Mark my words, in the next week people are going to accuse Martin Scorsese and his film, Killers of the Flower Moon, of being racist. Sexist. Glorifying violence. Exploiting the experiences of Indigenous people. And most annoying of all, of being “woke.” This has happened to Scorsese for decades. He was accused of blasphemy with The Last Temptation of Christ,* accused of glorifying violence and the underworld with GoodFellas, and accused of glorifying violence/risky sex/drug use with The Wolf of Wall Street. The number of bad takes are seemingly endless. It’s okay if Scorsese’s work is... Read More

The endgame of most romantic comedies is to get the couple to “and they lived happily ever after.” Right? After all the meet-cutes, bouncy banter, misunderstandings that could have been easily resolved with a conversation, and tearful reconciliations, it all ends with a kiss and the assumption that the happy couple will walk into the sunset together. Okay, cool. But then what? Do they deal with the seven year itch? Have kids, then vaguely regret having kids? Slowly grow apart? Get into an expensive and time-consuming divorce? Make it all the way into their twilight years and then one of them... Read More

I don’t know if you knew this, but The Creator was released theatrically on September 29 of this year. As I write this, it’s made somewhere in the neighborhood of $32 million. Considering it had a production budget of $80 million, it’ll have to do some work over the next few weeks to break even.  So far it’s not a box office smash hit. A little research into why tells me a few factors worked against it. They are: The WGA and SAG strikes largely prevented the stars and filmmakers from promoting it. While the film features excellent actors, it has no major stars. It has a somewhat compassionate... Read More

You’ve heard from farty old film critics like me that movies have an excess of excess these days. Gigantic budgets, massive explosions and special effects sequences, and runtimes that would test even the hardiest of bladders. People complain about that now. People complained about those very same things forty years ago.  Sure, I get the bellyaching, at least to a degree. You’ve sat down at a theater for a cinematic epic. You proceed to be bombarded by superheroes, hammered by blue cat people, or slammed by historical personages. And, as the dust settles and the audience staggers from the multiplex... Read More

We don’t see too many elegant movies any longer. Why is that, I ask you? Perhaps part of the problem is that the modern cinematic landscape is separated by a vast gulf. On one side are blockbusters. They’re designed to be big, loud, and appeal to anyone with a pulse and some without. On the other side lies independent film. They’re small, scrappy, and frequently made for the nichest of niche interest. As a result, there’s very little middle ground for intelligent fare made by studios for a moderate budget. Is part of the problem that modern society is dumber and coarser? That’s an easy... Read More

“You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan.” That’s dialogue delivered by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. You might hate Batman in particular or superhero movies in general, but the power of that dialogue cannot be denied. It posits a truth that hasn’t changed since the earliest days of hunter-gatherers scampering across the plains. That truth... Read More

I usually have my review schedule booked out a few weeks. A number of factors come into play with what I write about. If possible, I don’t want to review too many blockbusters, too many horror movies, too many of the same thing. That sucks for you and it sucks for me. The vast majority of the time, I can find a way into my review. This week, I hit a wall.  To explain, August 27 was National Cinema Day, an amusingly desperate attempt for theater owners to juice their meager profits by offering four dollar tickets to all shows. It worked pretty well since about 8.5 million people took them up... Read More

Rocky is one of the greatest films ever made by anyone. It’s not hard to understand why. You’ve got a lived-in, realistic performance by Sylvester Stallone, a supporting cast of actors rather than movie stars, and direction that knows when to ease back and when to go hard. Top to bottom, it’s made by people working at the peak of their powers. What makes it endure, though? I think that would be Stallone’s screenplay. The legend is that he wrote it in three days and change. Say what you will about Stallone as a writer, but the end result of his script was kind of the creation of the inspirational... Read More

I came across a fascinating op-ed in The Washington Post recently* that dove into the wilderness that many men exist in these days. They don’t quite know how to act. They don’t quite know how to be. They don’t understand what a man is in the year 2023. The question is, do you care?  When these men ask for help and look for both an explanation of what masculinity is and a way to behave, they’re mostly presented with two choices: The right-wing approach which focuses on degrees of “traditional” masculinity that veers perilously close to misogyny. By and large, it’s highly specific... Read More

The best I can figure, the first movie about Dracula was the Hungarian production The Death of Dracula released in 1921. From there, the bloody floodgates opened. As of this writing, there are over eighty movies about Dracula. Some are good. Others, not so much!* All of them, to one degree or another, were spawned from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula.  That was Stoker’s seventh novel, and it was a hit. So much so that Stoker enjoyed a lifetime of comfortable success. He seems to have been the Edwardian era’s version of Stephen King. Both were writers with a flair for creativity, both had critics... Read More