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When filmmakers fall asleep and flunk high school American History, America: The Motion Picture is what’s created years later- an animated, anarchic, free association lunacy that mixes up the American Revolution with the Civil War and shows that it respects America by disregarding its truth and hyping its memes. In this alternate America, George-Bon Jovi-Washington…
The best time and light for film biographies is twilight. Everything old looks grand in the dying light and creeping shadows, and it hardly matters that the actorly imitation is a step or two behind the genuine article. At that age everything is reflection, memory, regret and sadness, hopes of resurrecting those youthful steps and…
Read More "Stan & Ollie: Finds the Sad Truth After the Visual Gag Has Shined"
Fans have been waiting for the DC Cinematic Universe to lighten up and are applauding Shazam as a step in the right direction. Shazam is just Big in superhero tights. Only in the dour DC Universe does Shazam seem a joyful cry. Shazam isn’t a revolution just a smart marketing ploy designed to appease those…
Us is them, you, me, U.S., United States and all the good black and white and in between moments. It being horror, Us. is also Halloween, The Birds, The Shining, Jaws, eventually Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Black Swan. You get the point- the references, the pastiche, the absurd visual metaphors involving…
Comedies usually begin with a funeral and end with a wedding. Tragedies begin with weddings and end with death. Paddleton (on Netflix) starts with bosom buddies bonding and ends with bereavement. The film never hides what it is, a gentle comedy stuck in the twilight moments between light and dark, life and death, love and…
Read More "“Paddleton”: Settling into the Gentle Comedy That Is Friendship and Death."
Wonder Park is probably the first STEM inspired animated film. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fills its every frame with whirligigs, loop the loops, mini rockets, calculations, precise measurements, blue prints and gears— lots and lots of gears. Wonder Park is a film where math summer camps, engineering problems, and oddly enough, great cursive writing…
WWE wrestling is like family: loud, rowdy, always fighting and making up, a love fest and a mutual admiration society, filled with their own alliances and jealousies, celebrated successes and commiserated failures. It is exactly like its movie Fighting With My Family, a heartfelt stunt that pulls and doesn’t pull its punches. The whole family…
Read More "“Fighting With My Family”: Gets the Family Participation Prize"
How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, finishes the series where it should properly end— at farewell. Farewell to adolescence, to the old Hiccup and Toothless bond and dance, to home, country and enemies. That farewell fusing into new hopes, lands, responsibilities and families is what gives the Dragon series its bitter sweetness.…
There can be no romantic comedy nowadays without some kind of meta attachment, without a winking nod to its existence in the film catalog. Isn’t It Romantic, starring curvy delight Rebel Wilson, is the ultimate mega romcom title, and if you didn’t get the meta irony, it spends twenty minutes explaining the genre conventions that…
