Praise4Media #72 - The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

The original Lego Movie was great a fun nostalgia trip for adults and a decent mix of humour of set-pieces to advertise lego products to our younger audience. A sequel to this was inevitable, and Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two still popular writers, were on board. So why did this film flounder at the box office? What went wrong here?

The film had critical success, but not the same level as the first one, though still an impressive 84% compared to 96% for the first one. The drop off with audiences is a bit steeper with a 68% rating down from 87% but why is that? I have some theories but let’s start by diving into the story.

RageLite Review - Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey)

So, here’s one that’s a bit interesting, and by interesting, I mean that the title is excruciatingly long, this is Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.

I try not to think about Suicide Squad too often, here’s hoping the James Gunn version is better. But one thing I couldn’t complain about was Margot Robbie’s performance as Harley Quinn. Harley Quinn over the years has surged in popularity, especially recently as her animated series, which to my astonishment was really f*cking good.

Anyway, with Harley’s star rising, a solo film was inevitable and the one that DC Ultimately greenlit was one championed by Margot Robbie herself. She was of the belief that Harley needed a team to interact with… a point I will bring up later in the review itself.

The end result is an R-rated $100m blockbuster, on the cheaper end for superhero films, written by Christina Hodson, known for the saviour of the Transformers franchise, Bumblebee, and directed by Cathy Yan, the first Asian-American director of a superhero film.

The performance was, regrettably underwhelming, making just over $200m and with a critical score of around 78% with a 6.8/10 average. 

Young Justice Outsiders Retrospective - Episodes 4-6

We’re back for another run of Young Justice and it’s happened again, I did the reviews then lost them, this time thanks to word glitching. I decided to have a go at doing these from memory and whilst the actual plot points are definitely from the episode, they may be a little out of order or condensed.

Young Justice Outsiders Retrospective - Episodes 1-3

 So, Young Justice Outsiders

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to talk about this show, the last time being way back in 2016, when I did an editorial one what I wanted to see from this show… and I’ll say I got 1/5.

My thoughts have shifted a little on Young Justice. It did an exemplary job in season one balancing the overarching storyline with its cast of main characters. By majorly expanding the team in season 2, it also really torpedoed the balance in favour of plot as opposed to character development, making certain characters feel like pieces on a chessboard. Outsiders, as I’ll explain, suffers from a similar problem, but I’ll get to that later.

What’s interesting is that fan demand and the launch of a DC streaming service lead to the announcement of YJ Outsiders in 2016, the show would ultimately be released in 2019, which is quite extensive gap, DC announced the show’s renewal literally days after the creators found out.

So minor changes before we get into it, James Arnold Taylor has taken over from Tim Curry as G Gordon Godfrey, who has also permanently taken over the role as the Flash from George Eads after voicing him in the season 2 finale. Could be a cost saving measure, voice actors are portraying multiple characters across the board this season, and there are other budget-saving measures as we’ll get into.

According to a source I can’t seem to find now, Logan Grove was likely off in the military at the time of Outsiders’ production, so Beast Boy has been recast with Greg Cipes reprising his role from Teen Titans (and TTG). And for what it’s worth he does a decent job.

I’ll be covering the first 13 episodes of the series now, with the hopes of doing the other half in the later half of the year. Part of the problem is that there’s no series purchase option on Amazon for the second half, if I wanted to buy the second half at present, I’d have to buy every episode individually and at £2.49 an episode (I live in the UK so HBOMax isn’t an option), I am not doing that.

RageLite review - The Lego Batman Movie

I wasn’t intending to do this one, but it’s a leadup to another review so here we are, the Lego Batman movie.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t enjoy the movie, far from it, but the reason I don’t review it is the same reason I haven’t done an in-depth review of a lego short since way back when I did Star Wars, there’s precious little to say about them. Most of the jokes in them are self-referential, either to the fact that they’re Lego or to various plot elements of the story it’s based on. They’re designed to sell Lego merch to children first and foremost. The Lego Batman is a good kids advertisement, don’t get me wrong here but its humour is satirical and it’s difficult to explain why I like it without also spoiling the jokes, plus unlike with the Lego Movie, there’s no overt real world allegory to it.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that Lego Batman would get a spinoff. Warner Brothers already owns the rights to the character, there have been 3 Lego Batman games and various Lego shorts based around Batman, plus Batman is still DC Comics’ most popular character. The film made a reasonable $312m on its $80m budget, not quite as much as its predecessor but enough to call it a success. And it has a pretty stunning 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a 9.5/10 average score.