Tag: Destroy All Monsters
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Destroy All Monsters: All Monsters Destroyed
“All Monsters Destroyed?” Well no, of course not. I wish the things that became the common themes in my weekly column at Screen Anarchy over the course of the past 4+ years could be called “resolved” — but really, they’ve just become part and parcel of the fabric of our conversations around pop culture in ever-increasing…
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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: 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: 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…