When Immovable Corruption Meets Unstoppable Corruption. MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE is a clickbait title. It tells us it’s going to push the mainstream narrative that FBI Associate Director William Mark Felt singlehandedly brought down the corrupt Nixon administration in 1974, by leaking anonymously to the press during Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Nicknamed “Deep Throat” by … Read More
ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE
Justice for the Justice League. A harrowing journey from Zack Snyder’s brain to our eyes, but at long last the true vision of JUSTICE LEAGUE has been realized. And it is everything a superhero movie should be: gods and devils, bombast and quietude, punching and mind-games, good and evil, sacrifice and hope, with the fate of the Earth hanging… on … Read More
JUSTICE LEAGUE
The League of Extraordinary Superpeeps. Nobody should come to the movies unless he believes in heroes. — John Wayne. An interstellar villain tries to destroy Earth, but is vanquished with punching and computer jargon, by a fresh clique of supers called the JUSTICE LEAGUE. Batman (grizzled Ben Affleck) recruits The Aquaman (warrior Jason Momoa), and Barry Allen not-yet-called The Flash … Read More
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE
Dawn of the Golden Age of Superhero Movies. …if Jesus was alive today and walked on water, it would be instantly on YouTube… And the first Comment would be: “Fag.” — Bill Maher. There is a scene in BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE where Batman turns a corner in his Batmobile and runs headlong into Superman blocking him in … Read More
MAN OF STEEL
Kneel Before Steel. Darkness, moral ambiguity, self-doubt, wearing underpants inside the trousers: these are things not commonly associated with Superman. But in MAN OF STEEL, the newest Superman vehicle, this heretical new direction is what we get – like it or not. But Poffy likey. The bedrock of Superman canon has been preserved (Krypton exploding, Kal-El sent to Earth, super … Read More
CHAPLIN
The Man, The Myth, the Trousers. Robert Downey Jr. runs around like a madman, knocks things over and falls down a lot. (Cocaine’s a helluva drug.) And in CHAPLIN, he gets to do all that without being arrested… Baron Dickie Attenborough‘s CHAPLIN is a towering tribute to one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry – Charlie Chaplin, not … Read More
STREETS OF FIRE
Rock and Roll Fable Disable. Everything you know is fake. Everything you believe is wrong. STREETS OF FIRE taught me this. In one crushing swoop, everything I believed about the movie’s finale song, Dan Hartman’s I Can Dream About You, was shattered. Allow me to digress… The movie itself is an unsuccessful stab at cult musical-actioner, with comicbook visuals set … Read More
JUMPER
Jumping The Snark. Hayden Christensen has learned a lot from being a Jedi. In JUMPER, he’s learned how to teleport. He’s learned how to rob banks by teleporting directly into their vaults. He’s also learned how to pick up women by playing the exotic erotic. Unfortunately, he still hasn’t learned how to act. Well, that’s not exactly true. He’s progressed … Read More
HOLLYWOODLAND
As Powerful as a Locomotive. The posters to HOLLYWOODLAND do nothing to alert us to the movie’s startling subject matter – Ben Affleck in red grandma-panties. Set in 1959, tracing the ripples in pop culture following the mysterious death of TV’s most famous Superman, George Reeves, writer Paul Bernbaum and director Allen Coulter (THE SOPRANOS, SEX AND THE CITY) embark … Read More