AVENGERS INFINITY WARObviously, just go see Avengers: Infinity War if you haven't already. No spoilers, just some amazing fights in there that make it worth it. You can nit-pick, but the movie is just a blast to start the... I guess, Spring/ Summer movie season. Marvel was weird to put Ant-Man and The Wasp after Avengers, but still gonna go see it.
So we got the good, let's go into why I live, the bad.
BATMAN NINJAOh, WB Animation, you are just pure crap. I want you to succeed. I don't want to even have to write bad reviews every single time you have something come out. Like I did last month. I'd like to be writing a series on how good your work has been, on how you changed the home video market, on how you made me a better human being. But, it's just consistently bad. I hope that people that work there read this and the lack of any awards over the years (including The Annies) has proven how little you are liked.
Had to get that off my chest, before we go over how WB Animation ruined this one and it's kind of amazing at this level of incompetence.
So WB Animation over here in North America localized and dubbed Batman Ninja in the worst way possible. In an article from Gamespot,writers Leo Chu and Eric Garcia took credit for rewriting 90% of the film. Which, is kind of effing crazy. I suggest reading the full article which kind of shows how full of themselves the writers are and their piss poor claim to fame of work with Ghibli on My Neighbors the Yamadas, yes, a film you've never heard of. It seems like the story was made so much worse by these two jack-offs.
Batman Ninja is crazy weird visually and that would be fine with how odd the Japanese might have written the story, because it's from their perspective, not two American writers trying to make it sound like an anime.
Just to go over another example, Evangelion 3.33 took so long to come out in North America because Gainax wanted to make sure they had a super good translated version convering the same meaning for the North American audience. The Blu-ray/DVD is called 3.33 instead of 3.0, because they are such nerds at Gainax that the original tile 3.0 doesn't fit the extra work for translation and possibly any minor tweaks on the movie that have taken place.
Batman Ninja and WB animation does not care and there is no talk of an original Japanese translation edition coming out.
Then there were some weird choices for voice acting in the film. WB animation could have easily gotten some of the top anime voice actors in the US to pull off the cast. I mean, Joker is voiced by Tony Hale from Arrested Development and Veep, not a great choice.
In short the movie is horrible to watch because of the redone script, voice acting and horrible lip-syncing.
On to the next movie that I had some high hopes for is Ghost Stories, we actually posted on its one theater release last week and warn not to see its wider release this week into small artsy theaters.
Ghost Stories started off so well and even started to get me excited as only an anthology movie with three ghost stories with a wrap-around story can. Then the ending comes around and you'll be shocked by how it just kills the movie. (Spoiler ahead) And it makes everything so worthless, it's the old, he's in a coma scenario. And that has been done to death. (End of spoiler)
It truly sucks, because there's some great acting, special effects and story that just isn't tapped into fully by this film. It's like every horror story was just starting and the last two stories I would have watched as their own movies. Martin Freeman from Black Panther and every other British film and Alex Lawther are great in their roles. It's just the movie misses the pay-off so much that it's like someone hurt you by showing you a glimpse of how good it could be.
It makes the film irredeemable at the end, like you put in time to be told how dumb you were for believing anything on screen.
DIVORCED DADFor the ugly we have Divorced Dad. This is an ugly messed up show that we loved watching at how weird it is. It's best similar media connection would be watching anything from Tim & Eric, though they're entirely unrelated and from Canada. Divorced Dad is a small limited series online with only five episodes each under 10 minutes. It showcases a bizarre show with very strange camera effects about someone who just goes by the name Divorced Dad with really no talk about his divorce. He's joined by an idiot, man-boy sidekick who he doesn't get along with. Divorced Dad tries to host his talk show and things just go bad, but to a surreal or nightmarish level. I'd equate it to watching a nightmare.
Watch with friends at home as it's not safe for work, but not in a nudity or sex kind of way. In a, "Oh no, what's happening now!," kind of way. It'll only take you less than an hour to watch the whole short series and then just look into the abyss online and wonder. Wonder wtf did I just watch?