The View From The Mountain

I was looking forward to seeing Bumblebee , largely for two reasons. The first was that Hailee Steinfeld was starring in it. This is the very same Hailee Steinfeld who admirably held her own against Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ superb remake of True Grit (and she also gave voice to Gwen Stacey in one of my all-time favorite superhero movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ). The other reason I wanted to see Bumblebee was that it was directed by Travis Knight, who also directed the astoundingly good Kubo and the Two Strings , a movie that made me care deeply about a group of animated characters from beginning to end. Bumblebee starts out like a typical Transformers film, with the Transformers battling their blood enemies on their homeworld, and losing badly. When I first saw this CGI orgy, I let out an audible groan, thinking it would devolve into the usual confusing Transformer slugfest that Michael (Boom-Boom) Bay gave us in the previous five (!!!) films, where you ha...

Before Batman first premiered in the summer of 1989, my younger self was convinced that it was going to suck really badly. Here were my reasons: it was directed by Tim Burton--who, at that point, only directed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure , and Beetlejuice --and it starred Michael Keaton, an actor, who, at that time, was best known for starring in comedies like Mr. Mom . Once I heard that ‘Mr. Mom’ was playing Batman, I was convinced that the then-new Batman film was going to be a disaster. Of course, back when I held these firm convictions about Tim Burton’s Batman , I hadn’t actually SEEN the movie yet. When Batman opened, it wasn’t just a hit movie, it was a cultural phenomenon. The character was already a well-known commodity, thanks to the 1960s Batman TV series, which served as my introduction to the Dark Knight back when I was a toddler. However, it felt as if the entire nation happily suffered Batman fever during the summer of ’89. Batman , both the film and the character, was ...

When I finally saw Shazam , the latest superhero movie from the DC Comics Universe, I thought it was marginally good at first. It was interesting, and a little bit funny…cute, even. But as I kept watching Shazam , something really nice happened. It got better. And then from that point, just when Shazam was getting really, really good, something even more amazing had occurred. Shazam had become fantastic. I should mention that I have been a fan of the Big Red Cheese from a very long time ago, back when he was known as Captain Marvel and had a TV show alongside another superhero named Isis (this was back in the 1970s, before that name became thoroughly trashed by real-world connotations). You see, “Shazam” was the phrase that young Billy Batson used to turn into Captain Marvel, a super powered hero to comes to the aid of those in need. But since Marvel Comics hijacked the Captain Marvel name for their own second stringer hero, the Shazam filmmakers, led by director David F. Sandber...