Someone would have to be an abject moron to be “disappointed” by Step Up Revolution, which is after all the fourth film in the Step Up franchise, and which thus is pretty much exactly the movie it’s supposed to be. I think it’s awfully grown-up of me to openly confess in a public forum that […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Step Up Revolution is a film about dancing and, nominally, revolutions, set in a town noted for its strong […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUNDirected by Guy HamiltonWritten by Richard Maibaum and Tom MankiewiczPremiered 19 December, 1974 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEThe third and (unless I have forgotten something important) final opening sequence in a Bond movie that does not feature Bond himself, though […]
The much-maligned 2004 summer flop Catwoman, despite its reputation as being totally valueless, actually serves an extremely important function: it provides an easy answer to the question of what is the absolute worst superhero movie adapted from a DC or Marvel title in the 21st Century, thus keeping many bar fights between cinephiles from getting […]
Batman, the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight of Gotham City, true identity of the callow playboy and son of privilege Bruce Wayne, has been around since May, 1939, when he appeared in a brief story in Detective Comics #27, and in that time he has had many iterations in the pages of DC Comics magazines […]
Barring a pair of 1940s serials that are largely forgotten today except by the most rabid completists, the theatrical debut of DC Comics’ Batman, the second most important and arguably the most popular of all the superheroes in that company’s stable was the 1966 film titled simply Batman, written by Lorenz Semple, Jr., directed by […]
Hype is a great leveler: it can ruin a giant studio tentpole or an indie film so tiny it barely exists with equal measure. I start this way, because in the span of just about 18 hours, I saw two movies that, by every fair measure, I “liked”; and for both of them, I had […]
Every Sunday (or thereabouts) this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: there are few narrative tropes as well-worked as the one at the center The Dark Knight Rises, […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. LIVE AND LET DIEDirected by Guy HamiltonWritten by Tom MankiewiczPremiered 27 June, 1973 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEIn the very first opening sequence in the whole franchise where James Bond doesn’t appear, even in the form of a doppelganger (viz. From Russia with Love), we […]
I had many expectations, and no expectations for The Dark Knight Rises, but I can say with absolute certainty that I was never even remotely prepared for this: that it would remind me, of all things, of a 1921 D.W. Griffith picture. Orphans of the Storm, to be precise, a story of the French Revolution […]
1997’s Batman & Robin, a film so widely-reviled that flopped so hard that it put the Batman franchise in cold storage for eight years, until a certain Christopher Nolan figured out a way to rejuvenate the character by going as far in the other direction as possible, hinges on the action of two grotesque cartoon […]
Let us first deal with a misconception: there are nipples on the batsuit in Batman Forever, though this innovation is frequently held to have started with Batman & Robin, two years later. My suspicion is that this has happened because, and there’s not really a delicate way of putting this, Batman & Robin is “gayer”. […]
