An ongoing exploration of the dark and gritty reboot
In the summer of 2016 everyone started telling me that I had to watch a show called Stranger Things. I was reluctant. The reluctance came from the way it was sold: the entire series was one large nostalgia fest for ‘80s Spielberg, Stephen King novels, and Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not that I don’t like …
Continue reading The Homage is Not Enough: on the Limits of Nostalgia-First Narratives
Toward the finale of the 2016 election, Mike Huckabee took to Fox News to give a defense of Donald Trump that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since. I see Trump as Capt Quint (Robert Shaw) on the boat, Orca, in the movie "Jaws." He's salty, drunk and says incorrect things. He spits …
If you haven't heard, the latest complete failure at the box office was the flaccid reboot Pan, an attempt to create a franchise out of the Peter Pan story by starting with Mr. Pan's origin as a young boy on an adventure to Neverland. In which the villain is Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard and Peter's best …
Do you read The AV Club? If not, it's the sister publication to The Onion, self-described as "the web's smartest take on TV, film, music, and lots more." Which nicely sums it up, as it lets you know how arrogant the writers of The AV Club are. (Not that I hate the AV Club or …
The fact that Spiderman is currently being rebooted proves that it is never too soon to start a franchise over from scratch. One might point out that Spiderman's reboot (the new trilogy's first film with a release date that comes only five years after the end of the last trilogy) is nothing new for comic …