I reviewed the first half of The Muppets, ABC’s misguided attempt at bringing the Muppet crew to modern audiences, last year. If you kept up with my recapping, you may remember that my thoughts on the show went all over the place; sometime I liked it, sometimes I didn’t, sometimes I nothing’d it, depending on the … Continue reading
Doesn’t get much more cut and dry than this, especially as regards the movies here where monsters and villains exist who wish for nothing more than to cut you and leave you dry. Continue reading
If Criterion’s October slate was comprised primarily of shit alongside either The Lure or Barry Lyndon, it’d still be a pretty good slate. Incredibly, both of these films appeared on the slate with a handful of other great films, so basically if you missed out on October’s releases, you really missed out (and might I recommend you take … Continue reading
Gang: It’s been a gross, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. It’s been a gross, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for a slew of reasons, but I’m here today to talk about the Harvey Weinstein scandal (which isn’t quite a “scandal,” because sexual abuse isn’t scandalous; it’s criminal). Because I am me, … Continue reading
I know what you thought when you read the title on this piece: “It’s April.” Yes, it is, but shut up. Shhhh. Stop. It’s okay. I know it’s April. We all know it’s April. I have gadgets all around me screaming the date at me at any given time during the day. Relax. It’s going to … Continue reading
“A 7 months pregnant woman starts murdering the people involved in her partner’s death because her unborn baby tells her to.” That’s Prevenge in summation. In my mind, there’s an alternate dimension where the film attached to that summation is just a winking, nudging, overly self-aware video nasty, and it’s probably fun but too insistent on … Continue reading
Vroom vroom zoom zoom beep beep screech crash bang boom man emotions vroooooom manly slap fight zip zip zap Continue reading
And you thought my obsession with “Lemon” was a sign of twisted character! Continue reading
If there’s a fundamental theme in The Venture Bros., it’s failure. If there’s a fundamental dynamic that dramatizes the element of failure, it’s self-involvement: All of the major characters in the series tend to cause their own problems, and this is as true of the first two episodes of Season 7 as any other episode in … Continue reading
I started reviewing Brooklyn Nine-Nine for Paste Magazine way back in the day, about four years ago in fact, so if anyone is going to write an editorial about Fox’s jaw-dropping failure to renew the series for a sixth season it’s going to be me. Which is basically a convoluted way of saying that I wrote an … Continue reading
Guys! I’m back! I made it home! I survived vacation! (TL;DR version of my vacation: We went to Vienna, Prague, Aberystwyth, and London, and now we’re all horribly jet lagged.) That means I have a whole lot of stuff to plop in your laps for your reading pleasure, and of course it would be pleasurable, wouldn’t it? We’ll … Continue reading
There’s very little about IFFBoston’s 2017 that I am not excited about. I’m always excited for IFFBoston, of course, for reasons I’ve elaborated on very recently on the pages of this very blog (and which I’ve probably talked about extensively in the deep past), so I’ll spare you my usual spiel on the subject. In 2017, I’m … Continue reading
Every year for the last five years, springtime has provoked a transformation of sorts in me, or maybe more accurately provoked my unabashed and kinda obnoxious excitement. If you’ve been keeping up, you can probably guess why: Spring in Boston means Independent Film Festival Boston, which means that for a week or so, Andy gets … Continue reading
There are two primary reasons to see Josef von Sternberg’s <i>Anatahan</i>. The first is that it’s a rarity, the final film in Sternberg’s solo directing career before co-directing <i>Jet Pilot</i> in 1957 with Fred Fleck. <i>Anatahan</i> is a picture obscured by the passage of time and by its own financial failure, a box office stumble … Continue reading
I didn’t like The Legend of Tarzan, the first of two movies on David Yates’ slate in 2016. I also didn’t like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, his second movie, but I liked it much more even if its failures left me feeling aggrieved more than Tarzan‘s did; it’s perhaps the 2016 franchise film that is … Continue reading
…annnnnd here’s “part two” of my attempt at getting to the core of why The Legend of Tarzan is such a failure and such an embarrassment as a modern studio blockbuster. How do you make a racist novel written in bygone times un-racist? Can you? Is it worth the effort to try? And is trying in and of … Continue reading
Confession: I cried at the end of Kung Fu Panda 3. Do not take my response to the film’s emotional payload as a strict endorsement of the whole package; as third entries in movie franchises go, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good bit of fun that falls victim to diminishing returns and an unpolished script. How many times must Po, … Continue reading
Maybe Obama should have postponed his final State of the Union until after the premiere of Michael Bay’s latest fascist masterwork. At least then, Ted Cruz would have been too busy sitting in an empty theater with his pants around his ankles to offer response. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (henceforth referred to solely … Continue reading
“If The Bastard Executioner’s cardinal season can be summed up with a single word, that word is “rushed.” From the show’s premiere to its finale, “Blood and Quiescence/Crau a Chwsg,” every narrative thread, every plot point, every character arc has felt unjustly compressed, like so many square pegs being stuffed into round holes. This, in … Continue reading
“Nothing’s more effective at shaking a teen out of their monotonous high school routine than the arrival of a new student. That’s the stuff actress/director Mélanie Laurent’s sophomore film, Breathe, is made of: mystery and allure, with generous dollops of adolescent rivalry, sexual awakening and verbal abuse spooned on top. Think of Breatheas a distant … Continue reading
