In light of Michael Bay’s fifth (5th!) upcoming robot-sex movie, Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), I thought it appropriate to look back on Bay’s previous work on the franchise that has become synonymous with big, loud, brain-dead Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, as well as obnoxious product placement and blatant, shameless international pandering. I have made my … Continue reading
I am not the biggest fan of AMC’s popular zombie-drama, The Walking Dead, but I wasn’t always a critic of it. When the show first aired in its abbreviated, six-episode debut season, I was one of its early converts, impressed by its production values, epic scope, and excited by the prospect of a long-running television … Continue reading
Amidst the cultural backlash, civil war, and whirlwind that was 2016, filmmaking soldiered on as usual, featuring a plethora of comic book-adaptations such as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Captain America: Civil War (2016), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Doctor Strange (2016), and the sidestream rebuttal, Deadpool (2016). It was a good year if you … Continue reading
With the upcoming release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) upon us, I decided it was time to look back at the Harry Potter film megafranchise that birthed the modern Young Adult (YA) novel-adaptation craze, giving us everything from Twilight (2008-2012) to The Hunger Games (2012-2015) to Divergent (2014-present) to Maze Runner … Continue reading
Even if not everyone appreciated Zack Snyder’s particular rendition of the Man of Tomorrow, or enjoyed the manner in which it was executed, I remain appreciative of the fact that, by the end of its two-film story arc, it succeeded in humanizing Kal-El, the Man of Steel. Superman, from his introduction and maturation in Man … Continue reading
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Zack Snyder’s divisive followup to his equally divisive Superman-reboot, Man of Steel (2013), will likely remain the most controversial film of 2016. It has received so much press, both good, bad, and ugly, that even general audiences with only passing interests in the film industry have discussed it … Continue reading
The bigger the cinephile you become, the more specific and technical your filmmaking preferences and opinions grow. Movie-buffs become more nuanced in their evaluations of their favorite and least favorite films, picking out distinct filmmaking techniques that they notice, time and time again, which can either elevate a film’s material or drag it back down into … Continue reading
As per usual, my yearly recap article is way later than every other blogger’s on earth, but then again it’s just in time for this year’s upcoming Academy Awards. So much happened in cinema in 2015, and very little of it was comic-book related. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) was a bust, and the fun … Continue reading
If you’re anything of a movie-buff, you’re aware that the past decade of filmmaking, and in particular the past ten years of film distribution, have been wrapped in a controversy so intriguing that it calls into question the very medium of movies themselves: The introduction and subsequent domination of HD digital video cameras to shoot motion … Continue reading
Sometime in the early 2000’s, many of my fellow small-town, Midwestern citizens got excited over another non-distinctive, brainless summer action movie called The Fast and the Furious (2001). It starred then unknown actor Paul Walker and recent breakout “star” Vin Diesel, the latter of whom had previously broken onto the map from the low-budget sci-fi film, … Continue reading
