Review: The Hobbit

December 14, 2012

The first entry of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is a well paced, exciting piece of work, a welcome return to the world of Middle Earth Jackson so vividly brought to life between 2001 and 2003 in his massive, and massively profitable, Lord of the Rings films. But then, I could be wrong. The film, as viewed in […]

Read the full article →

Cult in the Connected Age, ctd.

December 7, 2012

When the rise of television destroyed moviegoing as a mass habit, it simultaneously enhanced the opportunities for film fetishism and ritual screenings. Movies became integral to the celebration of religious events. King of Kings, Easter Parade, White Christmas, and Micracle on 34th Street were invariably telecast on their appropriate holidays. Starting in the mid-1950s, The Wizard of […]

Read the full article →

Cult in the Connected Age (Updated x2)

December 1, 2012

Last night on Twitter, Dan McLaughlin asked: Q for my under-30 followers: what would you regard as cult classic films made after 2000? — Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) December 1, 2012 It’s an interesting question, one that I’m not sure how to answer because it all kinda depends on how you define “cult.” Once upon a […]

Read the full article →

Super-belated pseudo-review: Cloud Atlas

November 27, 2012

I saw Cloud Atlas a few weeks ago but haven’t had time to write up my thoughts what with the election and freelance work and Thanksgiving and what not. Now that it’s out of theaters, I finally have a minute. A few mild spoilers after the jump.

Read the full article →

I did not like the new Red Dawn…

November 20, 2012

…and I said as much at the Washington Times in my review of the film: Announced in 2008, the new version was shot in 2009 from a script premised on an invasion of America’s West Coast by Chinese forces come to collect on America’s defaulted bilateral debt. But when MGM, the studio that produced the […]

Read the full article →

Silly platitudes, 140 characters at a time

November 12, 2012

I was so struck by this Conor Friedersdorf tweet over the weekend that I tucked it away for future reference as a prime example of “tweets that sound profound but are actually relatively silly”: If a CIA director’s affair imperils national security maybe we should rethink the extent to which we rely on and empower […]

Read the full article →

Four More Years (of Fail)

November 7, 2012

So, the election. That was a fun 15 months or so. I wrote a kind of long, extremely overwrought* post last night that will likely never see the light of day. I canned it for a variety of reasons. I would like to relay just one small anecdote, though. (Update below.) After 2008 was in […]

Read the full article →

Cabin in the Woods mini-review

October 13, 2012

Some spoilers below. Please don’t read if you haven’t seen the film and plan on watching it.

Read the full article →

‘The Master’ and the cult of PTA

October 4, 2012

Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman does a beautiful job explaining what I touched on in my review of The Master a couple weeks back. Here’s OG: I can’t escape the feeling that something has gone wrong in his work, and while there is now a cult for Paul Thomas Anderson, and a great many fans who just […]

Read the full article →

Hillbilly Heat: ‘Lawless’ review

August 28, 2012

The most surprising aspect of Lawless, John Hillcoat’s look at Prohibition-era moonshiners in the foothills of Virginia, is how funny it is. For a movie that prominently features a castration, a gutting, a number of bullet perforations, a neck-snapping, several extremely graphic and realistic-looking beatings, and a rather brutal and unsettling throat-slitting, it sure provoked a […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →