Blog Archives

Marvel’s been carving a vast swathe through cinema history. With 19 movies released over the last 10 years, all of them inhabiting the same shared universe, they’ve built one of the most impressive and lucrative film empires in cinema history. (Even their flops are better than, say, most of DC’s offerings.) According to the best sources […]

Modern movies are mostly awful. It’s rare you find even one worthy of a recommendation, and to find two? Well, that’s like winning the modern movie lottery. And to find two movies worthy of a recommend on the same day, movies that are absolutely and intrinsically opposed to each other in concept and execution, is […]

Modern American culture is nothing more than a geek media Skinner Box. The vast majority of geek gunk is driven by pure nostalgia. Creativity seems to have been banished, and with all the reboots and remakes all we do is endlessly recycle the identical characters, costumes, and props, endlessly retelling slightly different stories about the […]

The Princess Bride opens with Fred Savage in bed suffering from a dire illness, the likes of which has seldom been encountered by mere mortal men. I can empathize because, indeed as I write these very words, my body is under assault from some vicious scourge more suited to a zombie horror movie (or a Cloverfield […]

Jessica Jones, an ostensible superhero, is a compulsive narcissist, a miserable bitch who spreads misery wherever she goes. The first season of this Netflix Marvel show tried to justify her miserable narcissism by blaming it on her dead family and her insanely-tragic-in-an-over-the-top-adolescent-way past history with a mind control psycho. Fair enough. The funniest thing about […]

Every so often I find myself doing something completely inexplicable and retroactively justifying it to myself by saying “Well, maybe I can write about it for Castalia House.” Seriously, why CH hasn’t fired me yet, I have no idea. So how about that Red vs. Blue, huh? Red vs. Blue—RvB for short—is, or was, a […]

Modern day cinema should be a window into a world of marvels. Special effects are better than they’ve ever been, allowing us to depict anything we can imagine. Take the trio of “The Lord of the Rings” movies. Gorgeous, stirring, and while not perfect, they’re so damn good it’s astounding. Then, at the other end […]

Blame Netflix. Oh, sure, I’ve had vast numbers of people DEMAND that I review this cinematic catastrophe, but since I wasn’t ever going to spend any money on seeing it, I could plausibly wave off. “Nope, sorry. I’m too busy, it’s too expensive, and my astrologer says ‘no can do’.” Then Netflix went and put […]

Western Civilization is doomed. I know I’ve said that before, but this time it’s really true. (Actually, I was right all those other times, it just hasn’t happened yet.) Scope this stupidity: Thursday I suddenly found myself with two whole hours of unstructured time. Nothing I needed to play, nothing I needed to read or […]