EDITOR’S NOTE: This is my 100th post for the Slog. To all my readers, thank you for following along. To all my non-readers, you’re not reading this, so I can say with impunity I fucked your mom last night after making her pay for a seafood dinner. And I’m not…
Take Bugs Bunny, give him katanas, bloodlust, Ryan Reynolds’ abs and ADHD snark and you have Deadpool, the titular antihero of the year’s first superhero movie, which makes use of the character’s fourth-wall breaking and humor to gleefully take apart superhero film tropes, most hilariously encapsulated by an opening credits…
Last New Year’s Eve, in Florida, a mother shot her daughter to death because she thought she was an intruder. In California, a father killed his son’s bedridden mother, girlfriend and friend before the son wrestled the gun away and killed him. And just Tuesday morning, an Ohio father shot…
7. Zoolander 2 Release date(s): February 12 Ah, the Wall Street 2 of comedy sequels. The cultural timing seems right but can it break the comedy sequel curse? Anchorman 2 was supposed to, then missed the mark wide. Skepticism aside, the characters of Derek Zoolander, Hansel and Mugatu (played by…
Dear Readers, 2016 is upon us and that means 2015 is behind us. Last January, I set out to write a blog for a year. I’d become far too insulated during my college years. Time I would have spent reading and writing when I was a teenager, I started using…
7. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation Dir. Christopher McQuarrie (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) Tom Cruise, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, Ving Rhames, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin, Simon McBurney, Tom Hollander Tom Cruise never fails to entertain and he takes home Sam Flynn’s Imaginary Award for Best…
I find films succeed or fail on three factors: 1) story and characters 2) filmmaking 3) acting. The Revenant has two and three down, but it’s the film’s failure with one that makes me think the film will be forgotten soon after (or perhaps before?) Oscar night in February. Director…
The Hateful Eight, appropriately the eighth film from auteur Quentin Tarantino, dovetails his first film, fellow bad-guys-in-a-room thriller Reservoir Dogs with the Western genre with an added dash of Agatha Christie. Together, they combine for a surprisingly-sincere film with a powerful plea for racial tolerance. Like any auteur of Tarantino’s pedigree,…
How do you review Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Nobody will read this review to judge whether it’s worth a look. Let’s be honest, if you’re reading this, you’re either a Star Wars fan or my mother. So by what metric do we measure this film, carrying the legacy of…