Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows review

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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Since when were ninjas so bad at hiding?

by Thom Yee

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

I don’t know what kids today do after school, what with their STEM programs and their social responsibility and their parents who actually pay attention to them, but back in my day, a lot of us kids took martial arts classes after school, and no matter what our parents may have thought about us getting good exercise or developing a hobby built on a system of discipline, respect, and honour, most of us were only taking those classes for one reason: To beat up other kids.

The thing you have to understand about being a kid in the early ‘90s is that we were coming up only in the afterglow of the truly great action movies of the ‘80s, and so that spirit of almost mindless killing was slowly being eroded while also being finely tempered against the more spiritual elements of what we assumed was the Eastern philosophies of violence as a last resort.  For kids who took martial arts, that usually still meant a lot of fighting, just not fighting with the intent to kill. Continue reading →

X-Men: Apocalypse review

04 Saturday Jun 2016

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Let slip the dogs of war, and just cry, Havok

by Thom Yee

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X-Men: Apocalypse images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Sometimes I still can’t believe what a genius thing that early ‘90s X-Men cartoon wound up being.  It’s not like it was all that good (in fact it was laughably bad on a regular basis) but it ended up being an unexpectedly strong introduction to many of the bigger, crazier concepts and tropes of superhero comicbooks, and for a generation of ‘90s kids (like me), it was the key gateway to all the time-bending, cosmos-spanning stories that comicbooks, and the X-Men especially, specialize in. In many ways it laid the foundation for the superhero movies we’ve, by and large, enjoyed in the 21st century.  Plus, that theme song: Continue reading →

Fear the Walking Dead – Shiva recap

23 Monday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Fear the Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

2×07: “Shiva”

There’s a very specific type of melancholy that I’ve always felt during this time of the year as the days got longer, the darkness waned, and summer continued its inevitable approach. It’s too bright!  It’s too damned hot! And most of our favourite TV shows have finished their seasons. In one respect, however, we’ve come very, very far from that place, with summer television programming giving us some of the most acclaimed and most anticipated new series in recent history, as well as a brand new episode of one of our greatest shows only yesterday forever changing our feelings on the words, “Hold the door!”

All of which is another way of saying Fear the Walking Dead sucks. Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – Legendary recap

20 Friday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×16: “Legendary”

One of the things that got me most excited about Legends of Tomorrow was seeing all of these different superheroes and villains working together, unfettered, in the series’ first teaser trailer. As a comicbook fan whose introduction to the medium was through big, sprawling, and, frankly, confusing books like Crisis on Infinite Earths (a twelve-issue maxi-series that starred multiple iterations of the same character in a story about the destruction and reformation of the DC Universe’s multiverse into one single Earth), I developed an early appetite for gigantic collections of heroes in massive group shots working together against a common bad guy as drawn by classic artists like George Perez, so scenes involving almost all of the Berlanti-verse heroes that have developed over the years in raids on bad guy compounds or flying at top speed through the sky hit right where I live when it comes to this genre. Continue reading →