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

What would you do with a time machine? Go back to make sure you have winning lottery numbers? Jump forward to see how your children turned out? Discover the identity of Jack the Ripper? Take a stroll through prehistory and try to avoid being eaten by a pack of velociraptors? I get it. When the subject of time travel comes up, most of us have an opinion at the ready. One that comes up often is the idea of traveling to Linz, Austria in 1889. During that year, the Hitler family welcomed a new baby. They couldn’t know that baby’s destiny, but we do. The question then becomes, is the murder of an... Read More

The legendary screenwriter William Goldman wrote that, “Nobody knows anything.” He meant that common sense, as it is understood by us, doesn’t exist and can’t exist in the film industry. A film that should be a massive hit, such as John Carter or the dearly departed The Flash, isn’t. A film that flies under the radar, such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding or The Blair Witch Project, suddenly goes supernova and makes all the money. If you work in an industry where success can’t be predicted and failure means the loss of your job, you’re probably going to get scared. Once you get scared,... Read More

If not for the atomic bomb, I might not be here. My father came of age during World War II. He trained to be a pilot in 1945, and even after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, the common wisdom was that a war was still on, that Japan would never surrender. The common wisdom was that it would take around a million U.S. service members to successfully invade Japan, my father being one of them. The common wisdom was that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives in the long run. It seems to have saved my father’s life. And yet. The United States, my country, is the only... Read More