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Gotham Knight: Have I Got a Story for You

Studio: Studio 4°C 

Director: Shōjirō Nishimi 

Writer: Josh Olsen

Wha’ happen’?

Four kids meet up in a skate park and three of them tell stories about encountering Batman that day fighting a masked man with a jetpack. The three stories all describe very different depictions of Batman; as a shadowy monster, a human/bat hybrid and lastly a high-tech robot. Then, the real Batman bursts
into the skate park chasing the jet pack man and the fourth kid is able to save Batman by clocking the dude on the head with his skateboard.

How was it?

It sucks.

Torchesandaardvarks noted in the comments that Gotham Knight is just worse versions of Batman the Animated Series episodes. I don’t know about that, yet, but it’s definitely fair for the opener. Have I Got a Story For You is a direct lift from Legends of the Dark Knight, an episode from The New Batman Adventures that was itself an adaptation of The Batman Nobody Knows from the seventies. Gonna steal, steal from the best, I guess, but the problem is that Legends of the Dark Knight was a glorious celebration of multiple eras of Batman’s history with the production team going to insane lengths to mimic the style of Dick Sprang and Frank Miller. The message of that episode (outside of a mean and low-key homophobic jab at Joel Schumacher) is that Batman is vast, contains multitudes and that every
interpretation and version is wonderful. But Have I Got a Story For You isn’t an examination of who Batman is or what he means to people. It’s really ust about…how he looks. One kid thinks he looks like a shadow monster, one kid thinks he looks like a bat monster. Okay. And?

It also kind of breaks credibility that these kids were that close to Batman in broad daylight and couldn’t see that he is, in fact, a man in a bat costume. One kid claims to see Batman just emerging from the ground like liquid shadow. What’s the rational real world explanation for that other than the kid being high on mescalin?

Plus, when we finally see this terrifying figure of the night?

Batman Gotham Knight: Have I Got a Story For You (2008) - Filmaffinity

He looks like a Dad at a baseball game who got heatstroke.

So yeah.

Off to a bad start.

How do you fuck up animé Batman, and shall they do it again?

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!!!”

“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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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.

“What is Hoodwinked?!”
“I DUNNO!”
“Aaaah!”
“AAAAAAH!!”

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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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:

Just gorgeous, old fashioned film-making. There is a lot to like in John Carter.

And yet, and yet…something isn’t working here. Some wheel just ain’t clicking.

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Freddie as FR07 (1992)

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Some of you in the comments have noted that I’ve been a little, shall we say, down on the movies I’ve reviewed this year.

And some of you likewise professed that you enjoyed my review of Batman ’66 purely because it was nice to see me actually praising something for once. I get it, I do. Negativity can be draining.

But, if it helps, this review will be less “negative” than “absolutely incredulous”.

What. The. Fuck. Is. This?

You know what’s weird? I remember seeing trailers for this movie! I remember thinking it looked quite good!

This was not some obscure direct to video release, this was in theatres! With a pretty top-tier cast!

This is not an amateur production, this clearly had a lot of money behind it and was released in the early nineties, an absolute golden age for feature animation where even lesser known (or, to be frank, lesser quality) films still have passionate fanbases of ageing elder millennials desperately clinging to the nostalgia of their fading childhoods in the face of an increasingly bewildering and terrifying present (no judgement, we’re all in the same boat).

And THEN I learned that this is the first and only film written and produced by Jon Acevski, a British businessman who decided to make an animated film based on stories he told his son about his toy frog (his son’s toy frog, I mean. I don’t believe Mr Acevski has a toy frog and if he does it is none of my business). And that’s sweet, that really is.

But…

See, the thing about making movies is, they’re very expensive. And the people who back movies usually give their money to people who have demonstrated at least some competence in their field. But every so often, every so often, someone comes along who has no experience with writing, directing or anything really to do with the film-making process. But they do have money.

And when that happens? Oh, my friends, when that happens. That’s when you get the shit that makes my life worth living.

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“T’Challa was truly noble. Are you going to be like him? Or are you gonna take care of business?”

Goddammit.

Look, how do you think I feel?

No one wanted it this way. Marvel didn’t want to make a Black Panther without Chadwick Boseman, we the audience didn’t want a Black Panther movie without Chadwick Boseman and I certainly don’t want to give a bad review to a Black Panther movie without Chadwick Boseman.

His loss was first and foremost a human tragedy and if this movie succeeds at anything it’s in bringing across just the sheer, crushing grief of everyone involved in this. It’s not a fun time. It should not be a fun time.

Is it a good movie? I’m sorry, no it’s not.

But, it has good moments and I’ll be sure to highlight those.

It also has plenty of flaws and, well, I’ll be mentioning those too. But rest assured, I will feel like a complete asshole.

“Well. That’s the important thing.”
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