As a movie dork, one of the most thrilling things for me is when a typecast actor defiantly refuses to be typecast. We humans rely on pattern recognition to try (and often fail) to make sense of the world. When things are as they’re supposed to be, we’re content. When the pattern breaks, it can […]

Over drinks with a friend last weekend, talk turned to movies.* We discussed what we liked, what we didn’t, what would be forgotten, and what would become future classics. As so often happens, the conversation drifted into genres. He asked me what I’d thought the most wide-ranging and versatile genre of movie was.** My answer […]

We are firmly in a vibes era. That’s particularly true now, in this cursed year of our Lord 2024. We’re in the midst of a vicious Presidential campaign, and the vast majority of ads, speeches, and platforms aren’t really based on concrete and coherent policy arguments. They’re based on how the candidates and their operations […]

Donald Trump is one of the twenty-first century’s most important people. I don’t just mean from a fame standpoint, though I’d bet you could show a picture of him to nearly anyone on the planet, and they would recognize him. When I say he’s important, I mean as a person who influences the course of […]

As I write this, the first episode of what would come to be known as “Saturday Night Live” aired nearly fifty years ago. On October 11, 1975, one of the most influential shows in the history of television premiered. It would go on to spawn hundreds of episodes, dozens of stars, scores of iconic moments, […]

Are racing movies also sports movies? I think so. Even when the focus is someone piloting a car, motorcycle, bicycle, scooter, hydrofoil, or hovercraft, those kinds of films share a great deal with the sports genre. So much so that they feel like a subgenre. At the end of the day, they share multiple tropes, […]

Very, very, very few people make it through their teen years unscathed. Some people don’t make it through at all. It’s bad enough being a teenager, the acne eruptions, the hormonal explosions, and all the attendant drama that comes with the age. Suppose there’s more than that? Suppose there’s an additional weight you need to […]

Tim Burton is not a filmmaker. You can be forgiven for the confusion that previous sentence created, but let me explain. Tim Burton isn’t someone interested in making movies in the traditional sense. Instead, he’s an artist. He’s more focused on eliciting an emotional response as opposed to telling a story, and he uses the […]

Is it morally wrong to enjoy true crime? The question itself is tricky because the true crime genre itself has changed over the years. Up until the 2000s, I think, the genre was more niche, to use the most polite phrasing possible. If you liked books about gangsters, documentaries about serial murder and the like, […]

Rally Caps drops on Prime and Disney+ September 10 The appeal of sports is largely lost on me. Growing up, I was an indoor kid. While my father hoped for a strapping young man who would toss around the ol’ pigskin with him, what he got was a committed uber geek. When he lustily cheered […]