Showing posts with label Spawn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spawn. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

A Brief Discussion of "Myopia: Defend Your Childhood"

A man from Marietta has joined the ranks of podcasters with his new podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood.

"It's because I consume a lot of podcasts and I'm part of a group of people who watch a lot of movies," Nick said when asked where Myopia came from. "We talk about a lot of movies."

He credits his wife Candice and his friend Scott Miller with keeping him focused and helping develop the idea. He and Scott started developing the idea in the spring of 2014. They'd been hitting around the idea of a movie podcast and didn't know a formula, although The Flop House and How Did This Get Made? inspired him, as did We Hate Movies. However, he wasn't sure how he'd put his own spin on the topic. Then he listened to Pop Culture Happy Hour, in particular their discussion of myopias. This they defined as something one is so familiar with that one is short-sighted. That's what made the idea for Myopia work and what makes it different from other movie podcasts. Rather than watch new movies like a review show or watch bad movies on purpose, instead Nick and his merry band will challenge blind spots people have.

With Scott's help, Nick devised a formula. A select group of participants--full disclosure, I'm one of them--would use a survey to list movies from their childhoods that they wanted to see how they held up. When a movie was selected, the person who suggested the movie must defend it before the group watches it. The movie must be at least ten years old and the defendant can't have seen it in at least five years.

The first episode, recorded in late June, covered the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

"We were thinking to capitalize on the assumption that the Michael Bay Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would be a trainwreck," he said. "Frankly it looks like we were right."

The podcast has attracted a following already--as of last count, 976 unique downloads, with the feed being checked over 6,000 times. Since Podbean bases its count on devices, this means nobody is gaming the system by downloading it multiple times. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been downloaded over 200 times. Nine episodes are available online, with new episodes premiering every Wednesday. A rough schedule has been established that will take the podcast through early spring. October, for example, is slated to feature scary movies, while November will be devoted to film series like Batman and December will be Christmas movies.

Nick's favorite movie to discuss was Hook, chosen in honor of the late Robin Williams. He was particularly impressed with the Hook discussion because it got into film study. He and regular participant Daniel both studied film in college, so they both prize deep discussion.

"It was satisfying to rewatch Space Jam and Hook and the Mighty Ducks movies because they were my favorites as a kid," he said.

He said it's important to do what one enjoys. Due to his busy work schedule, he can't always record regularly, so he sometimes records three movies in a weekend.

"If it becomes a job, it's no longer worth doing," he said.

One must also be comfortable with the sound of one's own voice, since one will be hearing it a lot.

Participation in the podcast keeps growing. Every time he talks about it, more people like to talk about it. The first episode only featured three participants, but now an average movie night features 8-12 participants. His favorite part is that people come to watch him and the other participants discuss the films. The early movies discussed were films he'd seen before, but with so many new participants, people are suggesting movies he's never seen before.

"It's giving me an excuse to see movies I should have seen years ago," he said. "Or perhaps that should never have existed."

Case in mind: The 1997 film Spawn,which was so bad that Daniel devoted an entire blog post to calling it the worst move he'd ever seen, even worse than Scooby-Doo.

Nick's future plans include his family. One episode that has already been recorded features him and his brothers discussing A Goofy Movie and a planned episode will feature The Muppet Christmas Carol. A special Mother's Day episode will feature his mother discussing The Breakfast Club.Meanwhile, Candice and her mother will have their own Mother's Day feature--Airplane!

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Spawn (1997)

Last night I went over to my friend Nick's to watch Spawn for his podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. It's was slated for October as part of a Halloween-themed month and behold, here it is!

So let me tell you about how I movie I saw when I was in middle school (it came out the month I turned 13) about secret agent Al Simmons who returns from Hell as a demonic uber-warrior to see his wife again after making a deal with the Satan stand-in Malbolgia held up...



The Good

*John Leguizamo plays the demonic Violator, who's the "evil angel" on Spawn's shoulder to speak. And he's clearly having a lot of fun playing this character in all his perverted scatological glory. Among other things he eats a rotten pizza writhing with maggots out of a dumpster (something the actor actually did, according to TVTropes), passes prodigious quantities of gas, and even performs a cheerleading number dressed in drag. Yes, watch it. It's hilarious. But he's not just a purveyor of lowbrow humor and bad advice to our hero--watch out when he gets really mad (it's around 2 minutes into this clip). He's probably one of the best things about this movie.

*The character of Cogliostro, implied in this version to be a Hellspawn from an earlier generation who had successfully rebelled against Malbolgia and now serves Heaven, had a lot of potential to be an interesting character. They didn't touch on it as much as they could have, but then again, it's not his movie.

*I liked how they introduced the evil Jason Wynn (played by Martin Sheen) and his henchwoman Jessica Priest. Jason is smoking prodigiously and putting out his cigarettes in an ashtray crawling with live scorpions, while Priest is getting really friendly with a tarantula.

*The fight scenes--with the exception of the battle between Spawn and Cogliostro and the Violator in Hell--are pretty entertaining. Michael Jai White, who plays Spawn, is a martial artist in real life, so that certainly helps.

*Spawn's widow Wanda and his best friend Terry are in an interracial marriage with a biracial daughter and nobody cares. Not even the villains. It's a non-issue.

The Bad

*How on Earth a superhero movie could be this dull is beyond me. The opening credits (which consist of a lot of stylized fire effects and the names of pretty much everybody involved in the film) take about ten minutes. During the movie and the podcast I joked that this is where a lot of the special effects budget went, considering how poorly the rest of the special effects held up. The movie drags in multiple places, so this isn't just a one-time problem. It is probably one of the most excruciatingly dull films I've seen this year.

*The special effects are abysmal, especially in scenes taking place in Hell. The computer animation sequences in which the characters go to Hell (Al when he's damned as a murderer and Al and Cogliostro when Violator drags them into Hell to fight him there) is really fake. And when we actually get to Hell, it looks like (as TVTropes put it), a bad Playstation One game. Malbolgia is even worse--when he talks his mouth doesn't move with his words. And by that, I mean it doesn't move very much at all. This isn't some 1960s Godzilla movie with poor dubbing, but much, much worse.

Yes, I know the movie was made in 1997, but guess what else came out in 1997? Men In Black.The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And this is after the glories of Jurassic Park (1993) and The Abyss
(1989). This movie cost $40 million to make, so it's not like there wasn't money available.. I've seen much cheaper movies with much better special effects than this. If they made Hell a physical set in the vein of What Dreams May Come and made the Malbolgia a physical puppet monster rather than CGI, that would have been a massive improvement. Sometimes a big puppet really IS better than CGI.

*Here's a really ballsy alternative course they could have taken that would have dealt with the above issue--make the movie animated. There was an an HBO animated series that premiered a few months before the movie did and lasted a few years. The movie could have been a tie-in with the animated series in the vein of Ducktales The Movie or even replaced it completely. The former course makes more sense business-wise even if it means the movie would be released a year later, since a TV show is a cheaper way to build a fan-base. Animation would save money on actors (since it wouldn't take up as much of their time to record lines as opposed to physical acting) and avoid the special effects fails of the live-action movie.

And even though animation for adults is pretty risky in the USA, this would have been a great time for it. This is years before Batman Begins,during which the Batman saga consisted of the much goofier Schumacher films. Hell, this is the year of Batman and Robin, which from what little I know of it was just absurd.

(Seriously, a Bat Credit Card? And here are some really bad Mr. Freeze puns too.)

This is also the age of the dark 1990s antiheroes. Spawn is the epitome of that trend, being an undead assassin transformed into some kind of hell-monster who does really awful things to really awful people. There simply were no films reflecting this trend, so even a riskier violent animated movie would fill a gap.

The Verdict

So much wasted potential. Don't bother with it. 3 out of 10.