For the past few weeks, I've scowled at the sight of every Mary Poppins Returns poster. My inner monologue boiled with cynicism: Hey, cool! Remember when they made Revenge of Citizen Kane? Or Return to the Bridge on the River Kwai? Nope. 'Cause they used to know enough to leave perfection alone. Mary Poppins is one those movies…
Todd Wofford
The makers of Mortal Engines clearly went to great lengths to render a fully three-dimensional world, only to populate it with two-dimensional characters. This is perfectly embodied in a scene where the two protagonists sit breathlessly after a narrow escape. "That was close!" One of them gasps. "Yeah," says the other. "Too close!" Millions of dollars are…
"We breed wars," Eleanor of Aquitaine says in The Lion in Winter. "We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten." The Favourite depicts a world of war, high taxes, and pervasive poverty, all while an absentminded queen sits dazed on the throne. This movie's most surprising…
Comic book writers often combat story stagnation by fiddling with their continuity and canon. Realities get warped, deceased characters come back to life, and origin stories get scuttled for brand new ones. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse takes the novel approach of weaving a web of disparate plots into one cohesive story: A host of Spider-Beings from many…
Clint Eastwood's The Mule makes a fascinating companion piece to Robert Redford's recent swan song, The Old Man and the Gun. Both films center on crinkly geriatrics who stroll their way through a career in crime. The two movies differ greatly in tone, however, and much of this derives from the lead actors, who imbue their personalties onto…
For this week's podcasting saga, Travis and I discuss our favorite movie quotes of all time. Our wine for this week, the Pinot Noir from Dutton Goldfield, tasted so incredible that it's possible we had a bit too much of it. So, if two goobers talking absolute gibberish is your thing, get on in here.
An unspoken dialogue exists between the makers of modern animated films and the parents who haul their kids to see them: Buy tickets to our movie, and we will offer you 90 minutes of mollified, glassy-eyed silence. We will show them a whole new world--shining, shimmering, splendid. This exchange regards adults as hapless captives, stuck…
A legend has sprouted about the day Bob Dylan met an aging, ailing Woody Guthrie. "You sound more like me than I do," was the elder bard's supposed summation of his successor. It's entirely possible that if Lee Israel could've met the great gallery of writers she impersonated, they might've offered her the same backhanded…
"F orget everything you've seen." The awkward narration that opens Robin Hood asks a tall order of its audience: Cast out your memories of Errol Flynn's buckling of swash, Disney's cute, flippant fox, and even Kevin Costner's wandering, wobbling accent. Make room for this clunky, funky steampunk mishmash that delivers one mile of style for every…
T he story goes that in 1963, Sam Cooke and his band were turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, La. Cooke, arguably the most important soul singer of the 20th Century, flew into a volcanic rage. "They won't shoot me!" He fumed. "I'm Sam Cooke!" But they could have and would have, if cooler…
