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.
Back in 2019, I announced this as my favourite film of that year, we look at the tale of Elton John, or at least a stylised version of it, in Rocketman.
Taron Egerton had recently been in the absolute disaster
that was the latest Robin Hood reboot, I may have to talk about that at some
point but for now, it put his status as a leading man on a knife’s edge, the
next film had to hit it out of the park. And a dramatized retelling of some of
the interesting bits of one of the biggest popstars to come out of the UK,
certainly an interesting choice but it’s not as if Taron Egerton had no
experience in the field, he had previously a sung cover of I’m Still Standing
whilst playing the Johnny in Illumination’s Sing.
The director is Dexter Fletcher, a guy who’s no stranger to
musical biopics, having taken over from Bryan Singer as the director of
Bohemian Rhapsody. Whilst that film, for all its flaws, was a smash at the box
office, Rocketman had a lot more working against it. Simply put, to do justice
to Elton John’s life, an R-rating was pretty much guaranteed, which would
place it as a much more niche product compared to the PG-13 Bohemian Rhapsody.
There’s also the issue of Elton John being gay, an issue
they couldn’t dodge because his love-life ended up quite entwined with his
music, especially in this story. This would unfortunately put it on a blacklist
for certain homophobic countries, who’s names I am going to happily drop. F*ck
Egypt, F*ck Malaysia, F*ck Samoa and naturally F*ck Russia, though ironically it’s
f*cking that got the film into trouble in the first place.
Still, the film only had a $40m budget, which was made back and then plenty, making $195m at the box office. And it went over well with both critics and audiences with 89% and 88% Rotten Tomatoes Ratings. Why did this beat out films like Endgame to be my absolute favourite film? Let’s take a look.
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.
It’s May, so let’s take a look at the Ocean’s Franchise again with its sequel, Ocean’s 12. With the success of the previous film, a sequel was announced but now they no longer have an old movie to remake so they’re on their own, for better and for worse. To handle this job, they got George Nolfi, a relative inexperienced writer, his only other film is Timeline, which was critically panned and a financial disaster. Still, Steven Soderbergh is still directing so there should be some consistency
Made on a $110 million budget, the film was successful, earning $362m at the box office, still less than the $450m the original made, but critics were far less kind to it, with only 54% finding it favourable, whilst scoring only slightly higher at 60% with audiences [has RT taken away the average scores, they provide important context] so what happened here? Let’s take a look.
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.
Note: I'm falling behind schedule, so here's a double helping of Dragons
We’re about halfway through the final season of Dragons:
Race to the Edge, the season faltered in the last 3 episodes, will it be able
to make up lost ground?
We know that superheroes save people, but who saves the people who save people? Well, if you’re unlucky enough to be injured in the Lab Rats Universe, your first port of call is Mighty Med. I’ll let you decide which bit of that’s the bad luck.
Mighty Med was the Brainchild of Jim Bernstein, a producer
who’d worked on Phineas and Ferb and American Dad and Andy Schwartz, who’d been
a writer and editor for Scrubs and had worked on Drake and Josh prior to that.
The show ran for 44 episodes across 2 seasons, a relatively short run and not a
well acclaimed one, with an average 6.5/10 on IMDb. This is not dissimilar to
the score of Lab Rats either, so let’s not jump to conclusions there
The main stars of the show are Bradley Steven Perry, who has
Disney Channel Experience playing Gabe Duncan on Good Luck Charlie, and having
a role in Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure; Jake Short who’d played Fletcher on
A.N.T. Farm, and making her television debut, Paris Berelc.
Other actors involved are Devan Leos, I briefly mentioned
how he attempted to murder a homeless person in my Austin and Ally
retrospective. Seriously, f*ck him. And he won’t be last controversial figure
I’ll mention unfortunately. Carlos Lacamara is also a pretty significant cast
member, he was in Independence Day.
Much like with the Austin and Ally and Lab Rats reviews,
I’ll cover the opening episodes, and any important developments through the
rest of the show’s run. I won’t cover every episode in-depth because this is a
sitcom and that would just amount to explaining the jokes. I’ll also be
covering the Lab Rats vs Mighty Med crossover.
