Because Everybody Else Has One

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a phenomenon that has been quietly blowing me away since the late 1980s when I discovered the original cartoon at the impressionable young age of seven (or thereabouts) and became a massive fan almost at first glance. Like those famous Marvel and DC superheroes before them, the Turtles have managed to transcend their humble comic book origins to become an entertainment juggernaut that have caught the imagination of now generations of kids and even some adults along the way. All the more so because unlike the massive success of, say, those early Superman or Captain America comics, the Turtles started life as a truly independent, self-published, black-and-white comic book that were written and drawn mostly as a parody of Frank Miller's gritty, neo-noir takes on Daredevil and Batman. And here we are, most of four decades later, with the seventh (?) big screen outing for our heroes in a half shell (following countless TV series, comics, video games and a...

So, You People on Netflix. I have thoughts.  And none of them positive.  (Reprinted in part from my Twitter multi-post). First off, on a simple, artistic level how the hell did they get this many excellent comedic actors in a movie this unspeakably bad? David Duchovny, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Rhea Pearlman, Matt Walsh, Nelson Franklin, and Eddie frickin' Murphy, but not a single laugh between any of them. But not only is it horrifically unfunny, its racial politics are also genuinely grotesque. Now, to be clear, I tend to roll my eyes when films and TV shows are criticized for being "woke" because normally such criticisms come from basement dwellers whinging about women or minorities having the audacity to, you know, be represented on screen, but this film is pretty powerful proof that there is a serious argument to be made against "woke" identity politics from a liberal, (centre-)lefty perspective.  You People is clearly, by today's standards, entirely "p...

The other half of the Barbeheimer phenomenon, Oppenheimer, hasn't been quite as controversial as Barbie, but it has still drawn some controversy. Not controversy about the morality of atomic warfare, of course, but about Florence Pugh's nude scenes. Because that's the world we're living in, I guess. But I begin with a digression. Much like Barbie, there's probably not a ton to be said about Oppenheimer at this point, except to say that it's every bit as good as people are saying. Still, I'm going to take a run at it. What stands out most about Oppenheimer is how much it's both very much a Christopher Nolan film and quite a radical departure for him. Yes, loads of the old Nolan tropes are present and accounted for: multiple timelines, an epic scope, trouble writing female characters, practical effects shot on IMAX cameras, a booming and intentionally over-stuffed soundtrack, and of course, Cillian Murphy, finally taking centre stage.  On the other hand, i...

At this point, is there anything more to be said about either part of Barbenheimer? Probably not, but that hasn't stopped people from continuing to weigh in on both films.  Just yesterday, Bill Maher was trending on I'm-not-calling-it-X-Twitter (yet again) for saying how much he disliked the film for being both preachy and presenting a militant feminist view of the world that doesn't actually exist anymore. Whatever. Bill is just being Bill, as usual. He manages to be both right and completely misses the point at the same time.  Barbie does indeed show a greatly exaggerated view of the world that represents a male-female power dynamic that is at least 10, if not 30 years old. It's also true that Gerwig is not afraid to hit us over the head with its anti-patriarchy messaging.  But what Bill misses - and what dumbasses like Ben Shapiro, who went on to have an embarrassing 45-minute hissy fit about a freakin' Barbie movie, certainly miss - is that a) it's a satire,...

  So, yeah, it's been a while...  I abandoned this blog some four years ago for the simple reason that it just wasn't getting very many hits and it wasn't really worth the time and effort to maintain it.  A couple of significant changes happened recently career-wise, though, that I decided to bring this old blog back from the dead. First, with a new emphasis at News 24 on in-depth reviews and features rather than reviewing every single thing that comes out, there are a number of big movies (and TV shows) that I've seen of late that I haven't covered, and I've been itching to write about them. Just as importantly, I finally have the chance to improve the readership of this blog, as I was recently accredited as an official critic on Rotten Tomatoes (as in, my reviews will now count towards the "Tomatometer score"), so hopefully, by having these reviews side by side with my "official" reviews, they might draw more than the dozen or so readers I ...