Still, the only way to actually praise the film is to agree to the terms it lays out, and the conceit it wants to plumb. Unfortunately it fails as both a critique of capitalism and as a dark and entertaining comedy. We live in an age where most filmmakers spoon feed us our morality and say the quiet parts loud and the loud parts loud. if you’re not going to commit your voice will get drowned out in the squall.
I think some important aspects of the film were probably lost on the cutting room floor, and I think if this had been reworked properly it would be that much better of a film. If they had maybe cut out the whole Lucy/Claudia/Vivian friendship triangle it would have glided along better. Ultimately, the side characters, who aren’t disengaged white girls with pretty privilege, are probably the ones who should be telling this story and the ones who are the most interesting.
The largest complaint I have seen about this film is that it includes vital but already understood basic information about the world as it exists. I have to heartily disagree. For every millennial who has been dutifully educating themselves on the internet since the Myspace age, there is a tech unsavvy adult who doesn’t know the difference between HDMI and VPN.
I’m not even going to get into the mechanics of the animation which are varied in execution. For every positive thing I can say about the fur on Pikachu, I can say fifty horrible things about the eyes on that Psyduck and the lips on those Greninjas, who all looked ridiculously hacky.
The film centers on the suburbs of Kissimee, Florida, a short six miles from Walt Disney World, wherein a population of nearly homeless people thrive in downtrodden motels. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) and her very young mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) live in a mawkish and dilapidated fairy tale themed motel called the Magic Castle.
Collectively, I think we all needed this movie a lot more than this movie needed us. At this time I don’t think I have to point out that the world is a dumpster fire of epic proportions, out of control and about to send a spark into a dynamite factory. The women of SNL past came together to write, direct, and star in this ensemble comedy about long time female friendship at an older age.
Bo Burnham, a highly intelligent comedian and YouTube phenom, has encapsulated not only the horrible feeling of being fourteen, but the equally horrible one of displaying that time in your life for the whole world to see. This is one of the most painful films I have ever seen and that is its highest praise.
Still, the film lightly prods at universal truths: women have to be perfect if they want to be seen as electable, special interests have a decided vote in our elections, and concessions are often a part of negotiating international treaties. For a film trying to play coy about our current predicament, that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.
This Netflix show focuses on a caricature of Gad: French, rich, entitled, arrogant, and fostering some serious doubts about what he has done with his life. Though this is not the show his stand-up has informed, it has done well using him as a straight man to his supporting cast’s antics.
William Castle (1914-1977) was a pioneering filmmaker who was often called the, “king of gimmicks.” Before screenings of his directorial debut, Macabre (1958), Castle handed out $1,000 life insurance policies. The film became a hit and he continued creating gimmicks for his films’ releases over the next twenty years.
Female friendship is a hard concept to quantify in any passable script. Too many films of the late nineties and early aughts focused on a message of watered down white feminism and gurl power euphemisms instead of creating fleshed out characters.
O’Connell is also gay, and that duality in identity lends to a truly innovative and pioneering show that showcases rarely told stories. The show follows Ryan as he realizes how closeted his behavior has become, and he strives to finally become independent and authentic.
In The Conjuring 2 Valak served as a side antagonist who Lorraine battled while helping a family with a cursed home. In that film Valak added another creepy element to an already strange narrative, but here she is sapped of much of her power.
The mystery is only entertaining because it’s enjoyable to see formerly meek Stephanie hunt through clues to find the truth behind the disappearance of her newfound best friend Emily. Though Stephanie has her own secrets and embarrassing past, she pushes through it to question suspects, and what she finds is beyond the pale.
The villain’s motivations and lore are never truly covered by the film. The only thing we know is how he can get in your head and how his evil spreads. I don’t need to know every single thing about a horror movie antagonist, but there’s no mention of what he is, who he is, or why he does what he does.
No disrespect to Jeté Laurence who plays Ellie, as she is a child who is early in her career, but her undead performance was laughable. By that I mean I, and everyone in the theater, started laughing as soon as she started talking.
The norm for women is to passively deal with real and imagined slights to accommodate thinner people which is where we start with Annie. It’s one thing to tell women to show more confidence, but to really know the price of presenting your true self it’s unclear what that looks like for full figured people.
While television critics have lauded the bad behavior of people literally killing people in the most profane and evil ways, millennials with daddy issues or middle-aged upper-class sophisticates engaging in bad behavior has never been tolerated by audiences.
Before I get into my criticism I would like to highlight the fact that this film was written and directed by a woman. The director in question is Lauren Miller Rogen, and don’t be fooled by that last name, this woman has earned her way through Hollywood all on her own.
While we have a better range of choices for our gay love stories, and there are ground-breaking movies and television shows coming out every day, God’s Own Country feels more significant than anything I have seen in a long time.
While I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the film, I would not say that it is at all scary, gory, or weird. It’s barely horror. It’s a PG-13 film that works more as a mystery thriller, that pays homage to Groundhog Day and Sixteen Candles, than it is a slasher film.
Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we: Yes, Nick Cage does have many amazing Nick Cage high level freakouts, and they had me belly laughing in the theater. I’m talking blood, drugs, fire, decapitation, gore, the works!
When I first saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing I was greatly affected, not just because it is a cinematic masterpiece of epic proportions, but because it said something broader about the world at large.. Lee handles the subject matter of racial tension in a thoughtful and powerful way in all of his films, but I bring up the 1989 classic because it changed my life for the better.
There are almost too many similarities between these two films to list, but here goes: Both were produced and released by MGM, both were made in the fifties, both were musicals, and both feature women who performed with the Ziegfield Follies…
This review is for all the people who were burned by Jennifer’s Body: I know you’re scared to trust again. Maybe you thought it would be more like Juno, but full of lesbian scenes, and instead it was weird and exploitative. I know you aren’t ready to come back into the fold.
What I most want to get across in this review is that I felt that the story contained real truths about lives that are often diminished by society at large. Between the life or death madcap adventures and evasion of the police, there are real moments of mom angst and frustration that come across as nakedly real.
I’m not going to mince words on this one: this was a grueling film watching experience and it has left me dazed. How, in this day and age, are we still allowing such obviously bad and irrelevant films to be made?
The current trend of coming-of-age LGBT teen comedies is creating real and relevant change for millennial teens, and it does my heart good. In the same vein as the recent release Love, Simon, the story focuses on the point-of-view of a closeted teenager.
Set in both Los Angeles and the main character’s hometown of Austin, Mr. Roosevelt proves to be endearing, honest, and fixedly personal in a really invigorating way.
Kirby Dick is probably one of my favorite documentarians thanks to his work on films such as This Film is Not Yet Rated, The Invisible War, and The Hunting Ground.
Out of this long and tangled relationship has stemmed the greatest collab in Youtube history, “Frenemies”. Sitting apart on their split black and pink set, every week Trisha and Ethan delve into their pasts, engage in trivia, athletic competitions, mukbangs, and drama dumps. There isn’t a lot of game changing content on the show, but the interplay between the two, and their uncontested chemistry, make it a much watch every week.
For context, this was one of the greatest directors' most acclaimed and pivotal work, his second most beloved after “Annie Hall.” I had no broader context, no necessary dialogue explaining that this was a work of its time, or that it was not okay. It was presented as a heady, lovelorn version of a city beloved by its narrator. From a very early stage I was conditioned to believe this was normal.
Even the film lovers that invest time into watching Marvel movies have to wake up to the fact that their films of choice are stifling the competition. You should not have to be an obsessive compulsive nerd completionist to find films you actually want to see. That’s what Scorsese is trying to say, it’s what we all agree should be the reality, and hopefully there will be a shift in the future to denote that wish.
In 2019 I am at a strange point in my life, where I no longer hold Oscar bait in high regard, where most of the new releases I see are on Netflix, and most of the movie tickets I buy are for films that were released forty to fifty years prior.
Create a checklist of items that you need before getting lunch to ensure that you’re well prepared. My lunch runs always precipitate the need for my keys on a lanyard around my neck, my car keys, wallet, phone, the lunch order, a sharpie marker, sunglasses, and gum.
As a consequence of their honesty they often delve into topics not often covered in the true crime genre, including mental health, interpersonal relationships, addiction, and feminism. Though there are many laughs to be had, they are not at the expense of the victims, who are often referred to as “sweet baby angels.”
I recently realized that I didn’t have a companion list to my article 5 Weird Women of Old Hollywood, and I honestly felt a little ashamed. If any gender was capable of weirdness back then, it was the men. Their weird behavior ranged from obsessive cleanliness (Clark Gable) to a need for manipulative control (Alec Guinness) and everything in between.
Horror lovers can’t get enough of Jason Voorhees: He’s big, he’s mysterious, and his hulking frame moves soundlessly through all ten of the original films, the crossover, and the 2009 remake.
One of the more grisly, imaginative, and consistent franchises was the Nightmare on Elm Street films, which were released between 1984 and 1994. Originally helmed by Wes Craven the series saw child molester and murderer Freddy Krueger entering the dreams of teenagers and killing them to perpetuate vengeance against their parents for burning him alive.
The best television comedies of all time have basically been decided by the gods of Variety, Slate, The AV Club, and Ranker, so I won’t try to undermine their wisdom on the subject. What I do want to turn your attention to, is the fact that sometimes the weird little quirky comedies of yore have not, and do not, get the respect they deserve.
Mental illness has become a hot topic of recent conversation in part because of ongoing debates over universal health care and gun control. A major call to action from the left has been to treat mental illness, and to point out that many people with mental illnesses are not violent. Someone should really tell that to Hollywood
Murder, She Wrote was an hour long weekly crime show that ran for 12 seasons on CBS; from 1984-1996. Angela Lansbury starred as Jessica Fletcher, a former English teacher who is widowed, and then becomes a bestselling mystery writer.
Whodunits are stories about a murder in which the identity of the murderer is not revealed until the end. Modern day mystery fiction is marred by intense character development for the main sleuth at the expense of the mystery, but Christie only cared about the who, what, where, and how.
Short film is completely ignored as an art form in today’s mediascape. The closet thing we have to a short film industry is YouTube, whose videos either come from vloggers, film critics, or popular clips from talk shows.
Among the legions of golden haired beauties with scarlet lips lay weird women in hiding, beautiful and seductive yet secretly very interesting and intelligent.
Disclaimer: I have not watched all of Daredevil or Iron Fist, mostly because they look really boring. I know that they are the members of The Defenders with the most interesting powers, but they look like two flavorless white boys, and I’m just not interested.
New properties are also very expensive, and are more likely to fail than something with a built-in fan base. This also means that without that fan base, a show that was once cancelled will not be revived. (No one is clamoring for a Diagnosis Murder or Grace Under Fire reunion.)
After the election results came in optimists pointed to one fact that they thought would soothe liberal psyches: “At least comedy shows are going to be so hilarious. They must be glad for all this new material.” No they’re not. Shut up. You are the worst.
Everybody wants to be better read, have seen the right films, and binged the right kind of television shows. We as humans have to consume art, as a function of being human beings. In that spirit, we want to consume the best art possible
In the past five years the network has become unequivocally vicious. Conspiracy theories about the Clintons, endless reports about the birther movement, and Islamophobic rhetoric have been the network’s bread and butter.
It’s probably not right to group these two esteemed actors together just because they have been married for twenty years, but in all sincerity I think all of America can agree we are blessedly obsessed with them both.
Since the premiere of The Mary Tyler Moore Show women in the workplace sitcoms have become a renowned genre. Before Mary moved to Minneapolis and began working in the newsroom under Lou Grant, she was a domesticated mother and straight man to Dick Van Dyke on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Conte explained to Time in 2014, “There’s great ways for people to build an audience online right now,” he says. “There’s really no great way for people to make a living.”
Movie Guilt arises when you watch or read content that you have dubbed intellectually inferior or has no cultural worth. It is an attitude that many of my friends carry around
Female directors make money at the box office and have been tasked with supposedly male-centric content. Here is a list of female directors who are currently working in Hollywood and are prime examples of true artists in their own right.
Even just ten years ago it would have been unheard of to adapt critically lauded, adult minded literature for television because of its ultraviolence and sexual content.
It’s not just her purity and grace that audiences love, but her versatility. Kerr was typecast because of her proper English accent, but she fought against this with roles in “King Solomon’s Mines,” “The Prisoner of Zendaya,” and “Quo Vadis?”
Why do networks make these mistakes? Well, it’s a mix of different aims, the first being to tap into the vortex of pop culture at the moment. “Selfie” is a ubiquitous term that has its ruminations in internet culture, which is a market that begs to be tapped.
When I am talking about the worst, I don’t mean the movies that are so bad they’re good. I am not talking about “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” or “The Room,” or “Troll 2,” which is actually one of my favorite films. No, I am talking about the films that were so ridiculously bad that they actually angered me.
Categories that you can add include: The screenwriter(s), genre, when or where you saw it and who with, whether you used an online streaming service, or if it won any major awards.
