Expelled Grey Matter

I remember in the late 1990s when I heard that Peter Jackson was going to be directing the Lord of the Rings trilogy that I was filled with excitement.  My wife had bought me the books a few years before and, despite my grumbling about not caring for books about magic and dragons, it turned out I liked them quite a bit.  Where I was expecting the old stale tropes that had been copied from J. R. R. Tolkien, I realized that the source material also dovetailed with medieval literature I was currently studying in college at the time.  Not to mention that I was probably one of the few Americans not scratching their heads and going, "Who's Peter Jackson, and why is this being filmed in New Zealand?"  I had been a fan of Jackson's since seeing Dead Alive , which became a cult horror film.  I hunted down the films he did before that and, though Heavenly Creatures was far from what he had previously made, it quickly became an arthouse favorite.  He returned to ...

Netflix has been a bit iffy on delivering good movies.  Well, in all honesty, it's been pretty iffy on delivering bad movies as well.  It's the perfect platform for delivering b-movies that studios are afraid to take a chance on in theaters, allowing them to get traction they otherwise wouldn't get.  It worked for both Bright and Bird Box .  It doesn't help that they have been historically willing to slap together, or grab, almost anything, from slapping the Cloverfield label on a half-baked sci-fi film or signing Adam Sandler to a multi-film deal when it doesn't appear to be 1995 - although Murder Mystery seems to have broken his series of misfires.  Still, so far, Netflix has been known for delivering some amazing mini-series and television shows, but the good movies have been few and far between. That's why I was a bit shocked when I saw the trailer for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs .  It mentioned Joel and Ethan Coen, and my first thought was tha...

With all the jokes that still go around about how Chuck Norris can largely destroy about anything in his past, it's hard to believe that, as of writing this, he is 79 years old.  It is also hard to believe that I have seen very few of his films.  I learned early on that Norris, at least when younger, could hardly deliver a line without it sounding like he was reading directly from a cue card.  When you're young and caught up in "artistic integrity," that is something that automatically becomes the focus rather than just the fact the guy made fun movies in which he, believably, kicked every bad guy into oblivion. It's also important to remember that while Arnold Schwarzenegger went into politics, Sylvester Stallone into bad comedies, Steven Seagall into an ego-induced career coma and Jean Claude Van Damme into being a parody of Jean Claude Van Damme, Norris moved to television once his movie career started winding down and dealt with bad guys as Walker: Texas ...

Iron Man did a number of things.  It set up an entire universe (whether that was intentional, or largely just to set up a future Avengers movie and have done with it, I'm still not sure) that would, after years of stumbling, bring the main Marvel characters to life.  While Iron Man was a strange place to start, part of the reason was because at the time everything wasn't largely consolidated under one studio.  Almost every major movie studio had grabbed the characters at one time or another and, often, did little to nothing with them - at least nothing that could be considered watchable. One of the few that was at least tolerable was Ang Lee's Hulk .  The problem is that it was one of those times everyone who wanted that elusive "character development" got exactly what they wanted, at the expense of much of what made the comic and, more importantly for many of us, the television show enjoyable.  Instead, it was an Ang Lee movie, which is typically a good t...

Let's address the kaiju-sized elephant in the room, while totally ignoring that there is (kind of) a kaiju elephant in this movie.  I sometimes pay attention to Rotten Tomatoes when it comes to major movies, because if I am going to spend the time to go to the theater and see it (as well as the expense) then I want to know that I am not wasting my time or money.  There's a reason that I, like many adults, are more than happy to wait until we can see movies on the small screen.  However, this is a Godzilla film. Godzilla is quite important to me, no matter how bad many of the movies can be technically.  I grew up on watching giant monsters stomp cities (as a kid they don't look as much like toys as they do when you're an adult) and beat the living snot out of each other.  There were a couple Saturday morning cartoons I liked, but I was always anxious for 10:00 am to roll around - that was when classic Universal horror films, Ray Harryhausen stuff and Japanes...

One of the reasons George Lazenby gave for leaving the Bond franchise after On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a concern that James Bond had already become a dinosaur - a relic of the early 1960s that would not translate well into the 1970s.  While that movie was nowhere near the box office failure it is meant to be, there was still enough backlash that Diamonds Are Forever overcorrected.  Remember Goldfinger ?  This one is diamonds!  And Shirley Bassey!  Guy Hamilton's directing it again!  It was a heavy-handed apology that still couldn't ignore that the '60s were over despite featuring yet another plot by Blofeld to take over the world.  Most importantly, it brought back Sean Connery one last time.  Connery was offered five and a half million dollars to appear in Live and Let Die , but he was done with the series and the drama that was working Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, the series producers who by this time were almost con...

Most movies automatically lend themselves to a sequel, whether they want to or not.  If it is successful then it seems that money, if not creativity, will find a way.  Since Deadpool was a bit of a gamble  to begin with, it was surprising that a sequel was greenlit even before the movie hit the theaters.  Even more surprising, unfortunately, was that the director of the first split early on with Ryan Reynolds over creative differences. If it wasn't for Reynolds's commitment to the character the second film could have easily ended up in development hell (something that it is possible that the second sequel or the upcoming X-Force series may suffer now that Disney has purchased 21st Century Fox and begins to purge anything that doesn't fit their agenda).  Even worse we could have ended up with a film that stained the first one just by merely existing. Deadpool (Reynolds) has been out slicing and dicing bad guys, but realizes he better make it home for his...