Watch movies long enough, and you’ll start to learn the individual traits that directors have. I think it would be physically impossible for Quentin Tarantino to make a movie with no dialogue.* If J.J. Abrams made a movie set in a lightless cave, he’d figure out a way to sneak a lens flare in somewhere. Some for-hire filmmakers are able to sneak under the radar by tailoring their style to the project, perhaps in a desire to let the story be the star. For the most part, you can eventually spot their tics. One of those tics for Edgar Wright is music. With the exception of Martin Scorsese, I’m... Read More

Anything can be funny, right? There are two schools of thought, there. The first is the theory that anything has the potential to be amusing. Comedy is all about puncturing bubbles of pretention, going after targets that deserve skewering. As long as the joke teller is punching up instead of punching down, the only limitation is their imagination. The other school of thought is that some subjects are too sacrosanct to be mocked and to even attempt them is, at best, in poor taste. We wouldn’t dream of making fun of the Nazis, right? Ah…as a matter of fact, we would! There’s a long and... Read More