Reading Time: 3 minutes Gotham’s billionaire prince Bruce Wayne shocked the world today by publicly admitting that he is Batman. Over the years, he’s protected the good people of the city from street thugs to psychotic supervillains. Bruce Wayne dropped another bombshell as well — he is hanging up the cape. No longer will Batman perch on high buildings […]
Film/TV
Exploring the world of film and television from a secular perspective.
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘X’ is an entertaining tour through cinema’s seedier backwaters
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ti West is good at silence. There’s a great sequence in his satanic panic flick The House of the Devil in which broke college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), having taken a suspicious “babysitting” job watching a very old woman upstairs, don’t even worry about it, dances around the living room of this not-empty house as […]
Posted inArts
‘Power of Sail’: We should be punching Nazis
Reading Time: 4 minutes There’s an adage in film: Don’t use babies or dogs. Because babies and dogs don’t know they’re acting, they have no inhibitions in front of the camera. A truly uninhibited force on stage or on screen can break your production’s reality because the audience realizes by contrast that everyone else is just acting. After seeing […]
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Denzel Washington’s ‘Macbeth’ should win best male actor
Reading Time: 2 minutes Denzel Washington should win the Academy Award for best male lead actor in the 2021 offering of Joel Cohen’s “Tragedy of Macbeth.” I have admired numerous players in this role over many years, but I have been waiting decades for someone to credibly and creditably deliver Macbeth’s lines in an American voice. We have seen […]
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Review: Leave the kids, watch the ‘2022 Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts’
Reading Time: 3 minutes The thing that sucked about Quibi is that a streaming service dedicated to short films is honorable in theory. The short is a criminally undervalued art form, too frequently condescended to as mere launchpads to making “real movies.” Meshes of the Afternoon, La Jetée, World of Tomorrow, The House Is Black, and countless others are […]
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Review: Computer-generated ‘Earwig and the Witch’ lacks Studio Ghibli magic
Reading Time: 2 minutes Earwig and the Witch (hereafter Earwig) is the first fully computer-generated feature produced by Studio Ghibli, giving it instant curio status. Since the mid-1980s, the studio has specialized in traditional hand-drawn animation under the stern perfectionism of Hayao Miyazaki, who’s only sparingly relied on CGI for elaborate productions like Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki announced his retirement […]
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‘The Tinder Swindler’: Netflix perfects the documentary mold
Reading Time: 4 minutes Netflix is in the content creation business. It’s a machine-tailored operation that’s algorithmically perfected its audience-driven productions based on the kind of user data that marketing companies would kill for. When this kind of power is granted to a media company with the ability to drive artistic expression, sometimes the output can be somewhat mechanical. […]
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Is the Pussy Riot ‘Punish’ music video calling out Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I don’t typically write about music, but the Satantic references (along with some interesting commentary on Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church) in the latest Pussy Riot music video, definitely caught my attention. While it’s certainly not the first time a band has used its platform to spotlight current issues, whether social or political, and […]
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Review: Before ‘The Batman,’ ‘Zodiac’ chronicled obsessive quest for answers
Reading Time: 2 minutes As The Batman broods its way through theaters, this week seemed as good a time as any to revisit David Fincher’s historical drama Zodiac, from which Paul Dano’s twisted Riddler takes inspiration. Yep, still good! It’s 1969, and the San Francisco Chronicle begins to receive encrypted letters from a killer calling himself “Zodiac.” A manhunt […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘The Batman’ overburdened with Hollywood excess
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the early 2000s Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka penned a well-regarded comic series titled Gotham Central, a police procedural of the Homicide: Life on the Street variety, set in Batman’s perpetually crime-ridden Gotham City. The conceit was that it pitted a bunch of working-stiff cops against a colorful, gimmicky Rogues Gallery, with Batman making […]