Category: Columns
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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…
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Destroy All Monsters: The Toxic Masculinity of Shaming the GHOSTBUSTERS Haters
The cadre of solipsistic, misogynist Ghostbusters fanboys executed what one hopes would be their final coup de grace against Paul Feig’s imminent Ghostbusters reboot this week, by spamming the IMDB (and Letterboxd) with disastrously low user ratings for a movie which, to the last man, none of them have seen yet.
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Destroy All Monsters: Gazing At THE NEON DEMON
Looking is everything in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon. Besides being the kind of cinematic scopophilia masterpiece that we only seem to get every couple of decades (Blow Up; Peeping Tom), its narrative turns on two different definitions of the word “look.” How good do you look? And who is looking at you?
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Destroy All Monsters: Movie Brands Are Ads, Not Outcomes
Independence Day Resurgence had all the makings of a mega-hit (in North America, at least): apocalyptic action, big(ish) returning stars, and most importantly in terms of what properties have netted huge returns in this decade, a nostalgia-friendly recognizable brand. So why did it crash and burn?
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Destroy All Monsters: WARCRAFT Sucks, But Fantasy Doesn’t
New site! TwitchFilm has become ScreenAnarchy, and Destroy All Monsters continues. This week I come not to bury fantasy, but to praise it (but bury WARCRAFT tho).