Category: Columns
Want more posts like these, straight to your inbox?
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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…
-
Destroy All Monsters: NOCTURNAL ANIMALS Is Sadly On-Point For Women In Hollywood
…This places the film in an unofficial sub-genre: the “intentionally or not” films. I like these. (Die Hard 4 is, “unintentionally or not,” a hell of a movie about how emasculated America felt in the years following 9/11.) In the case of Nocturnal Animals, it’s “intentionally or not, this movie is a working model for…
-
Destroy All Monsters: We’re Bad At Confronting News Like The Bertolucci News
On the weekend one of my listeners jumped on the comment thread for my latest podcast episode to voice his disgust at the news that Bernardo Bertolucci had conspired with Marlon Brando to rape Maria Schneider for a scene in Last Tango in Paris. He went on to say that at least Hollywood and the…
-
Destroy All Monsters: Why The World (Of SUPERGIRL) Doesn’t Need Superman
Can’t resist any SUPERMAN RETURNS reference, can I
-
Destroy All Monsters: Filmmakers Need To Get Over The Idea That We Want To Be “Immersed”
I’m as big a fan of high-frame-rate cinema as probably exists in the general audience (i.e. I’m not Doug Trumbull, but I’ve seen Ufotog). Hey, I liked Avatar a hell of a lot, too – 3-D included. Saw it six times in IMAX, for the explicit reason that it was such an inherently transportive big-screen…