7 years ago
Featured (10 posts found)
Stop-Motion Animation Is Dying, But It Still Matters
Roughly a decade ago, the world of animation was nearly dealt a serious blow in the form of a fire destroying over three decades of archival work from Aardman Animations. This stop-motion studio is best known for creating the unflappable duo of Wallace and Gro...
Read more →
“Fantastic Four” Isn’t Terrible, Just Unremarkable
A cursory browse of the Internet suggests that the new Fantastic Four may as well be one of the worst films ever made: an Adam Sandleresque score on Low Hanging Fruit, unusually harsh user rating on the Internet Males Database, and widely reported tales of pro...
Read more →
Productive Failure: Three New Films Allow Female Characters to Fail
Like the Pacific Theater in World War II, America’s literal movie theaters have become the site of crucial battles in the cultural war for womankind’s dignity and agency. With every new month’s slate of releases, we get a wave or two of incisive assessments ov...
Read more →
“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Is As Messy As Other Indie Teen Sex Dramedies
It's 1976 and, as she enthuses to her tape-recorder diary, 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time—with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Based on the hybrid graphic novel/regular novel by P...
Read more →
The Cult of Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise imbues every performance with an exciting amount of personality and charisma. There is no one more fun to watch onscreen on a consistent basis. Yet the world remembers: He still jumped on Oprah’s couch.
Despite a prolific career, years of apologizi...
Read more →
“I Am Chris Farley” Avoids Exploring The Man’s Dark Side
Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: "It's just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happines...
Read more →
“Rogue Nation” Is The Best “Mission: Impossible” Film So Far
Ethan Hunt (the 53-going-on-35 Tom Cruise) may not be considered a superhero, but he undoubtedly possesses powers that appear to be superhuman. He may not have a web to sling and his most impressive gadget continues to be a ludicrously transformative face-mask...
Read more →
Locked Between Professional and Personal: On “The End of the Tour”
Early reports on James Ponsoldt’s sensitive, earnest The End Of The Tour tended to describe the film as something of a David Foster Wallace biopic--a notion abhorrent in literary circles that still hold up Wallace as an untouchable, multifaceted genius. Those ...
Read more →
Two Writers Get Into A Car. Ouch.
David Foster Wallace is the epitome of the Writer's Writer. His labyrinthine prose and slang-laced erudition appeal to the myriad would-be scribes struggling to find meaning in their debt-inducing liberal arts educations that never really pay off—the "obscenel...
Read more →
SNL In Review: “Caddyshack”
By 1979, Saturday Night Live was a house divided. Popular cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were preparing to send their Blues Brothers characters to the big screen, bolstered from the success of Belushi’s National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). The sh...
Read more →