Blog Archives
sTom Cruise is back. Mission: Impossible Fallout—the sixth movie in the 22-year-old franchise—opened Friday, and if the news can be believed, it scored the highest opening weekend gross of the whole series (a cool $61.5 million domestic plus another $91.5 million worldwide). Given the somewhat cool reception to M:I 5 (aka Rogue Nation), the uptick […]
Since they first got big, Penn and Teller have been known as the bad boys of magic. Their acts did away with, and in many cases explicitly rejected, the familiar patter and psuedo-mystical trappings so common with magicians up until that point. Originally loathed by fellow magicians (irritated by the duo’s habit of revealing some […]
Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four: a Cinema Legend for the Ages!
Monday , 16, July 2018 Movies 7 CommentsHere’s the story of a little movie that could, a really-real urban legend made by a legitimate cinematic legend, a movie never released in movie theaters, a movie whose reels were supposedly burned to ash by the Hollywood producer who bought the rights to it, a movie that somehow leaked to the public and (like […]
This is roleplaying: A bunch of guys sit around a table. One of them—the Game Master—says: “The room is dark, lit only by your flickering torches. In the middle of the room is a squat statue of the Bloated God, carved from an unknown mottled green stone. In his hands is a metal bowl, inside […]
DC Comics is about to learn an expensive lesson: never f*** over the fans. Yesterday the New York Times posted a thorough preview of the upcoming Batman #50, the issue wherein Batman and Catwoman are supposed to get married. The article spoils pretty much everything about the comic, up to and including the “let’s spit […]
We Used To Tell Great Stories of Greatness; No More
Monday , 25, June 2018 Comics, Movies, Pulp Revolution 11 CommentsPeople have forgotten how to tell good stories. Or maybe just forgotten what makes up a good story. Comics have forgotten what makes good stories. They’ve decided that actual adventure stories with actual superheroes are boring and passe (or maybe they just don’t understand heroism). In the place of awe-inspiring more-than-merely-mortal bad guys and good […]
So, The Incredibles II: I didn’t hate it. And maybe that’s not surprising. Despite being bought by Disney—who’s run the Star Wars movies so far into the ground, they’ve plummeted underground and are now nearing the Earth’s core (and also The Core is a much better movie than the last two Star Wars flicks combined)—they’ve […]
So E3 is hoving into view, and once again I must spend some of my dwindling store of precious time watching company men try to get people pumped up for the latest round of sequels, remakes, and rip-offs. Surprisingly, there were some original games scattered here and there, and some of the sequels (etc.) actually […]
Solo, Sanders, Scandanavian Revenants, Comics Scandals, and SocJus Cataclysm: It’s a Potpourri Episode!
Monday , 4, June 2018 Comics, Movies 4 CommentsWith nothing big enough to be worth spending an entire column talking about, it’s time for a potpourri episode! # Solo, a Star Wars Story, failed in large extent because the writer was trying to force together four different genres—genres with different character archetypes, incompatible visual styles, and above all, wildly differing pacing—into one movie. […]
On this Memorial Day, when we stop to pay our respects to the fallen, I think it’s apt to remember the veterans of a wholly different war, a war in which the fallen got back up and began wandering around, looking for people to eat. I present to you: THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! Z Nation is […]
This week I discovered something so absolutely amazing, so utterly startling, that I was compelled by my sheer amazement to share it here, with you my loyal readers: The much ballyhooed 2015 Mad Max video game, a sorta-but-not-really movie tie in for Mad Max: Fury Road, by (not so) famed developer Avalanche Studios, makers of Just […]
YouTube Red is not great. It’s pretty pricey—$10.00 a month—and has a very thin roster of content. And the content it has? Not very good. Last week I reviewed Cobra Kai, the single best show on YouTube Red. So, just for the heck of it, I decided to watch some other shows and see how […]