Older Films

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

What makes a film, or anything for that matter, good? Perhaps I should answer that in a different way, since the word “good” in the English language has two broad but distinct definitions – the first moral, the second beneficial. Both of these are valuable as qualities in filmmaking, but what I mean to ask specifically is how do we, from our various frames of reference, discern value in a particular film?
The Lady from Shanghai

Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai begins with the sea, roiling and foaming beneath the opening credits. Many films noir are laden with existential anxieties; indeed, fatalism and cynicism are as commonplace in the genre as stylized lighting, bantering innuendoes, and convoluted crimes.
TRON: Legacy

TRON: Legacy can hardly be called a great film, but it made quite the impression on me when I first saw it on opening night back in December of 2010, and I have been making excuses for it ever since. Emerging from the theater, I might even, in my adolescent fervor, have described it as […]
John Wick: Chapter 2

Early in John Wick: Chapter 2, the titular assassin (Keanu Reeves) somberly places his weapons in a box, puts the box in a hole in his basement, and covers it with wet concrete. The action suggests an addict burying his stash, and symbolizes his intent to leave his world of violence and live a new […]
Snowden: Propaganda and the Mundane Beasts It Makes

Oliver Stone is one of the few directors whose auteurism is his ideology. While he has hit a few correct notes (mostly in the Adagio for Strings sequences of Platoon) there is very little about his directorial style—no signature montages or lengthy tracking shots—that say “Oliver Stone” the way that his completely misinformed takes on […]
A Gritty Goodness: The River Thief

The typical hero of a faith-based film measures their own satisfaction with the ending by the metric ton. If you stuck a teaspoon in the ending of the average Christian film, you’d pull it out dripping with enough sweet goo to give everyone in the world a mouthful of cavities. We don’t merely like redemption. […]
Becoming Like The Teacher: Stranger Things And Pedagogy

The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher. -Luke 6:40 Here, finally, is something which cares nothing for novelty, originality, innovation. There are fine television programs which do not worship at the altar of The New, but the makers of those programs are infrequently interested […]
God’s Not Dead 2: First World Problems

If courage is a mark of greatness in film making, God’s Not Dead 2 is deserving of more than a few laurels. It takes real guts to give a movie called God’s Not Dead 2 a theatrical release date of April 1st. If the release date is analogous to riding a motorcycle without a helmet, […]
Suicide Squad: Are Comic Book Movies Actually Interesting?

“A lot of comic book movies are actually pretty interesting…” If, over the last ten years, you have lived within the vicinity of teenage boys, you are likely familiar with this claim. The claim that a thing is “actually interesting” is, often enough, actually interesting in and of itself. The “actually interesting” claim assumes that […]
The Witch

Long time readers of this website will have no problem predicting where a review of this film was apt to begin. “Let us not neglect meeting together…” as St. Paul teaches. “…ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is…” as the blessed Jeremiah teaches. Either of these verses ought to do for […]
The Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Ethos of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

INTRO: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Joss Whedon, and Myself I consider myself a casual Marvel fan. I could probably count the number of superhero comics I’ve read on one hand, but I’ve seen every film in the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (the web of interconnected superhero films that started with Iron Man) since Iron Man 2 (2010) in […]
The Lone Ranger: Gore Verbinski’s Unheralded Masterpiece

A similar dilemma faced those who watched Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger when it was released over 2013’s Fourth of July weekend. Was it stupid? Or just pretending to be stupid? Most critics and audiences subscribed to the former possibility. In fact, most people really, really hated The Lone Ranger. More than just stupid, they called it overlong, offensive, bloated, messy, disastrous, horrific, boring, and so on, with the hyperbolic amounts of vitriol further fueled by reports of the film’s extravagant budget. In the end, it was a financial and critical bomb, and seems to have singlehandedly destroyed Verbinski’s once-promising career in the same way the infamous 1980 flop Heaven’s Gate destroyed Michael Cimino’s, mere years after he was deemed a rising star due to the success of The Deer Hunter.
The Bourne Atheist: Ridley Scott’s New Soulless Cosmos

This ain’t no Sierra Club. This ain’t no National Geographic Society neither. “Fuck you, Mars,” says Martian Mark Watney shortly after finding himself utterly alone on a foreign planet. Man has been set against nature many times before, especially in 20th century literature and film. At times, man must battle nature. The Old Man must […]
Where’s That Olde Time Religion? The Force Awakens

I suspect I am not unique in claiming to have had serious conversations with friends in the wee hours of the morning wherein real considerations of future plans have been hashed out using the original Star Wars trilogy as a template for a genuine pursuit of truth and goodness. Should I find a Yoda under […]
My Life With The Chill Kill Cult: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Where do flashbacks come from? Who delivers the flashback to the audience? Is it the same authorial power which delivers the present tense narrative to the audience? And who is privy to the flashback? If the flashback occurs in the mind of a present character, should the flashback be trusted less than the objectively rendered […]
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Left Behind: A Good Premise for a Lousy Movie

Blessed be Netflix, that magical website which allows one to watch terrible movies without feeling guilty about paying for it. After all, you already dished out $8 for the month. The only problem is that sometimes the movies aren’t just bad. They are horrid. Left Behind is a perfect illustration. One will, no doubt, walk […]
Control

I once spent an afternoon on Babblefish, inputting English song lyrics, translating them into other languages, then translating them back into English to see how they’d changed. Something hidden but true might be discovered within the English that would only come to light when the English was subjected to the grammatical rules of another language. […]
The Enduring Brilliance of The Office: We Are All David Brent Now

A scene in The Office Christmas Special nearly gives David Brent away. Or rather, David Brent comes closer than usual to giving himself away. The Christmas Special is set three years after the conclusion of The Office and plays catch-up with faces made famous by the BBC2 documentary series. David has been made redundant, won a […]
Charlotte’s Web (1973)

In the world of trigger warnings, where one needs to wear kid gloves just to touch the kid gloves, the old 1973 animated adaptation of Charlotte’s Web is a relief. I see recent children’s movies from time to time, and I know that beloved characters still die, but nothing in kid’s movies of late rivals the […]
Good Kill: The Banality Of Slaughter?

“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it,” says Robert E. Lee. Most veterans, from the Bunker Hill to Afghanistan, would agree with this statement. But what happens if war ceases to be so terrible? This is the question at the center of Good Kill, the latest from […]