Category: Destroy All Monsters
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Destroy All Monsters: IRON FIST Doesn’t Just Suck, It Sucks the Rest of the Marvel Television Universe Down With It
Iron Fist isn’t just the worst thing in Marvel’s nearly-ten-year MCU arsenal; it’s indeed one of those rarest of pop cultural entities, an outright creative disaster. It can be used as a teaching case in universities for everything from film classes to project management: just because A was successful (and B, and C, and D…
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Destroy All Monsters: Peter Jackson’s KING KONG Was Kong, Perfected
It’s always a pleasure to write a sentence about a film that the filmmaker himself would recoil from in disgust, but here it is anyway: Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong remake is the best King Kong movie, surpassing the original.
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Destroy All Monsters: Myths Evolve Because We Need Them To, And Other Things I Learned From LOGAN
If the MCU and DCEU are the Dollars trilogy – a sensationalist genre at the height of its formal slickness –Logan is McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The myth of the American West is still there, but the people who populate its landscape can no longer live up to it. This is a film about itself,…
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Destroy All Monsters: Look to the Movie Stars
It wasn’t a particularly political Oscars after all. Hollywood mostly went about the business of giving and receiving Oscars, and the most political moments in the show – the first Muslim-American actor winning; the proxy Best Foreign Language speech thanks to President Trump’s travel ban – were the ones we expected.
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Destroy All Monsters: Is JOHN WICK Neo’s Video Game Afterlife?
John Wick certainly feels like a video game. Its “gun-fu” action sequences owe a lot to The Matrix‘s blend of Hong Kong cinema styles (gangsters in suits with guns + Yuen Wo-Ping wire work = The Matrix), but the sheer breadth and repetitiveness of both films’ gun scenes recall video games more than anything else:…
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Destroy All Monsters: General Leia Is STAR WARS’ No-Win Scenario
Two weeks ago, Disney took the unprecedented step of announcing that, in spite of their recent resurrection of Peter Cushing for CGI Frankentarkin in Rogue One and in the wake of the tragic passing of Carrie Fisher, that they would not be digitally animating a General Leia for the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode IX. (Fisher…
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Destroy All Monsters: Oscars Stay White As Long As Movies Like LA LA LAND Exist
Watching La La Land, for me, was accompanied by a sinking feeling, a pronounced “of course”-ness, a sensation halfway between grudging admiration and simple exhaustion at the obviousness of it all.
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Destroy All Monsters: The Meme-ification of ROGUE ONE
I’m consistently fascinated by how pop cultural mega-properties take hold in the discourse of the group they are ostensibly created for, the fans. There’s an interesting cycle created here.
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Destroy All Monsters: JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS, A Weird Experiment With Fan Engagement
It’s 2017 and the world’s going to shit so naturally here I am prattling about JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS.
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Destroy All Monsters: Michael Giacchino’s ROGUE ONE Rebellion
Since the announcement four years ago that Disney would buy Lucasfilm and begin making new Star Wars movies, this moment has been inevitable: excepting Kevin Kiner’s fine, fun work on the briefly-theatrically-released Clone Wars pilot, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the first Star Wars feature film with music composed by someone other than…