Franchises & Series · Superheroes
Joker: Sympathy Epic
“It’s there all the time, driving me out to wander the streets, following me, silently, but I can feel it there. It’s me, pursuing myself. . . . But who[…]
Category: Franchises & Series
Franchises & Series · Superheroes
Lesser Expectations: Joker and Classical Hollywood Cinema
Phoenix’s body is mostly skin and bones, which is ironic since the film attempts to flesh out the Joker. In fact, this Joker’s ribs and shoulder blades seem to be[…]
Franchises & Series · Superheroes
Avengers: Endgame; or Looking Ahead to 2016, the Liberal Fantasy Redo
This is all to say that Endgame is more interested in fantasy outcomes than solving the problems it gives itself. It promises us a future more bearable than our present[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch it Again! Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
We could call Episode I the first of the modern “digital epics.” It is perhaps the single most influential film on today’s Hollywood, the film that introduced the concept of[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Holding On: Mission: Impossible and the Myth of the Perfect Man
Fallout is basically about Ethan holding on, not just to elevators, helicopters, or sliding rocks, but to immortality and the ridiculous notion of the perfect man. He is fast, strong,[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Die Hard Turns Thirty: The Enduring Appeal of an ’80s Classic
As the years have gone by, the heroes have become less McClane-like and become, again, Ramboesque demigods. This goes for McClane, too. In the first Die Hard film, he looks[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Superheroes
There Goes the Friendly Neighborhood: Why Spider-Man Needs Adversity
So how does Disney repeatedly peddle the same action film while also making this story acceptable to the media as a progressive identity narrative for the little guy? How does[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch it Again! Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Jurassic Park, in all its dark consumeristic negatives and heartless colonial instincts, exists in the real world as a film in the same way that the park exists in the[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! The Avengers (2012) and the Intertextuality Problem
A Transformers film has to face incessant criticism about the amount of action, the blurry continuity of its symphonies of shrapnel, the overuse of MacGuffins, and the lack of good[…]
African · African American · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF/Fantasy
The Fight to Be Fathered: False Political Pretenses in Black Panther
The media’s insistence on making more of the film than a big, enjoyably dumb action movie only highlights the drastic shift in representation in casting and marketing as a predatory[…]
Actors & Personalities · Franchises & Series · Interviews
A Man for All Seasons: An Interview with Dean Cain
I feel like I get to go and play at it now. I mean, I take it very seriously and I do the work. But it feels more like play[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
The Last Jedi: Enjoying Corporate Cinema’s Quasi-Risks While They Last
One might argue that Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi attempts at deconstruction yet again, depicting the original trilogy’s heroic Luke as an inexplicably jaded Jedi living in self-imposed exile on[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch it Again! Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
So as you peel back the folds of the opening of Batman v Superman you get the sense that even in its immediately awkward, tone-deaf plotting, this is not a perfectly[…]
Crime · Franchises & Series · Philosophy · TV & Streaming
Ten Years Since the Cable Went Out: Disassembling The Sopranos’ Finale, “Made in America”
As Jonah Weiner puts it, the final scene “does stage a violent death, patently and unambiguously: ours.” If the cut-to-black is punitive, it’s also Chase’s memento mori: remember that you[…]
Books · Comics · Franchises & Series
Book Review: Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, ed. by Matt Yockey
Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. $29.95, 364pp. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. In August this year, Netflix released The Defenders, the[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Watch It Again! Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
The scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of in jokes and outlandish gags … that it becomes repetitious and tedious.[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Franchises & Series · Producers & Studios
Surf’s Up! Beyond the Beach: AIP’s Beach Party Movies
With summer starting to fade, what better way to while away the hours than by revisiting the beach, as imagined by exploitation studio American International Pictures in the early 1960s?[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Silence is golden, so it would seem: On War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)
Is it rude to point out that male chimps don’t hug their sons? That’s because they don’t know they have sons! They aren’t “faithful” to their “wives,” which they don’t[…]
Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! Batman: The Movie (1966)
The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Fight Makes Right: Unearned Feminism in Wonder Woman
Unshackled by the Snyder malaise – and ignoring the slow motion he made a fad with 300, which Jenkins curiously revisits with consistency verging on the fetishistic – Gadot roars.[…]
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