Years ago, motion-capture performance legend Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes) had the idea to create a live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. With his expertise in mo-cap, Serkis gathered an all-star cast to play the animals in the story, and the stage was set for a groundbreaking technical…
Category: Film
Green Book – A Guilt-Free Guide to Racism for White People, By White People
Green Book is being sold as a feel-good road trip movie through the 1960s American south. It seems like the perfect holiday movie for all families; a drama about connecting with others, no matter how different you are, sprinkled with moments of good-natured humor and a lot of heart. Unfortunately, Green Book is a story about American…
The Grinch – “Max! Fetch Me My Sedative!”
Illumination’s The Grinch feels like a movie we’ve seen before. Not in the kind of movie it is or how it goes about its business, it just feels like we got this movie years ago already. How has it not happened until now? Maybe the feeling comes from the whole thing being instantly forgettable. The Grinch isn’t…
“First Man” – The Price of Progress
When it comes to movies about space, you usually end up with a couple of different options. There are the more technical, behind-the-scenes dramas of the specifications surrounding space missions (Hidden Figures), or tales of survival in the harshest environment in existence, combined with majestic imagery of the final frontier (Apollo 13, Gravity). First Man…
“Mandy” – The Insane, Violent, and Tragic Ballad of Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage is a true enigma of a human being. He is endlessly lampooned, idolized, studied, quoted, and ironically loved to the point where it is no longer ironic. Montages of the actor “losing his shit” or just straight freaking out onscreen have garnered over a million views, and there was even an episode of…
“The Predator” – A Wild, Flawed, Problematic Ride
The very first film in the Predator franchise, 1987’s Predator was more of a thriller than a full on action flick. A team of commandos stuck in the jungle are hunted by an alien warrior that kills for sport, and that alien stays out of sight for the majority of the film, building up suspense…
“Peppermint” – Racially Charged Fear-Mongering For the Suburban Middle Class
Let’s get right to it. Peppermint is an incredibly irresponsible piece of racist fear-mongering. Irresponsible might even be too soft of a description; the timing of this film is a bit too perfect to be an accident. There’s something inherently malicious about the release of a movie that features two-dimensional, irredeemable, unsympathetic latinx characters as…
“American Animals” – A True-crime Experimental Blast
American Animals is an incredibly smart take on perception and what it means to truthfully recount and tell a story as it happened. In this fact-based experimental film we follow four young college students who plan to steal a collection of incredibly rare books. Bart Layton, coming off of his acclaim from his documentary ‘The Imposter’ brings us an in-depth take on a…
“A.X.L.” – The Teenage Sports Drama is More Fun Than the Robot Dog
Last week, audiences went back in time to witness the very first bond between man and canine. This week, we go a little bit into the future with A.X.L., to witness the first bond between man and robot canine. Well, maybe not the first (remember the Tekno toys?). Yes, this is the second “boy and…
“The Happytime Murders” – Puppet Debauchery With Zero Substance
Most discussion involving The Happytime Murders is centered around calling it the worst film of the whole year. I don’t think that I’d go that far (Mile 22 was both exhausting and headache-inducing), but the adult puppet crime noir is certainly very disappointing. The concept of taking something that’s generally associated with children (such as…
