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23 Dec

WB and Paramount Merger Would Be Bad for Everyone Except Shareholders

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Ethan Hunt is about to join the DC Universe (or what is left of it). Top Gun pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell could find himself flying wingman to Harry Potter. Get ready for Batman v Transformers! The jokes wrote themselves Wednesday evening as late holiday season news broke: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav met with Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish earlier this week to discuss a potential merger of their respective media companies. Yet any attempt at humor is of the strictly gallows variety (particularly since it is difficult to imagine someone like Tom Cruise working for David Zaslav). That’s…

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23 Dec

The Iron Claw: True Story of Von Erich Family Curse Is Even More Tragic Than the Movie

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When it comes to serious movies about wrestling, The Iron Claw is a bit unorthodox. During the height of wrestling’s popularity in the late ‘90s, we had two major documentaries on the subject via Wrestling with Shadows and Beyond the Mat. The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke was serious, but fictional, based loosely on the modern life of Jake “The Snake” Roberts and his contemporaries. The recent Fighting with My Family, meanwhile, was a sensationalized and comedic take on Saraya/Paige’s initial ascent in WWE. By contrast, The Iron Claw is based on a bitterly true story that has always been considered…

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23 Dec

Home Alone’s Last Minute Addition of Old Man Marley Changed the Ending of a Classic

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You know what they say about Old Man Marley, the South Bend Shovel Slayer? Back in ’58, he murdered his whole family and half the people on a suburban Chicago block with a snow shovel. He’s been hiding out there ever since, disguising the remains of his misdeeds by turning victims to mummies, and using the dust off their bones to salt our streets. That’s what the kids in the McCallister house tell each other every cold December night when the lonely stranger played by Roberts Blossom appears outside their window. It’s of course a lie, but the truth was…

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23 Dec

How Many Parts Will Rebel Moon Have?

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The heroes have saved the day by the end of Rebel Moon, at least for the moment. Admiral Noble may be down but he’s definitely not out, as we learn in the final moments of the movie. Surely, he’ll soon be back on Veldt to punish Kora and the rest of the warriors who dared challenge the Imperium. The cliffhanger ending shouldn’t come as a surprise to Zack Snyder fans. After all, the movie is officially titled Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire. We know that at least one more Rebel Moon movie it’s on its way, the…

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22 Dec

Aquaman 2 Review: The King of Atlantis Limply Buries DCEU at Sea

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One of the most amusing bits of the 2000s HBO sitcom Entourage was the fake movies that existed within the TV show. While protagonist Vincent Chase was fictional, the Hollywood he moved through was not. Real actors playing versions of themselves cameoed as they helped build Chase’s fictional movie star career, with each faux film working as a parody of some trend or fad at the time. The most infamously pointed of these was Aquaman, a phony superhero flick designed to poke fun at the recent Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. I thought about that gag for the first time in…

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22 Dec

Rebel Moon: All the Major Star Wars Influences in the New Zack Snyder Movie

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This Rebel Moon article contains spoilers. After rolling credits on Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire, you won’t be surprised to learn the Netflix movie began life as a pitch for a new Star Wars film. Director Zack Snyder brought his idea for a “more mature” Star Wars movie to Lucasfilm in the early days of Disney’s takeover of the studio. While that version of what would become Rebel Moon never got off the ground, it freed Snyder to create his homage to George Lucas and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai completely in his own way, without having to…

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22 Dec

Rebel Moon Ending Explained and How It Sets Up Part 2

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This article contains Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire spoilers. They almost appear disappointed. The motley band of heroes whom Kora (Sofia Boutella) assembled to save her agricultural moon have come to fight, and probably die, against the might of the Imperium. But when the dastardly Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) revealed himself to be a toothless fighter, and was left to rot after being knocked into the sea by Kora, it seemed like everything worked out on its own. The death of an admiral, Kora informs us, means that his now leaderless dreadnaught must return to…

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22 Dec

10 Great Batman Christmas Stories That Are Surprisingly Full of Holiday Cheer

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Quick, name a superhero with a more cynical perspective than Batman. Okay, sure there’s Spawn, but I meant in mainstream comics. Yeah, Punisher, but how about in DC Comics? Sure, there’s John Constantine. But I mean a character less suitable for Christmas stories. What’s that you say? Constantine once crushed the bones of St. Nicolas and snorted them into a powder? And Lobo murdered Santa? Okay, the point is that Batman doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would make for a good Christmas story. Spider-Man can deliver presents while swinging across New York City and Superman has carried…

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21 Dec

Let’s Talk About the Leave The World Behind Ending

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I’m a bit late to the party here, and this is an unusual article for me to be writing. I don’t like to use first person, see! But even though the film came to Netflix a couple of weeks ago I feel like we need to talk about Leave The World Behind and its ending. This isn’t an ‘ending explained’ as such, because I’m not completely sure I can fully explain everything. Instead I think we should talk about it, and I invite you to join me in the comments with your explanations. Here’s what I made of the film…

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21 Dec

The Exorcist Might Just Be the Biggest Christmas Movie Ever

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Every year brings new Christmas movies with their often plentiful and phony Christmas cheer. In fact, most of the recent ones released on streaming—such as 2023’s less-than-esteemed bunch—seem designed expressly for their disposability. They’re content as sincere as polyester Christmas roping strung around the company’s copier in the back. You’re meant to watch them with one eye on the phone, and no Christmas Spirit in your heart. But there was a time, dear reader, when a Christmas movie could be a truly magical thing: an emotional and cathartic experience shared with strangers in a darkened theater that would make you…

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20 Dec

The Lord of the Rings Movies Are the Ultimate Christmas Movies

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This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, the final part of the Academy Award-winning The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Adapted from celebrated author J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy novels of the same name, these films more than just introduced the iconic realm of Middle-earth to millions of fans around the world; they became legends in their own right. So much so, The Lord of the Rings has become a holiday staple celebrated by millions around the globe. Indeed, despite being set in a world without the usual Yuletide trappings, this trilogy has quietly become something…

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19 Dec

Maybe Quentin Tarantino Should Just Make That Star Trek Movie

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Quentin Tarantino will not direct his much talked about Star Trek movie. We have known that for a while, with the iconoclastic filmmaker moving away from the project back in late 2019 and following the release of his last film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. But now as Tarantino edges close to lensing his fabled final film, we are getting some better insight into the starship that got away. In a new interview with Collider, screenwriter Mark L. Smith, the Oscar-nominated scribe who co-wrote The Revenant with Alejandro G. Inárritu, and who’s next film is the George Clooney-directed The…

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19 Dec

The Rise of Skywalker’s Most Divisive Twist Broke the Original Plan for the Sequel Trilogy

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Four years on, we’re still learning new things about The Rise of Skywalker and the behind the scenes decisions that led to the highly divisive final chapter of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. For some, Episode IX was a return to form for the franchise, while for others, it paled in comparison to what came before, particularly the equally divisive The Last Jedi, because it chose to play the hits instead of saying anything new about characters or their world. In particular, there are still fans out there debating the movie’s most controversial and surprising arc — Kylo Ren’s return…

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19 Dec

Kang the Conqueror Deserves Better Than the Marvel Mess With Jonathan Majors

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This article contains light spoilers for Loki Season 2. In the 31st century, the scientist known as Nathaniel Richards surveys the landscape around him and feels nothing but disgust. The son of the 20th century time traveler Nathaniel Richards and half-brother to Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, Richards the younger knows that he’s bound for greatness. Yet, no one in the bland utopia of his generation can challenge him and give him the chance to prove his greatness. And so, Richards follows the example of his father and seeks power in the future and the past, building an army…

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19 Dec

The Best Movies of 2023

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It is fair to say 2023 did not go the way many of us expected, perhaps especially those in the film studio conference rooms. This time last year, the prospect of Greta Gerwig’s curious dance with intellectual property opening on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s talky, three-hour biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb seemed like a double-header risk. Yet on the other side of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Barbie and Oppenheimer stand as the highest and third highest grossing films of the year, respectively. Meanwhile many of the perceived blockbuster sure things in long-running franchises failed to take…

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19 Dec

Ranking the Ten Best Scrooge Movies

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In 1843, London publishers Chapman & Hall released A Christmas Carol. Written by Charles Dickens and illustrated by John Leech, it was inspired in part by Dickens’s anger at inequality in his country, especially as it affected children. Despite its aversion to the upper classes, A Christmas Carol was an immediate hit among readers and critics. Given the book’s popularity, it’s no surprise that movie makers have picked up on the story many times. Between its clear redemption arc and ghostly premise, the story has everything that a good movie needs.  Still, not every adaptation of A Christmas Carol is…

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18 Dec

Frozen Empire Is Moving On From One of Ghostbusters’ Most Recognizable Characters

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There is no Gozer, only… well, we don’t know yet. After the chaos that followed the release of 2016’s series revamp Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, Sony went full nostalgia with Ghostbusters: Afterlife in an attempt to appease change-resistant fans. The studio recruited Jason Reitman, son of original director Ivan Reitman, as well as the original four Ghostbusters (including the late Harold Ramis in CGI-ghost form). Afterlife even brought back the main villain of that first movie, Gozer the Gozerian. In other words, it was a textbook legacy sequel that introduced a new generation of heroes while nodding to the originals,…

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18 Dec

Barbie Asks If There Is Room for Queerness in Barbieland

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This article contains spoilers for Barbie. When Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) initially wakes up in her perfect pink world, Barbieland looks like a genuine utopia. At first glance, everyone seems happy with their place in this matriarchal society. Within Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Women hold positions of status and power and constantly support each other. There’s no war or conflict (aside from the Kens trying to get Barbie’s attention). But even with all the progress that Barbieland seems to have made as a fictional society, there doesn’t seem to be much room for queerness within this hyper-stylized, feminine world. Queerness as…

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16 Dec

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor Is One of the Best Star Wars Movies You’ve Never Seen

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If you’re anything like me, the two Ewok movies were always that piece of Star Wars media you meant to get around to at some point but never did. I remember first reading about the existence of these movies in a Star Wars action figure guide, yet even as a Star Wars obsessed kid, I never bothered to seek them out. They weren’t exactly easy to come by for a while but when they dropped on DVD in 2004… I still never got around to it.  Yeah, it was part of Star Wars lore, but both films were about the…

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16 Dec

Barbie and the Masculine Joy of Being Kenough

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This post contains spoilers for Barbie The Dream (House) is dead. That’s the revelation that Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie must face midway through Barbie, when she and her friends from the real world return to Barbie Land and visit her home. In place of the Dream House, a pink paradise that served as the stage for all-night dance parties and splendid breakfasts in the morning, stands what Ken has termed “the Mojo Dojo Casa House.” “You don’t have to say ‘dojo’ and ‘house’,” Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) responds.  “And ‘casa’,” continues Gloria (America Ferrera).  But Ken (Ryan Gosling) isn’t having it.…

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