I was looking forward to reading Douglas Brode’s Midnight Matinees: Cult Cinema Classics (1896 to the Present Day so much, I didn’t realize until after reading that its main title is — like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence” — a true oxymoron. Intended or not, this catchy term operates in the spirit of many of the … Continue reading Midnight Matinees: Cult Cinema Classics (1896 to the Present Day)
Inherent Vice has all the trappings of film noir. There’s a rumpled gumshoe who lives by a seemingly quaint moral code, a mysterious femme fatale and a hard-boiled cop with whom our protagonist has an ambivalent relationship. Los Angeles sizzles with corruption and sleaze, with the threat of violence simmering just below the sun-bleached surface. … Continue reading Inherent Vice (2014)
White nerds like to loudly announce that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the greatest self-contained film series in movie history, but, you know, I’ve always found Tyler Perry’s Madea-verse to be a far richer tableau of real-life heroes and villains, with plenty of Christian-based dramedy-heavy life lessons sprinkled throughout the course of these 11 films, … Continue reading A Madea Family Funeral (2019)
Let’s get something straight: The Rotten Tomatoes website is a tool of evil. And yet, its editors sure have put together one helluva fun book in Rotten Movies We Love: Cult Classics, Underrated Gems, and Films So Bad They’re Good. Its cover is a good place to start this discussion, too, because what’s wrong with … Continue reading Reading Material: Short Ends 10/26/19
As the titular superhero of Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman becomes to a generation of children what Christopher Reeve’s revelatory performance as/in Superman became to mine: an instant icon. Making this one all the more remarkable is that while the red-caped son of Krypton already had embodied truth, justice and the American way through decades of … Continue reading Black Panther (2018)