Recently I watched The Babadook, an Australian psychological horror film released in 2014 and directed by Jennifer Kent. The film follows Amelia Vannick, a single mother who works as an orderly and is struggling to raise her six year old son Samuel. Her husband died in a car accident on the day Sam was born, an event that continues to haunt their small household.Read More »
This post contains some spoilers for The Dark Knight Returns
This past week I finished watching part two the DC Comics animated release of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which adapted the comic book miniseries of the same name by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson released in 1986. Set in a dystopian near-future (relative to the 1980s) version of Gotham City, an aged Bruce Wayne (55 years old) returns to his role as Batman, after 10 years of absence, in an effort to quell a resurgence of violent crimes afflicting the city.Read More »
While by this time it is rather old news, a little while ago the all-female cast of the new Ghostbusters remake was announced. In the places I frequent online I noticed a very common response — a lot of people seem to absolutely hate it. Many called it pandering, doomed it to fail, or otherwise complained about the “damage” they were doing to a beloved nostalgic film. While the kind of hate it has drawn has a range of implications, I think a lot of it boils down to the simple fact that most people hate change.Read More »
Over the last few months, an argument has been brought to me a few times that I take issue with. My friends and I are fans of a lot of animated movies, so it isn’t uncommon for us to watch a fair amount of movies intended for younger audiences. During one of these viewings we were watching Anastasia, a 1999 20th Century Fox film directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman.
Part way through the first act I expressed that I was not enjoying the film because I did not think it was very well written. A friend of mine simply dismissed my criticisms, however, stating “It’s just a kids movie; don’t think so much about it.” This is a mindset I have always taken issue with. The genre or intended audience of something does not automatically forgive its shortcomings.Read More »
Over the weekend, I was able to see the final Hobbit film; The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, directed by Peter Jackson. The third and final installment of the trilogy, Battle of the Five Armies marks the end of Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the J.R.R Tolkien novel.
This post will be partly a review, but mostly a general overview on my feelings toward the trilogy. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, the massively successful and popular trilogy that preceded it, The Hobbit is a story I am personally more invested in. It was the only one of Tolkien’s novels I read as a child, and later read once more in university. I have not read any other Tolkien work.Read More »
This past week I was finally able to get out to the cinema again, where I managed to catch Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. The film follows former NASA pilot Cooper (McConaughey) in a future decimated by “blight” — an affliction that has been laying waste to crops on a global scale. After receiving coordinates in binary — transmitted via gravity waves by an unknown intelligence — Cooper rediscovers NASA and their plan to launch a mission through a wormhole in space to try and find a new planet for humanity. They recruit Cooper to pilot the spacecraft Endurance along with a team of scientists, forcing him to leave his family behind with the hope of securing their future.Read More »
This past week was a series of impromptu viewings of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, specifically the first three. It was my girlfriend who wanted to watch the movies, so I did not entirely sit through each one. I’m familiar with the series already, but having them on throughout the week got me thinking about trilogies, and the many things the series did right that made it compelling.Read More »
This past week I finally managed to watch Xtro, a 1983 British science fiction horror film directed by Harry Bromley Davenport. I first heard about the film when it was discussed on RedLetterMedia’s show Best of the Worst, where they deemed their selection of the film an accident because they found it to have legitimate quality. This piqued my curiosity, so watching it this Halloween season became a priority of mine.Read More »
This past week October began, and in keeping with the season building up towards Halloween, my friends and I began watching horror and Halloween themed films. While there are many more classics to watch as well as some new great and interesting stuff, a lot of what we have watched so far have been in the realm of the “found footage” subgenre.Read More »
The past couple weeks have been very busy, with my picking up and moving out on my own in a new city for the first time, but I still managed to get to the theatre one last time before I did, where I saw Sin City: A Dame to Kill For by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. I had been personally anticipating the release of this film since the first film in 2005.Read More »
Muse with Me 