What do you get when you combine shonky 70s Kung Fu movie sensibilities with overdubbed dialogue, an Extremely Irish King Arthur, rape, incest, and a director who turned down The Lord of the Rings to make it all happen?
Excalibur!
Apparently!
I was so ready to laugh this movie off. It is ...
2018-11-23 21:47:15 +0000 UTC View PostThis movie chosen by a "Fennelsher" patron.
I get frustrated by parodies that poke fun at aspects of an original work, only to commit the same sins. Movies that mock sexism and are still, for the most part, sexist. Games that make jokes about awful tutorials and still have an awful tutori...
2018-11-19 07:53:50 +0000 UTC View PostYes, Split can be seen as yet another movie using mental illness as a plot point--a villainous trait to be feared. However, I think there's something valuable to be taken from its version of a final confrontation.
In classic horror movie fashion, the Final Girl confronts our antagonist. There's ju...
2018-11-19 05:59:07 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a really weird movie to watch in 2018--not just because of increasing demand for stories that don't objectify women or minorities in pursuit of some dude's 'cool' fantasy, but because of what we know of John Hughes' career before and after its creation. Weird Science came out the same year a...
2018-11-17 02:27:56 +0000 UTC View PostI just finished Pitch Black. It's 2 AM, I have class in a few hours, and I really want to see it all over again.
Let's dig into that a bit.
I love the colors. The blatant overuse of distortion, saturation, and grading. Sometimes, for artistic effect. Sometimes, to communicate a character's p...
2018-11-15 09:25:42 +0000 UTC View PostYes, I could shout for hours about WHY THE HELL THEY LET NICOLAS CAGE HAVE A SOUTHERN ACCENT AND A DRAWL AND A MULLET OH GOODNESS GOSH--but I'll digress.
Con Air is refried action thriller sold alongside coffee hot enough to obscure the taste.
Con Air is the exact kind of absurdly obvi...
How do you make a movie after Die Hard, that's very much like Die Hard (complete with a similar antagonist, progression, characters, etc.), as the cinematographer of Die Hard, after people keep turning you away saying they don't want to copy Die Hard?
It turns out you just, uh...make it anyway. 2018-11-13 05:01:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The typical musical movie is an odd beast, come to think of it. If the stage is a step removed from film, than musicals are yet another, giant step away from that, requiring yet more specialized skills to transfer their strengths to another medium. The choreography needed, the mechanics of singing a...
2018-11-13 03:47:01 +0000 UTC View PostThere's a passage in the Bible - Isaiah 45:6-7 - that really threw me for a loop when I was younger:
"That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else.,
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, ...
THE FINAL SCENE OF THIS MOVIE IS NICOLAS CAGE RAISING HIS EYEBROW HIGHER, AND YET HIGHER, UNTIL HIS FACE TRANSFORMS INTO A FLAMING SKULL
Phew. Had to get that out of my system.
Do you know what was the superhero movie of the day just a year after this released? Iron Man. The...
2018-11-09 04:03:59 +0000 UTC View PostHere's the thing about seeing the two Bill & Ted movies back to back - it is an awful idea, and you should do it immediately.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure isn't *good*, per se. It's fine. It's fun. Time-travelling teens build a travelling band of historical figures to...
2018-11-09 01:09:41 +0000 UTC View PostCOSMIC
COSMIC
COSMIC
Drench me in color. Make every shadow I cast a kaleidoscope. Create legend out of the broken potsherds of sin's deadly reign. Give Nicolas Cage a fricking Oscar.
Mandy is two hours long. It does not feel like...
2018-11-06 05:40:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Dark Nights: Metal is a big ol' event about evil versions of Batman emerging from damned universes in the dark multiverse to (stay with me) drag the main DC Universe Earth in the light multiverse (STAY WITH ME YOU'RE ALMOST THROUGH THIS) into an eternal dark.
The Dark Knights Rising collection det...
2018-11-05 00:03:21 +0000 UTC View PostI have no idea how this got made.
What was the pitch meeting like? Who said, "That movie about the two totally bodacious teens going through history and kidnapping historical figures to do an utterly radical history report? Let's give that a ten million dollar budget." I'm glad it exists but I am ...
2018-11-04 05:09:45 +0000 UTC View PostYou Were Never Really Here is the first movie I've found to capture the reality of what suicidal ideation feels like on a chronic level.
Most of the time, movies treat suicidal thoughts and impulses as a dramatic element, or simply a deepening of depression. Neither of these uses quite capture the...
2018-11-01 03:05:42 +0000 UTC View PostThe Wiz terrified me as a child.
That makes sense, because it is an unequivocally black science-fantasy body horror nightmarescape filled with the most disturbing, evocative imagery this side of childhood trauma.
A few highlights:
Dorothy finds the Tin Man trapped beneath his fourth wife....
2018-10-30 05:29:46 +0000 UTC View PostAccording to the almighty memory of Twitter, I first watched Adaptation in June of 2016...Just before I announced the upcoming release of my first game, which would come out thirteen days later.
I remember admiring Charlie. The spurts of creative inspiration followed by deep malaise, relation...
Let's be clear:
Vampire's Kiss is a bad movie.
The script and story are a mess. The workplace gender dynamics on display are both regressive, and unfortunately, still all too real. It's a semi-erotic psychological thriller drama comedy about a man with a stick up his ass and raging mental il...
2018-10-28 03:18:20 +0000 UTC View Post- WHO GAVE NICOLAS CAGE A FREDDIE MERCURY MOUSTACHE
- WHO ALLOWED THIS TO HAPPEN
- imagine being the person who gave Nicolas Cage a Hack3r skull etch-a-sketch with little flame buttons that light up when he puts in his crime code. imagine being responsible for this
- oh wait it's just ...
2018-10-28 02:16:06 +0000 UTC View Post
If you ask someone why the original Blade films were notable, one of the most common responses you'll get is that they were "cool". Specifically, Blade himself is cool.
Imagine my surprise when I found that wasn't the case.
At least, not universally.
Look at Blade in the ab...
2018-10-27 04:41:58 +0000 UTC View PostHOLY CRAP VENOM
I walked in expecting very little. The trailer primed me to expect a so-so action thriller with a dull villain and some occasional fish out of water body horror comedy.
Venom smashed every one of those expectations.
Let's clear up a matter of genre firs...
2018-10-27 04:00:58 +0000 UTC View PostLet's talk about hating God for a second.
*SPOILERS*
I think there are very few people of faith who have not been in Daredevil's position. Who did not despise God, or believe he despised them, and vice versa. Who thought about ditching religion entirely to forge a given path...
2018-10-24 07:22:19 +0000 UTC View PostThis was...a really bad movie to watch right after A Knight's Tale.
Where the latter is a clever, entertaining historical romp with layers of unexpected depth, Gladiator is what pops out of an oven when you type in the words "Hollywood Epic." Po-faced, overstated drama with dubious historical accu...
2018-10-24 05:24:31 +0000 UTC View PostThe Music Man takes us into a bizarro, absurdist world full of rubes for our con man protagonist to take advantage of, and eventually transforms Harold Hill into one of them.
It's...sweet. Kinda?
Simple, but sweet.
Even though The Music Man was made in the 60s, this is what I'll have in my m...
2018-10-24 04:35:55 +0000 UTC View PostGod it feels good to watch a movie you saw as a kid, and find it's better than you remembered.
A Knight's Tale does this thing - a thing it got heavily dinged for upon release - where it plays contemporary music, has significant modern references (i.e. the "origin" of the Nike symbol), an...
2018-10-23 08:27:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Bodyguard is one of the best examples I've seen of a movie mirroring the perspective of its protagonist to artistic effect.
Kevin Costner's bodyguard places priority on his job to the detriment of his feelings and personal life. As a result, a movie that's ostensibly a romance is far mor...
2018-10-20 19:35:01 +0000 UTC View PostFour Weddings and a Funeral has one of the saddest happy endings I've ever seen. Charles and Carrie, standing in the rain, pledging their love amidst a dedication to never marry each other.
What's sad about this ending isn't that they didn't, well, marry - it's that we weren't given a reason to &n...
2018-10-20 18:26:46 +0000 UTC View PostSPOILER ALERT
If you haven't seen A Beautiful Mind yet, check it out. It's pretty decent.
CONTINUED ALERT OF SPOILERS
---
About 75% of the way into the movie, we learn that Nash has been suffering from delusions. His best friend ...
2018-10-17 07:04:39 +0000 UTC View PostI'm sorry I didn't see this sooner.
Not in the sense that I'm apologizing to you. More that it has been added to a pile of regrets that only continues to grow with the arbitrary number associated with the length of my existence on this Earth.
LET'S TALK ABOUT A MOVIE
Escape From New Yo...
2018-10-17 06:17:34 +0000 UTC View PostI like dark stuff--dark comedies, deep thrillers, you name it. I can mainline tragedy regardless of my emotional state (I'm not sure whether that says more about my taste or just me as a person).
Field of Dreams has a classic, dark setup. A man in a field, his family just a few dozen yards away, h...
2018-10-15 04:56:30 +0000 UTC View Post