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Monday, October 12, 2015

Returned to Life

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One of the reasons that film noir has persisted in the cultural massmind is because films noir are so often epistemological. Questions of ...
Sunday, October 11, 2015

An October Challenge Trick or Treat Bag

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I'm not "officially" doing The October Horror Movie Challenge this year. I'm not aiming to watch all the films and I'...
Saturday, September 19, 2015

A Wolf Cub In the Desert

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Theeb (2014, directed by Naji Abu Nowar) finds its title character, a young Bedouin growing up in 1916, roped into a grand adventure. For ...
Sunday, September 13, 2015

Innocence, Experience, Sex, and Drugs

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In Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015, directed by Marielle Heller), a film set in the sexually liberated, doped up 1970s, the title character ...
Saturday, August 29, 2015

Gifted

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The Gift (2015, directed by Joel Edgerton) is one of those psychological thrillers that it's best to approach without any fore-knowled...
1 comment:
Saturday, August 22, 2015

Trans Women Scorned

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It's been a while since I've been as conflicted about a film as I am about Tangerine (2015, directed by Sean Baker). It's a fi...
Sunday, August 16, 2015

Say, UNCLE

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The Man from UNCLE (2015, directed by Guy Ritchie) finds Hollywood trying to breathe life into another pre-sold "franchise," pre...
Saturday, August 08, 2015

Clobberin Time

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I don't hate Tim Story's Fantastic Four films. Oh, don't get me wrong: they botch a lot of things (most notably Dr. Doom and G...
Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Hitting the Small Time

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Ant-Man (2015, directed by Peyton Reed) finds the Marvel superhero franchise experimenting with genre. The superhero film is flexible if y...
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Monday, July 27, 2015

Rich and Famous

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I wasn't a fan of Amy Winehouse during her lifetime. Not because I disliked her music--I rarely heard her music in the radio wasteland ...
Sunday, July 26, 2015

A Final Problem

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I'm reading Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings , right now. One of the stories in that book is a Sherl...
Sunday, July 19, 2015

Salting the Soil

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The Salt of the Earth (2014, directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado) is one of those documentaries that confounds expectation...
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Saturday, July 11, 2015

The Future, Postponed

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Terminator: Genisys (2015, directed by Alan Taylor) is not as bad as you may have heard. It's certainly no worse than any given city-de...
Saturday, June 20, 2015

Fang and Claw

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My long-suffering partner has much simpler demands of movies than I do. For example: when she sits down to watch a movie about dinosaurs, s...
Saturday, June 06, 2015

Ultron Unbound

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) finds the Marvel Cinematic Universe entering its decadent period. I'd almost call it the series' Br...
1 comment:
Monday, June 01, 2015

White Elephant Blogathon: Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea

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When I opened the email containing this year's White Elephant, I was convinced that I had seen my film before. It turns out that I was ...
Sunday, May 31, 2015

Start Your Engines

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There was a guy on Twitter assigning "Mad Max" names the week after Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, directed by George Miller) opened....
Sunday, May 24, 2015

...I Am Rather the Fallen Angel

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Ex Machina (2015, directed by Alex Garland) has the great misfortune of following too soon after Her , a legitimately great film about art...
Saturday, May 16, 2015

Heinlein in Hollywood part 3: Closing the Loop

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Robert A. Heinlein is typically considered one of the grand masters of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction," that period...
Friday, May 15, 2015

Heinlein In Hollywood part 2

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It was perhaps inevitable that Hollywood would come calling on the Robert A. Heinlein estate in the early 1990s. The previous decade had se...
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Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Heinlein in Hollywood

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I saw a story on the internet a few months back about the demolition of Ray Bradbury's house. It sold a while ago for $1.7 million and ...
8 comments:
Sunday, May 03, 2015

The Pull List, early 2015

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In honor of the new Avengers movie (review soon), I thought I'd give you a run-down of what comics I read month to month. As you might ...
Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Dog Eat Dog

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I'm conflicted about the Dardenne brothers' latest film, Two Days, One Night (2014). On the one hand, I think that in spite of the...
Sunday, April 26, 2015

Monstrous Feminine

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David Cronenberg has always included a strain of horror toward women and female sexuality in his films. The monstrous feminine often manife...
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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Backward Glances

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Horror movies are going through one of their periodic revivals right now. The last eighteen months or so have been particularly fertile for...
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Friday, April 10, 2015

Blogorama: 2015 edition

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I'll be joining two blogathons in the next month or so. Both of them are old friends. The first one is the periodic For the Love of Fil...
Sunday, April 05, 2015

True/False 2015: Across the Rio Grande

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Cartel Land (2015, directed by Matthew Heineman) and Western (2015, directed by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross) are so thematically similar...
Monday, March 30, 2015

True/False 2015: Almost Famous

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"Fuckery and shenanigans." That's how the sister of one of the antagonists in Finders Keepers (2015, directed by Bryan Carbe...
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Sunday, March 29, 2015

True/False 2015: A Better Tomorrow

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Another persistent subject of the contemporary documentary zeitgeist are the lives of people--particularly children--who squat in the ruins...
Saturday, March 28, 2015

Myths, Stories, and Songs

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Song of the Sea (2014, directed by Tomm Moore) expands on the design aesthetic of Moore's The Secret of Kells , while diving even deep...