It’s days like this that remind me of just how little I really know about movies. You see, I’m here to talk about The Northman, the gore-drenched film directed by Robert Eggers concerning the revenge of a Viking prince. As I was turning the movie over in my head, I began wondering, “Are Viking films numerous enough to be considered a genre?” As it turns out, they kind of are! We don’t quite have a time in cinema where Viking films reigned supreme at the box office. While gangster movies were very much a thing in the 1930s to 1940s, and westerns were the dominant genre for close to three... Read More

I love seeing actors take risks. Even more so, I love seeing movie stars take risks. It’s not the kind of thing that happens too often because, like criminals, movie stars tend to be a superstitious and cowardly lot. Considering that the era when a matinee icon could guarantee a huge opening for a movie is essentially dead, movie stars are increasingly faced with two choices. They can either retreat into a niche that gets increasingly smaller, or they can adapt. Robin Williams was an early adopter of adaptation. For those of you too young to remember, Williams was a hyperactive stand-up comedian... Read More

Poor Aquaman. Ask any kid, any comic aficionado, any pop culture enthusiast who their favorite superhero is. Batman will come up a lot, Spider-Man and Wolverine will certainly get mentioned, even Black Panther and The Flash will get some love*. But the King of Atlantis? Eh…not so much. Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger created the character for DC Comics way back in 1941, and he languished in obscurity until the era of Saturday morning cartoons in the 1960s. From that point on, Aquaman became a joke. You could tell people all day long that he was immensely powerful, due to an ability to withstand... Read More