Category: Destroy All Monsters
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Destroy All Monsters: HBO’s WESTWORLD and the “Entertainment” of Sexual Violence
Trigger warning, sexual violence (and spoilers too, I guess, if you don’t want the first fifteen minutes of the first episode of Westworld spoiled for you): at the end of the Westworld pilot’s extended opening fake-out, a human man drags a robot female into a barn, presumably to rape her. He tells her, as he is…
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Destroy All Monsters: MOONLIGHT and Having a Flow Experience in the Cinema
I have a spot. A favourite spot, in Cinema 1 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which is not my favourite movie theatre, but is in the top five. This spot is up in the balcony, way over on the left wing, right up at the front. It is a weird little high seat, all on…
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Destroy All Monsters: The Normalized Atrocities of Julia Ducournau’s RAW
Last Monday night’s screening in the Midnight Madness program at the Toronto International Film Festival gained a week’s worth of notoriety when The Hollywood Reporter announced that three people had fainted during the show and were taken away in an ambulance.
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Destroy All Monsters: In the Blind Land of Nostalgia, STRANGER THINGS Is King
As I’ve mentioned before, the best movie of the summer wasn’t a movie; it was an 8-part Netflix serial about kids hanging out in the ’80s, caught (unbeknownst to them) in the plot of a Steven Spielberg movie. In a summer where an actual Steven Spielberg movie couldn’t compete with Stranger Things, we’ve officially entered…
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Destroy All Monsters: TIFF, Cinephiles, And The Entitled Fury Of Learning You’re Not The Audience Any More
I live in Toronto, and for most of my 20s and half of my 30s, the Toronto International Film Festival was one of the major milestones of my year – so much so that even today, the vast majority of people in my life presume without being told that I am simply unavailable to them…
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Destroy All Monsters: We Need to Have a Long Look At Our WEINER
Elyse Sternberg and Josh Kriegman’s Weiner opens with a quote from Marshall McLuhan – “the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers” – which we might just as well paraphrase to: may the gods help those whose names write the jokes themselves. Weiner is one of the year’s great films,…
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Destroy All Monsters: Was This The Worst Summer We’ve Ever Had At The Movies?
The summer is dwindling to a close and film folks are taking stock of the season, both financially and creatively. It’s looking tepid on both fronts. We’ll lose some franchises that shouldn’t have come as far as they have; and the writing is on the wall for the dominant genre of the moment: evolve or…
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Destroy All Monsters: As The DCEU Burns, The Studio’s Model Needs To Change
There are a few factors at play here. The first, obviously, is that regardless of what director is in charge, the team at Warner Brothers / DC clearly has no idea whatsoever what a good movie of one of their properties would actually look like. That they would release a film as technically terrible asSuicide…
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Destroy All Monsters: FIRST CONTACT Is When STAR TREK Sold Out
Look at them guns! That’s Patrick Stewart in 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, a movie which had a lot of actual guns in it, too, arming the crew of the Starship Enterprise with their own skinny version of the pulse rifle from Aliens (with a little headlight!) and sending them on a bug hunt in…
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Destroy All Monsters: GHOSTBUSTERS Got Rid of Capitalism; Can We, Too?
I can’t resist saying that I loved Ghostbusters ’16 – yeah, actually loved it, much more so than I expected to – and by sheer dint of my having said that, several users (the majority, I will hazard a guess, will be male) will take this opportunity to insert themselves into the conversation* and tell…