With both Toy Story 4 and a remake of Child’s Play coming out the same weekend, did we even have a choice? We take a look at out all-time favorite dolls in the movies: from beloved child’s playthings to unfathomably evil vessels for demonic energy, and everything in between. In Worth Mentioning, we discuss The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, Chernobyl and The Holy Mountain by request of Patreon Dan Prestwich.
From where I stand, the summer movie season of 2019 has just tipped off of a cliff. Godzilla: King of the Monsters was the last popcorn movie I was looking forward to for over two months – and look at how well that turned out for me – and while June isn’t quite the wasteland that July is shaping up to be, it’s been a good long while since the […]
This year has brought a lot of retrospectives on the movies from 1999, which are now twenty years old, as well as reflection on the year 1999 itself. Many have marked 1999 as a standard bearer for great cinema. A short survey of the movies released that year – The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, All About My Mother, Toy Story 2 – immediately justifies its reputation. As much […]
Take out the end credits, and UglyDolls is about 80 minutes long. I spent every single one of them trying to figure out what hell was wrong with their mouths. Let’s do an exercise, you and I. Lightly put your hand on your face, right around your cheekbones. I’m serious, please do it. So much the better if you have a mirror handy. Now, open your eyes really wide, and […]
Mid-April is awfully early to be thinking about summer already, but Marvel and Disney have decided for the rest of us that the summer movie season begins this year on Friday, 26 April, with the release of Avengers: Endgame. To prepare, this episode will be all about the blockbuster movies to come: the superheroes, the living toys, the monsters who fit inside your pocket, the Hobbses and the Shaws. In […]
If you’ve seen Stranger Things or the recently released zeitgeist-embracing adventure The Kid Who Would Be King, you know there’s no shortage of nostalgia for the decades in which most of the folks reading this grew up. The 1980s and ’90s are en vogue and ready to transport you back to your Topanga poster-covered walls of your bedroom. Or whomever you were into at the time. Maybe it was just […]
Who trusts a horoscope? Do you really think the alignment of stars and planet can tell you anything about your personality, your destiny, your future? Give me a break. There is only one question that can truly pierce into a person’s soul, and reveal the most personal and profound elements of their personality. That questions is, of course, “What is your favorite animation studio?” Read the answers below, and see […]
Every New Year’s celebration allows us a chance to look back (Tim’s annual top 10 post I always await with unalloyed glee), but it also gives us an opportunity to look forward. The year that will be 2019 is stretching before us, full of potential for cinematic joy or tragedy. Now I’m sure you’re all already looking forward to and/or dreading things like Avengers: Endgame, Toy Story 4, and John Wick 3, but there is […]
Every week 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 ants in Ant-Man and the Wasp. There are ants in other things also, but only rarely as the starring characters. I don’t know if I can name another movie of such historical […]
It’s not like it’s a surprise that Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is dumbfoundingly bad. Hell, it’s actually gratifying: it’s always pleasant when a movie is exactly as good as you hope it will be, and that’s just as true when said hope is for something truly repulsive that you can later talk about pridefully with other bad movie aficionados, the way old men compare scars.* […]
Exhibit No. whatever in the continued softening of Pixar Animation Studios: Coco, the company’s 19th feature film in 22 years, and a film that would be the pride and joy of literally any other American animation studio. And yet even after so many years of such unexceptionally fine output, I keep wanting them to still be the creative powerhouse of Finding Nemo and WALL·E and Up. Maybe those days will […]
I’m going to throw all caution to the wind and declare that The Emoji Movie has the worst concept of any film ever given a wide release in the United States of America. I try not to hold concepts against movies: it’s all about the execution, and you can make any movie sound ridiculous if you just reduce it to its concept, and all that sage crap. But there’s just […]
