For your consideration: A whole heapin’ helpin’ of real good performances in real good movies. My picks here: Brady Jandreau, Joaquin Phoenix, Kiki Layne & Stefan James, and Ben Foster & Thomasin McKenzie. Maybe the last two feel like cheats, and in a way they are. But in a totally different way they’re not, because … Continue reading
Well: We did it. It’s not often that a critics group’s awards match up closely with my own feelings, and if I’m being really nitpicky, this year’s Boston Online Film Critics Association awards miss a few marks for me; if you know me well and you’ve followed this blog since I started bitching about a certain … Continue reading
June has arrived, and also it’s about to end, the month-long worldwide celebrations of my birthday winding down* as I settle into my new age-number and look ahead to the rest of the year**. Thus, this, my Best Things halftime report, expanded once more from merely a ranking of film and TV to include music, … Continue reading
It’s June. “Best Of (So Far)” list time. About a third of the blurbs on Paste Magazine‘s June ’18 list have my name on them, and of those that don’t, there are a handful I don’t agree with: I think Avengers: Infinity War is an exhausting slog, How to Talk to Girls at Parties is garbage, and Hereditary … Continue reading
Michael B. Jordan, right? What an actor. What a fire starter, too. The guy loves burning shit. It’s almost his bread and butter, at least in 2018, where his two biggest roles play literally and metaphorically with fire (and sometimes both). See: Black Panther and Fahrenheit 451. (Actually see Black Panther, too. Don’t just consider it as evidence. … Continue reading
Happy Black Panther weekend, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Instead of writing strictly about Ryan Coogler’s immediately successful, instantly groundbreaking movie, I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s immediately successful, instantly groundbreaking movie in context with Stephen Norrington’s Blade, the first Marvel movie shaped around a black protagonist, and how watching Black Panther reminded me of my experience watching Blade for … 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
