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 noticed, there is a very heated and very strange argument occurring right now in certain circles of the internet. It's about Ghostbusters. There are two sides to this argument: The new Ghostbusters is going to be the worst movie of all time. It won't be funny and it does not honor the original …
Continue reading What Would F. Scott Fitzgerald Say About the Ghostbusters Reboot Controversy?
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 …
We are close to the end of what is, quite possibly, the greatest franchise ever: The Fast and the Furious films. While I initially disliked these movies, (referring to the fifth installment, prior to actually seeing it, as "more-or-less the same shitty movie they made the last four times"), I had a change in opinion after …
Continue reading Why Vin Diesel Should Be the Next James Bond