Movie genres come with expectations. We expect to see magic and mythical beasts in fantasy movies. Monsters in horror films. Car chases in action flicks. The western that doesn’t end in a gunfight is something other than a western. It’s a period piece. With suspense thrillers, we expect rising tensions, twists and turns, and...
IMDB labels Lucy as science-fiction, but I prefer to think of it as fantasy. It’s foundation is the popular but debunked misconception that human beings use only ten percent of their brain, and it posits a scenario where tapping into the other ninety percent gives us extra-human abilities like telekinesis, telepathy, and omniscience. In...
Hell no, Mr. Refn, The Neon Demon doesn’t have to make sense; it can wallow in obscurity. Just look at the films of David Lynch—obscure as all get out. True, he grounded these obscure plots in well-rounded, if quirky, characters, but you don’t need to worry about that. And it’s okay if the plot...
I have a saying: Good novels make bad movies; bad novels make good movies. There are exceptions in both cases, but the maxim holds true in too many cases to ignore. The Circle by Dave Eggers, which I review last October, is a bad novel. So following my maxim, it should make a good movie....
For me the common denominator is story, mainly fictional story, but often true life or inspired by real events story. Story is a catch-all phase that includes plot, characterization, setting, theme, and other elements of storytelling. Story comes to us in many forms, from epic poetry to campfire ghost tales, from novels to music...
I never reviewed Cloverfield (2008) in the blog. When I watched it a few years ago, I found it an okay movie, worth seeing since it was available on one of my streaming services, but nothing I felt the desire to see again. I do not like the found-footage style. Though there had been...
A talking raccoon! A walking tree! Zoe Saldana with green complexion rather than blue! What in the world is happening here? And what does Marvel have to do with it? Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 is due out this coming Friday, and I realized I have never review the original movie, released in...
Back in October, when I started writing episode reviews of HBO’s Westworld, I warned readers that it was an experiment. Even then it was an experiment I intended to succeed rather than failed. Perhaps calling it a failure is saying too much, because I had fun writing the reviews and I learned a lot....
“This is the best time of your life,” an adult told me, when I was in high school. Perhaps high school was the best time of his life, but it was far from the best time of mine. Add teenage angst plus a speech impediment plus a bookish disposition plus a withdrawn personality plus...
Six astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) recover a probe returning from Mars, where it drilled into the soil looking for life. Following careful protocols, called firewalls—since any extraterrestrial life form, even a germ or a bacteria, could be harmful for life on Earth—they processed the samples and discovered a single-cell organism. Ecstatic,...
