RageLite review - Thor: Ragnarok

After Catwoman, I need a bit of a palate cleanser, so let’s return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Thor: Ragnarok.

Of the Avengers characters who’ve had multiple solo movies, Thor’s have undoubtedly been the weakest. Whilst Loki remained one of Marvel’s strongest villains, the films themselves often felt bland and boring. This was particularly the case with the Dark World, which ended up being quite a divisive movie.

It’s all change for Ragnarok though. Natalie Portman, who allegedly hated filming the Dark World, is gone, and once again, we have a new director, this time Taika Waititi. The overall style and tone from the first two movies is to get a massive overhaul, but I’ll leave that for the review portion. Waititi’s past experience is in comedy, with his directing credits including “What we do in the Shadows” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” neither of which I’ve seen but they’re both critical and commercial successes.

And the trend would continue here, Thor Ragnarok would go onto make $890m on its $180m budget and scoring a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating with an average 7.52/10 and an 89% audience rating with a 4.2/5 average. All these figures exceed the previous Thor movies, but is it worth the reception, here’s my take

Netflix Retrospective - Jessica Jones Season 2 Episodes 3-4

Jessica Jones likes to touch on uncomfortable subjects, which is not entirely surprising given what Jessica’s most famous comic storyline is. But I can’t deny hearing how a character was sexually assaulted as a child, doesn’t make me feel comfortable, and that perhaps is intentional as societal acceptance when it comes to stuff like this should be challenged. But being uncomfortable is not the same being entertained, so they really need to pull something out to keep that part going.

#70 - Catwoman (Rage4Media 5th Anniversary)

It’s the Rage4Media (formerly Rage Issues) 5^th Anniversary!!

And it’s been a tough year, I’ve had to drop to 2 reviews a week but hey, I covered the Blade Trilogy, I finished off my Superman reviews, having waited a year after finding out Kevin Spacey is a scumbag, only for the news that Brian Singer is a scumbag to overshadow it. I concluded both 4 issue tests and Sequel Baitings, but began a retrospective on Pixar sure to last me until the end of time. I actually tried doing a Halloween theme for October, no I haven’t seen Happy Death Day 2 and have no plans to in the foreseeable future.

I’m slowly rapping up my reviews of classic DC and Marvel films. I have a few to go with DC with stuff like Constantine, Steel and Jonah Hex but I do not plan to cover any more classic Marvel. I think all the ones I haven’t covered are the awful low budget sh*t they produced in the 90's and the like.

I've been slowly rebranding as Rage4Media, in case Rage Issues was too off-putting.

But speaking of DC films, that brings us to today, as we delve in to one of the worst DC films of all time, the #Cata5trophic Catwoman

The idea of a Catwoman movie had been toyed around with since Batman Returns, because that film was such a masterpiece it deserved a spinoff #sarcasm. Michelle Pfeifer was to return to the role and Tim Burton to direct, and Daniel Waters, who wrote Batman Return’s screenplay set to write. He made the unfortunate misstep of submitting his script right as Batman: Forever was release, and the studio rejected it on the grounds of its tone being more akin to Batman Returns, which of course had issues with merchandise.

The film was in development hell for the best part of a decade, with both Pfeifer and Burton dropping out and the story and screenplay being ultimately written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, straight off Terminator 3 with Theresa Rebeck, who had never written a film before, aiding with the story and John Rogers co-writing the screenplay, he’d only ever written stories for Box Office disasters at this point. (He’d later go on to write Transformers)

The directing duties for this film ultimately went to Pifof aka John-Chrisophe Comar, directing his first English Language film, his only non-English work as a director was the box office disaster Vidocq.

With such talent behind the scenes, you can tell we’re in for a treat, the movie floundered spectacularly, with an 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 3.1/10, and an audience score of 18% with an average 2.2/5. For some perspective, these are identical ratings to Fant4stic, the movie I reviewed 3 years ago, the average critic score for that film was 3.47/10. We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?

Made with a $100m budget, the film was bomb at the box office, making back only $82.1m and received 7 Razzie nominations, of which it won 4.

So, does this rank up with the worst of them? Let’s take a look.

Netflix Retrospective - Jessica Jones Season 2 Episodes 1-2

The Defenders was not a good show, even at only 8 episodes it was boring, so will things change in its aftermath. The first show to come out was the second season of Jessica Jones. There are no guest stars and any reference to the series is purely tangential. I get the need for a show like this to stand on its own but I feel that entirely misses the point of these crossovers, to have knock-on effects for each individual character. Only Iron Fist and Daredevil really capitalise on this, but before we get to those, we have to start with Jessica Jones. Can she hold her own without the not purple Purple Man, let’s take a look

Pixar Playlist #4 - Monsters, Inc.

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist

What’s that monster hiding under your bed? Find out in Monsters Inc

Monsters Inc seems to be the Brainchild of Pete Doctor, who had had a major role in the production of all 3 of Pixar’s other films up to this point. This guy is a major talent at Pixar and made his directorial debut here, later going to make Pixar classics such as Up and Inside Out, both of which I intend to get to. He began working on the script during the Production of a Bugs’ Life, and after a lot of tweaking we got a story

Production required Pixar to step up their game, with the main character having over 2 million strands of hair, the task became about making them move correctly in accordance to the action of the character. The creation of Fizt the physics tool was a major breakthrough for them when it comes to the hair, and it also helped with another problem, clothing, although it took another algorithm to handle collision between different items of clothing.

This was Pixar’s most complex film, requiring more than double the number of micro-processors than Toy Story 2 to render.

So, do these innovations make Monsters Inc a good movie? Here are my thoughts.

Netflix Retrospective: Voltron Legendary Defender Season 5 Episodes 4-6

Pixar Playlist #3 - Toy Story 2

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, the Pixar Playlist

Well, it didn’t take long to get to the first sequel but here we are with Toy Story 2. The success of Toy Story really sparked something, and because it’s Disney and around this point in their history, if a movie made any money, it got a direct-to-DVD sequel.

The deal with Disney was at this point revised to 5 movies in 5 original franchises, so Toy Story 2 wouldn’t count towards it. Production for this film was not easy, with tight deadlines and a sudden rush for it to be theatre quality as it was changed to get a theatrical release, not to mention them nearly deleting 90% of their assets and staff members working to the point of actually getting wrist problems did put a dampener of things.

Released in 1999, the film made a respectable $497m on it’s $90m budget and is one of those rare films with a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so is it worth all that praise?

Well, yes and no, but I’ll get to that.

Netflix Retrospective - Voltron: Legendary Defender Season 5 Episodes 1-3

OK, we’ve got to season 5 and since I wrote the last retrospective, Voltron has become somewhat a subject of controversy for certain narrative decisions in its final 2 seasons. I will cover the particularly controversial elements in due course, my opinion is that they’re well-intentioned but badly thought through, particularly with the announcement in the marketing for season 7, something I’ll get to when I eventually cover season 7.

For now, though, we’re only on season 5 and there’s only 6 episodes to cover as once again, the season was split in half so they could put more releases out, let’s see how this half holds up.