Some ants may have died in the production of this movie

by Thom Yee

Ant-Man images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

One of the things that’s really helped to make a regularly updated movie review website a sustainable endeavour over the last three years here at GOO Reviews has been the rapid proliferation of superhero movies. They’ve consistently been some of the leading tentpole movies of their respective seasons and years of release, they’re easy to schedule reviews around, and, frankly, they’re easy to write about. As a lifelong comicbook nerd and as someone who usually finds more to believe in from these fictional heroes than from anyone in our non-fictional world, I always get a kick out of watching them, and it’s usually easy for me to find something new to say about them.

On the other hand, Ant-Man is coming out at what may be a crossroads for the superhero movie in general. After almost ten years of consistent critical and box office success, there’s been an undeniable and growing shift in recent viewer preferences away from the format as it stands today. It started with low rumblings as people started to gripe about how sick they were of origin movies, it’s continued through a vocal recognition of how formulaic and unremarkable superhero movies are becoming, and right now I think it’s a movement spearheaded by some of the outright animosity Avengers: Age of Ultron has received from critics, the general movie-going public, and even some underwhelmed former fans. Continue reading →

With great power comes great… wait… different franchise. Never mind. Not relevant.

by Thom Yee

Avengers: Age of Ultron images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Age of Ultron represents a sort of anniversary for us here at GOO Reviews. It was nearly three years ago that Grace and I set off on this endeavor to review pop culture in all of its minutiae (or at least the parts we could be bothered with) after seeing an already overcrowded and thoroughly well served market of online reviews and saying, “Us too!” We launched with a spate of reviews, of movies and TV shows and novels and comicbooks, but the first out of the gate was a review of a particularly special movie – The Avengers. We’ve come a long way since 2012 and those lowly days of 3G iPhones, Large Hadron Colliders, and misinterpretations of Mayan calendars. We’ve reviewed more than 100 films, provided week-by-week coverage of several popular television series, and witnessed the Marvel Cinematic Universe grow from mewling quim to roaring froth. Some of us have graduated college, moved out of our parents’ house, and are well on our way towards marriage and adulthood, while still others have also graduated college, had already moved out of our parents’ house, and are continuing on our lonely, vengeful, blood-red path, with marriage, fulfillment and contentment still nowhere in sight, hoping that the next leap will be the leap home. Continue reading →