Category: Columns
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Destroy All Monsters: The Long Sad Tale of My Love for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN
To you, it’s a movie, and (perhaps) a bad one. To me, it’s just one thing: blinding, blistering love.
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Destroy All Monsters: The Abysmal Fathers Of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2
Arguably, GOTG2 isn’t paying anything off that Vol. 1 didn’t require of its own sequel. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) has dealt with the death of his mother, several decades after the fact. The ersatz family (Gamora, Groot, Rocket and Drax) has come together on the Milano II. The lingering question of why the gang survived their…
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Destroy All Monsters: Did Marvel Seriously Just Pivot To The Right?
The fiasco, last fall, of making Captain America a literal nazi (reinforced last week via the “Secret Empire” storyline, where it does indeed turn out that Cap was a nazi all along) seems now like a canary in a particularly inhospitable coal mine.
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Destroy All Monsters: Thanks, GIRLS!
I’m not going to add much to the discussion of Girls, where other writers have ably carried the conversation, besides returning to a point I made a few years ago: I’m glad this show exists, has existed, did exist; and as it wraps itself up in a non-bow that Hannah might have tried to tie…
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Destroy All Monsters: Maybe The Trailers ARE Better
The nicest thing about a trailer is that it can’t hurt you. If you’re not loving the vibe, any anxieties can be immediately dismissed with a simple “meh, it’s just the trailer.” If everything about the trailer, though, seems doooooope (see Star Wars: The Last Jedi), you’re going to fall in love all over again…
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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.