Rage4Media: #79 Dumbo (Disney Remake Marathon)

Rage4Media: #79 Dumbo (Disney Remake Marathon): OK, of all the films to give to Tim Burton, why this one? I get giving Tim Burton another Disney remake, much as his Alice remake sucks, l...

#76 - Mary Poppins Returns

Wow, have I really not done a Rage review in 2020 yet? (Yes, but Crimes of Grindelwald was originally planned as a 2019 review)

Let’s fix that, shall we, hello Mary Poppins Returns, aren’t you just a prime candidate

Yes, both my rage reviews this month are gonna be of Disney Films, both of which came out in December, though of different years, want to guess what the other one is?

It’s no secret that PL Travers, the writer of the Mary Poppins Books was no fan of the film. There had been talks about a sequel but Travers and Disney had very different ideas for it, so the idea laid on the shelf until well after Travers’ death. But this is Disney in the late 2010's, taking off old properties, giving them a lick of paint and then presenting them as something new is the norm, and sequels are more prevalent than they were in the early 2000's. So naturally a sequel to Mary Poppins was inevitable.

And naturally, it made money, because unless Tim Burton is involved in some capacity, all of the 2010's Disney sequels and remakes made money. No, I’m not bitter at all, why would you think that? The Tim Burton Dumbo sucked too, by the way, we’ll get to that at some point 

But why is this film the one that ignites my rage, let’s take a look

#75 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Note: This review was written and scheduled prior to JK Rowling endorsing transphobia on twitter. I think this is pretty scummy but this is a negative review of her work anyway so... This was written prior to revelations that the allegations against Johnny Depp were revealed to be falsified, whilst I only barely touch upon the subject, it seems they made the correct decision keeping him on. 

I love the Harry Potter films and I was pleasantly surprised by the first Fantastic Beasts film. The same cannot be said for its sequel

It was difficult to remain excited with as the build-up came around. The accusations around Johnny Depp and their defence of him, even giving him a much larger role this time around, the uncomfortableness around their decisions with Nagini (more on that later). With the inclusion of Dumbledore this time around, hearing that his sexuality wouldn’t be addressed was kinda disappointing too. (We will get to specifics in the review portion)

JK Rowling is writing the script, like she did with the first one, JK is a talented writer, the 7 Harry Potter Books are some of the best stories I've ever read, but there are differences between writing a book and a film, and I suspect JK Rowling’s talents are more in the book department. After the success of the first Fantastic Beasts, it was announced this would be a 5-movie series, this is important for a lot of reasons we’ll get into.

The end result is the worst ranked Harry Potter movie to date with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes Rating (avg 5.8/10) and a 55% audience score (3.32/5) and that shows with their box office, whilst it didn’t flop, making $653m on its $200m budget, that pales in comparison to the $814m its predecessor made and led to the studio upping the turnaround times from 2 to 3 years. So, what happened? Let’s take a look.

#73 - Heroes in Crisis (Part 3)

Oh goody, Heroes in Crisis, time to put this garbage to bed. Here’s a recap of what I’ve covered so far: A bloody massacre as occurred at the strange and stupidly run facility known as the Sanctuary, tapes that shouldn’t exist were leaked to Lois Lane and rather than giving essential evidence to the Justice League, she wrote an article.

Superman makes a statement to the press rather than actually looking for the killer. That honour goes to Booster gold, who after claiming innocence under the Lasso of truth, something I will not drop btw, is pursued by Harley Quinn and Batgirl who still think he’s the murderer for some reason. On his side is Ted Kord, who has donned his pre-new 52 appearance because Tom King and Jamie S Rich don’t know jack about DC continuity. And most of you are probably still wondering why I spent half my first review giving you the backstory of Wally West when he’s been dead the whole time. But don’t worry, answers will follow. Also, this is all that’s happened in 5 issues.

#71 - Heroes in Crisis (Part 1)

I was originally gonna wait on this one, but with my schedule originally there wasn’t gonna be another Rage Review until at least December, so I’m rectifying that now. Heroes in Crisis is the worst comic story I’ve ever read. I’ll make no bones about that, it’s worse than the stupid Mr Freeze retcons, worse than the revamped origins written by Scott Lobdell, worse than Felicia D Henderson’s Teen Titans rune, worse than Cry for Justice and its follow-up mini-series and worse than Secret Empire.

To understand exactly why this story p*sses me off, we need to examine a couple of mental health related issues, so trigger warning. This review, and the onecs that follow will discuss death and suicides in relation to mental health and how this story does all of it a complete disservice. Also, I’m not a doctor, most of my analysis is based on common sense and minor bits of research. If I make a mistake, please point it out to me, I do not want to be giving out inaccurate information.

                                                                                        

Before we begin we must also look at the story of Wally West, so many spoilers to follow. 

#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.