Let’s talk for just a second about Bruce Springsteen, not as a singer or a songwriter or a front man or a rock star. Let’s talk about Bruce Springsteen as a lifestyle. Today, before my 2 PM showing of “Blinded By The Light”, a pleasantly shaggy coming-of-age story centering on the music of Bruce Springsteen, […]
As with all Tarantino films, the audience for “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” will be a self-selected one: people who already like Quentin Tarantino. Like Wes Anderson, Kevin Smith, or Woody Allen, Tarantino commands a niche market of people who picked up the Q habit somewhere between ages fourteen and twenty-eight. No one smokes […]
Unless anyone else has a 21-chapter series of interconnected movies that they’d like to bring to a climax tomorrow, I think we can declare a winner: the Russo brothers, and more broadly the team at Disney/Marvel, have won movies. They’ve just won. No one else can talk to them now, except of course for the […]
Let’s get right to the point, “Shazam!” is a goddamn delight. S P O I L E R S DC has pulled off a light-hearted hat trick: an understandable villain, a likeable protagonist, and a coherent and inventive plot. In completely unrelated news that I am sure is a total coincidence, Zack Snyder was […]
Let’s break this down. First off: this opening scene is remarkably sparse, populated only by a single figure and her breath, scanning the horizon. The substitution of a rifle for a lightsaber would make this scene indistinguishable from any number of John Wayne movies; the substitution of Daisy Ridley for John Wayne makes this scene […]
It’s difficult to be objective about a movie that delights you as much as “Captain Marvel” has delighted me. And that’s why I’m not going to try. Instead, I am going to tell you a few things about the world I grew up in, and see if you recognize anything from your own past there. […]
I started crying at about minute five of “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”. It wasn’t at a particularly emotional moment; it wasn’t even a slightly tender moment. It was the reveal of the island of Berk, the stony paradise inhabited by a tribe of Scottish Vikings and their dragons, that saddened me. […]
If February isn’t too late, I’d like to make a New Year’s resolution: to face the undying nightmare hellscape of 2019 with the same cheerful aplomb as Emmet, the tiny yellow minifig voiced by Chris Pratt who is the hero of both “The Lego Movie” (2014) and “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part”. As […]
Splat. The marine installment of the DC Extended Universe has arrived, and boy is it soggy. An exposition-laden, by-the-numbers origin story detailing Arthur Curry’s (Jason Momoa) struggle to accept his destiny to ascend a throne and unite the world of Atlantis with the world above… you know what, my eyeballs are drying out and life […]
So Fraser had a suggestion tonight. “Why don’t you write some reviews of classic movies?” he asked. “I’d love to read your review of ‘Rocky IV’.“ So “Rocky IV”. I should start by saying I’ve never actually seen this movie before. Sure, I know what happens in “Rocky IV”. I know it by the same cultural osmosis […]
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