I’m a huge Aardman Animations fan. I’ve loved their Wallace and Gromit shorts since I was little, and equally loved all their feature-length movies to date, with the exception of Arthur Christmas. Anyway, I’ve been seeing the trailer for The Pirates! Band of Misfits a lot lately, and I’ve gotten very excited about it. After doing some research I was surprised to see that the title of the original book (as well as the movie in the UK) is The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists.

It seems the powers that be in the Sony Pictures marketing department don’t think having scientists in the title would be a good thing here in the states. So, they’ve completely taken out any mention of the scientists from our trailers, making it confusing when you see Hugh Grant’s Pirate Captain character wearing a lab coat, but whatever, I’m sure they know what’s best for us.

When I first got the email asking if we’d like to review an advanced copy of Chillerama, I grew hesitant when I saw the film’s tagline: “The Ultimate Midnight Movie.” For the last decade or so, there have been a glut of films that are meant to pay homage to old B-movies, but they normally just use this as an excuse to have no budget, crappy special effects, terrible actors, and even worse scripts. They say they’re being tongue-in-cheek, but they very rarely ever succeed at being funny, let alone entertaining in even the “so bad it’s good” way that the B-movies they’re spoofing actually are. But, as I always say, I’ll watch anything once, so I put my expectations in check and told them to send Chillerama posthaste. Much to my surprise, this isn’t your typical half-assed love note to the drive-in.
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I get sent a lot of crazy stuff that people want me to review. Some of it gets on the site and some of it doesn’t. I wasn’t sure what to think about the direct-to-Blu-ray and Walmart-exclusive animated short film LEGO Star Wars: The Padawan Menace until I heard Tim talk about it on the podcast, but I’m glad to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Not only am I growing utterly intolerant of prequel-era Star Wars, but I’d never heard LEGO characters talk despite being super cute in silent, video-game form, so I was leery. Luckily, it turns out that whoever wrote and animated this short film had a lot of creative freedom and decided to pump it full of slapstick, tongue-in-cheek humor, and lots of Star Wars in-jokes. Oh, and George Lucas makes a couple appearances.
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Terri looked like the type of movie I was going to really like. It’s a quirky story of an introverted, overweight High School student befriending his assistant principal, played by John C. Reilly. Oh, and Creed Bratton from The Office is in it. Yeah, this looked like my kind of movie.

Well, after seeing the amazing Win Win recently, I can’t help but feel like Terri was just ok, and not great like I was hoping it would be. That’s not to say I didn’t like it or it was a bad film, I just had higher hopes for it.

The Movie

Terri is played by new-comer Jacob Wysocki, and he totally embodies the character, who lives at home with his aging, eccentric, this-is-probably-what-Creed-Bratton-is-like-in-real-life uncle James.. He starts wearing his pajamas to school because they’re comfortable, but his poor attendance force him into some one-on-one time with John C. Reilly’s character, Mr. Fitzgerald.
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This is a good week for Batman fans. Like most of you I’ve been playing through Batman Arkham City and loving every minute of it, but this week saw the release of the animated adaption of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One as well.

Has it really been over a year since I reviewed a DC Animated Universe movie? The last DC U animated Blu-ray I reviewed was Batman: Under the Red Hood, and it was surprisingly good. Since then, I’ve seen a few more, but didn’t feel they were worth posting on the site. Green Lantern: Emerald Knights was a decent collection of stories, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse was just kind of interesting, and All-Star Superman was weird because I didn’t know the source material.

Even though I haven’t read Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, I thoroughly enjoyed the animated adaptation and feel like it is an impressive addition to Batman’s already awesome animated film history.
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