…). You want Kim Basinger gone? Kim who? Never heard of her. JUST MAKE US ANOTHER BATMAN TIM. JUST DO IT AGAIN, FOR UNCLE WARNER.”

And he did do it again for Uncle Warner, and what he did remains probably the most divisive Batman movie of them all. You probably either love it or hate it, there’s very little inbetween.

Whatever your opinion, I think we can all agree: It’s a Tim Burton movie.

In fact I would argue that it is THE Tim Burton movie.

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John Carter (2012)

Hello everyone. Recently I decided to get back into acting and I’m going to be appearing in a production of Comedy of Errors in two weeks time as Dromio of Ephesus aka the best Dromio.

Dromio of Syracuse is trash and you all know it.

Also, Spouse of Mouse is on a business trip leaving me with two orphans crying plaintively for their mother night and day.

Also, I have a really tight writing deadline to meet this week.

Ergo, review short. Soz.

***

Normally, a film like John Carter is exactly the kind of movie that I dread to review.

It aroused no strong feelings in me. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. But honestly, the more I watched it the more I realised…this is kinda good? I mean, the elements are really strong. For being a decade old, the effects hold up a lot better than most of what Disney is putting out today.

The cast is full of actors I love or at least have no ill will towards (I like Taylor Kitsch, y’all are just mean). The script is nothing spectacular but perfectly solid. There was clearly a lot of thought and love and creativity and subtle world-building that went into the design of its fictional Martian setting. And there’s some strikingly beautiful cinematography. Like this scene where John Carter is fleeing on horseback across the Arizona Territory pursued by Union Soldiers: