TheRetroCritic

In this 59th episode, Adam (aka The RetroCritic) and fellow film buff Jamie discuss movie news, review   Ant-Man   and talk retro stuff. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE Email us here if you have any questions, requests or contributions:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes ,  Stitcher  and  Player FM  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #TheBigRewind retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

I finally talk about Avengers: Age Of Ultron .

The Avengers are back in a sequel that promises to be even bigger and more epic somehow. Joss Whedon once again directs and, though you'd expect juggling that many main characters (plus about a dozen new recruits) would make for a complete cinematic mess, the man somehow pulls it off once again and delivers a blockbuster every bit as ambitious and entertaining as it suggests. Well, apart for that weird half hour where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) takes us for a particularly dull ride back to his "safe house". Urgh... Other than that, this sequel fixes a lot of what made the first movie a little too uneven. While the first Avengers suffered from a ropey opening sequence and an altogether sluggish first half hour, this movie throws us directly into the action and doesn't let go for a good while which is instantly refreshing. Again, everyone gets their chance to shine but also screw up. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), whom, I assume, has amnesia and therefore can&#

To celebrate the release of The Avengers: Age Of Ultron , I count down my Top 30 Superhero Themes over at Feedback Theatre and, shockingly, they're not all from Danny Elfman. Composers assemble!

Turn a corner in Sin City ... Wait about 10 years... Then turn another. Too little too late? The box-office seems to think so. But what of the film itself? Was Robert Rodriguez's sequel to his own Sin City , arguably one of the best comic book movie adaptations of all time, worth the long wait? This time, the film is mostly based on the Sin City stories "A Dame To Kill For" and "Just Another Saturday Night", though the latter is used more as an amusing prologue than anything else. The other two stories were put together by Frank Miller for the film specifically. One of them involves Joseph Gordon Levitt's gambler and the other continues Nancy's (Jessica Alba) story from the first movie. The problem with making a sequel this late is that you'll only be able to gather about a third of the cast from the original at best. And with the sad losses of Brittany Murphy and Michael Clarke Duncan a few years ago, this was never going to be easy. Es

Here's an old Top 10 of mine I just realised I never posted on this here blog! Ah Howard The Duck , welcome back. It's an oldie, but a goodie ;)

Following all the previews showing off the new Spidey flick's odd-looking villains and busy visuals, this second instalment in Marc Webb's rebooted franchise looked like it might have just skipped right over the superior sequel factor, instead going straight to an unintentionally hilarious   Spider-Man 3 -style of cacophony. After all, three villains would mean three origin stories and add that to the continuation of the first film's subplot following Peter Parker's (Andrew Garfield) estranged parents, the "complicated" Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) romance and the obligatory gallons of action which comes with every bigger superhero sequel and you've got yourself one exhausting-sounding follow-up.  The film opens with a surprisingly exciting opening sequence involving Parker's parents and, like with Captain America: The Winter Soldier , it feels more like we're in Jason Bourne thriller territory than purely comic book shenanigans. It's goo

After the double dose of disappointment Marvel offered us a year prior ( The Wolverine , Iron Man 3 ), I was certainly nervous about the direction the company was taking for its second phase, even though  Thor: The Dark World wasn't too bad. Thankfully, Marvel came back to prove me wrong, very wrong, with Captain America: The Winter Soldier , the present day-set sequel to The First Avenger . The real worry I had going into this one was that it would just feel like yet another Avengers Assemble , giving up on the retro feel of the first Captain America movie altogether, something I personally love about the character and that particular flick. As it turns out, The Winter Soldier is deeply rooted in the character's history and we actually get to see how that history had an impact on Steve Rogers' present. Sure, the film goes for a decidedly modern thriller vibe but it still manages to feel like a superhero movie and keep some good old-fashioned camp intact. With Jo

Jim Carrey burst onto the Hollywood scene in a big way in 1994 with the likes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective , Dumb & Dumber and The Mask . The latter stood out for many thanks to its mischievous cartoon vibe and its impressive special effects. Based on the Dark Horse comic books, The Mask saw Jim Carrey play mild-mannered banker Stanley Ipkiss, an overly nice, unlucky loser who gets stepped on by everyone around him and just kinda lets it happen. Until one day he finds some strange wooden mask which basically turns him into a superhero. Or, rather, a green-headed Tex Avery-infused freak who travels by tornado, spouts out catchphrases and wears bright and colourful suits. He becomes everything he's not and has a ball being The Mask until this seemingly unlimited power backfires and Ipkiss' life gets out of control. Before all this, he meets Cameron Diaz's femme fatale, a dancer at the "Coco Bongo Club" and the villain Dorian's (an intimidating Peter G

With sequel A Dame To Kill For coming soon, there's no better time to revisit Robert Rodriguez's (mostly) monochromatic film noir comic book thriller. Lately, Rodriguez has been focusing predominantly on tongue-in-cheek Grindhouse flicks so going back to Sin City was something of a breath of fresh air. Now, don't get me wrong, Machete and Planet Terror are tons of fun but there's a refreshing seriousness to Sin City which makes it feel that little bit more substantial. You can tell that the director was putting a lot of heart into this project and wasn't taking Frank Miller's works lightly, not only visually but tonally also. There is, of course, the odd burst of humour and absurdity in there but it somehow doesn't feel forced amidst the semi-earnest way in which the story is being told. There's always jokey touches in Miller's comics, usually rather dark one, and that comes through really well here, Rodriguez never letting Sin City get too

So new Marvel movie Guardians Of The Galaxy finally gets a full trailer after that cool, yet very short promo  was released recently and... Looks pretty silly, y'all! Action looks good, though. I just wish it didn't go out of its way to turn every single moment into a goofy joke. Here's hoping the movie itself is at least fun.

Spider-Man vs the sky?! I am SO in!

After Iron Man 3 and The Wolverine , I was half expecting Thor: The Dark World to be yet another disappointing Marvel outing. The first Thor film was nothing mind-blowing but it was solid enough and it brought to the screen the story of one of the most out-there Avengers about as convincingly as it could have possibly been done. But in a world post- The   Avengers , what is Thor to do? Well, a heck of a lot, as it turns out. If you thought the first film was rather bare plot-wise, which it was, you'll be happy to find that Thor: The Dark World is rich with things happening. They may not all make sense or work, but things are happening this time around. Less time is spent on Earth, definitely a good thing, and the film does a far better job at making sense with The Avengers than Iron Man 3 did. Unfortunately, Earth-wise, we leave the desert of New Mexico for the greyness of Greenwich, England. Why are the Thor movies given all the least impressive locations? Seems a bit

Hellboy 's a weird one... For one thing, I always liked the look of the trailers and always wanted to watch it but somehow never got around to. I would catch glimpses of it on TV every so often and it looked really good to me. Besides, I was a big fan of Pan's Labyrinth and I was really looking forward to checking out another Guillermo Del Toro flick. Having never read the comics, I really had nothing to go on so I had no specific expectations. Finally, post- Pacific Rim , this year, I did it: I watched the entire thing. And, you know what? Was slightly disappointed. Now I know I'm pretty late in the game and I should be happy that they even managed to make a Hellboy movie. I am! And there are a lot of things I like about Del Toro's film. For one, Ron Perlman is perfect for the role and it's literally impossible to picture anyone else playing Hellboy. Spot-on casting there. The combined efforts of Doug Jones and David Hyde Pearce bring fish dude Abe to

Here's the thing about Kick-Ass ... The first film was a big deal when it came out, mostly thanks to its fun premise of a regular dude becoming, or at least, trying to become a superhero in the real world. It was a big hit, the winning combination of Chloe Moretz's Hit Girl and Nicolas Cage's Big Daddy mostly to thank for that. To be honest, the first Kick-Ass was pretty overrated: it wasn't particularly funny (Cage being a glorious exception) or particularly well made and its odd tonal shifts made it seem like a film that didn't know whether it wanted to be a comic book movie, a spoof or a real world-set satire. With this sequel, this looked like the perfect opportunity to bring some focus to the franchise and finally take it in the right direction. Sadly, with Kick-Ass 2 , we get even more inconsistency as the film takes one character in an interesting direction and another straight down to the sewers. Kick-Ass himself is given a fun subplot (the film is gi

After Blade and, later, X-Men kick-started the first wave of modern blockbuster comic-book movies, Marvel jumped head-first into a Hulk movie and handed the directing keys to Ang Lee, known to Hollywood back then mostly for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . An odd choice of director but then again Kenneth Branagh made Thor so... Maybe not so odd after all. The result was a unique take on the Hulk character and the superhero genre in general which might have very well been ahead of its time. The film was by no means perfect and did suffer from the occasional "what-the-hell?!" moment as well as a ridiculous running time but looking back, the bad rep it often receives nowadays really feels harsh and, at times, misguided. Visually, Hulk is still an impressive achievement. Lee's film boasts an incredibly stylised look which really pays homage to the comic book form and gives the film a grand, operatic quality. Ang Lee doesn't f*** around! When he makes a comic

I never thought I'd ever say this but... Zack Snyder would have made this movie work. Now, nothing against director Timur Bekmambetov, I liked Night Watch and enjoyed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter , but Wanted is a perfect example of how to make a movie adaptation of a comic-book and completely miss the point. Not that Wanted is as bad as something like Catwoman , far from it, but had someone like Snyder taken on the project Watchmen -style, he would have at least represented the visual style of the whole thing accordingly rather than settle for this watered-down, safe Hollywood template. Bekmambetov is a talented director who knows where to point the camera and make fun, dark, amusingly trashy comic-book style movies for relatively not that much money, so this should have been a shoe-in but clearly, for his first big-budget Hollywood outing, studios probably pushed for a safer, more obviously Matrix -ey version of a pretty out-there comic-book. The film made big bucks