Expelled Grey Matter

One of the major backups for major Hollywood studios seeing less and less financial return on large blockbusters has had for awhile now is China.  While it is really hard to say that the Transformers movies underperformed in U.S. theaters, the truth is that they and many other effects-laden money pits often are so expensive to make that even the obscene hundreds of millions they make in the domestic box office are not enough to turn a profit. Thus, they turn to foreign markets.  The advantage of many of these movies (especially many of the recent ones starring Dwayne Johnson) is that they are not dialogue heavy, and what does need to be translated is not as heavily contextual as to cause problems.  It doesn't hurt that often the movies are altered for the Chinese market to make them even more universally acceptable.  The characters are already two-dimensional, the movies hollow spectacles, and so it is perfect for light entertainment fir a non-English speaking a...

I recently read an article about the 1980s nostalgia being perpetuated by Stranger Things .  There was a lot I didn't agree with, but the author grew up in a small town, and though Phoenix was a decent sized city by the middle of that decade, that was one thing I could relate to, although the portrayal of the decade he was perpetuating was somewhat clouded by a misunderstanding of how the economic collapse at the time was due to almost 20 years of mismanagement, including about half of it throwing resources at a useless war.  As someone who appreciates history the second half of the 1980s were an amazing time to be alive, and even growing up in a working class family I didn't find it that bad after 1985. One thing that was bad, and continued to be bad for a good part of the following decade, was the crime.  Phoenix wasn't on the radar for most people (often overshadowed by - and largely suffering for envy for - Los Angeles), but it had many problems.  Like any m...

Despite the budding desire to start an entire Avengers universe (now known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe), The Incredible Hulk did not exactly blow audiences away the same way Iron Man did.  However, it still made money, and Iron Man was a popular film, so now Marvel was committed, and became even more committed to creating their universe - much to the chagrin of Jon Favreau, who soon found himself bogged down with notes from Marvel execs on how Iron Man 2 was supposed to go. There were some other problems rearing their heads, even this early in the game.  Marvel, despite its decades-long popularity, is famously known for treating its talent like garbage.  This unfortunately seemed to pass on from the comic book world to the movies as Terrence Howard, who had played Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes in the first movie, soon found out.  The role was expanded, but Howard's paycheck was not, leading to suddenly changing the actor in what would be a major role sup...

The last time I decided to go through all the James Bond films was barely into Pierce Brosnan's tenure as the famous spy.  I knew most of the movies - the Sean Connery and Roger Moore films were played frequently on television, albeit quite edited, and I had seen the Timothy Dalton films when they came out on video - by The Man with the Golden Gun was a mystery.  I had never run into it on regular television or cable, and unlike the rest of the Bond films I had to look for this one at the video store. I soon found out why.  It was not considered a great movie, and the video I was able to get of it, rather than at the higher end of quality of video tapes at the time, was a copy of a washed-out print.  It looked more like the treatment a low-budget film that had fallen into public domain than a big-budget action film.  That just added to the point that it was just not a very good movie.  Even Moonraker got better treatment, and it's typically considered ...

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 ...