Category: Columns
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Destroy All Monsters: The Tyranny of Straight Lines in ARRIVAL
Here on Earth (both within the film, and out in the real world), time is always a story, and all stories are arranged around it. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Our entire understanding of psychology is based in how events in the past must have manifested in our troubles of the present;…
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Destroy All Monsters: It’s Not About You, DOCTOR STRANGE
One of the running jokes in Doctor Strange has Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) constantly having to reassert his title to anyone and everyone, because after the accident that shatters his hands sends him scouring the world for a cure, no one will call him “Doctor.” This is a useful line of insight the character, and…
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Destroy All Monsters: I Know How Badly You Want To Screw Up WONDER WOMAN, Warner Brothers, But Please Don’t
The thing is, I suspect that what a filmmaker turns in to Warner Brothers and what we actually end up seeing on the screen are pretty far apart. If 2016’s DCEU offerings are anything to go by, the studio wouldn’t know a good movie if it showed up and kissed them – and they’d work…
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Destroy All Monsters: Don’t Ruin Christmas The Way You Killed Summer, Hollywood
I’m as against the early proliferation of holiday decorations as the next man, and when I saw the tinsel going up in my local drug store last week – on October 25, and hanging, grotesquely, above the jack-o’-lanterns – I grumbled Scroogily to myself. And then I read the (also bizarrely early) holiday special of…
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Destroy All Monsters: As THE WALKING DEAD Reminds Us, The Apocalypse Is Going To Be Disappointing Too
“The fantasy of the end of the world only succeeds as a fantasy (or even as a horror story, if that’s what The Walking Dead is) if it offers an outcome more elevated than the one we have right now. Right now, though, The Walking Dead might be set in the zombie apocalypse but it’s…
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Destroy All Monsters: LUKE CAGE, Democracy, and the Voices Outside the Majority
I’m not a political writer, though like many professionals and non-professionals on the pop culture beat this year, it’s been difficult to hold back some political views.
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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: 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…