The Möbius strip- Animated Spider-Man swings to top of box office, Oscar discussion, ‘The Shining,’ ‘Jurassic Park’ inducted into National Film Registry

Posted on December 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse opened at no. 1 with a solid $35.4 million, which is the largest opening all time for an animated movie in December. Fellow new release The Mule was a distant second with $17.5 million, followed by Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch and Ralph Breaks the Internet in their sixth and fourth weeks of release, respectively. The weekend’s other new release, the $100 million-budgeted Mortal Engines, suffered a catestrophic $7.6 million debut- Box Office Mojo

As Into the Spider-Verse has catapulted into the conversation for Best Animated Feature, here’s a look at how producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller broke the rules of animation to create a moving comic book- Indiewire  

Mortal Engines is, conservatively, on track to lose more than $100 million at the box office- Variety

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Re-examining the backlash against ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ one year later

Posted on December 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Most images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi celebrated its first birthday last Saturday, though it feels like we’ve been living under its shadow for ages – time moves strangely in the era of American fascism.

Criticism of the film exists at a complicated and troubling intersection of grand artistic ambition, valid criticism, fan entitlement and zit-faced urchins who don’t want women or brown people in their movies or country. There have been several attempts to lay out the various aspects of this intersection, and this piece is going to lean heavily on the work of others, but with a year’s hindsight, I want to at least try and put everything in the same place.

The story of audience response to The Last Jedi is a story that transcends this individual film and several different groups of films. This is a story about how our culture processes media in the late ‘10s and how the political divisions most prominent in this era cross over into other facets of American identity. Let’s get started.

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What is ‘Widows’ even about

Posted on December 10, 2018 by reelentropy

Everybody thinks she’s the greatest, but how weird would it be at this point to see Viola Davis playing a character who isn’t absolutely horrible to everyone around her? She’s gotten pretty one-note lately. Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

4/10 I’m still not actually sure what happened in Widows.

The plot is simple enough – I mean, it’s incredibly needlessly complicated, but I at least understand its contents. Renowned heistmaster Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is killed on the job, along with his crew. Their prize, $2 million in cash stolen from local crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), burns to ash in the process. That was Manning’s seed money for a campaign to be alderman of Chicago’s south side, and he demands that Rawlings’ widow, Veronica (Viola Davis), pay him back.

Anybody else want to talk about how campaign finance laws are still quite strict, and Manning was already headed for a world of trouble if he was financing a campaign with money that, at any point, had to be stockpiled in a large stealable block of cash? No? I’m literally the only person in the world who cares about that? OK, glad we cleared that up.

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‘The Crimes of Grindelwald’ – a witness for the defense

Posted on December 7, 2018 by reelentropy

Ugh. When you have enough characters to do a big photoshoot like this — just, ugh. It’s all so slimy. Images courtesy Warner Bros.

4/10 In 2016, audiences were generally pleased and relieved to return to an Americanized version of the wizarding world, but Paul and I were dissatisfied with its length and general lack of direction. Now, the sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, is being met with critical derision, but I’d like to stand up for it, if only half-heartedly.

A year or so after the first movie, Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) has escaped imprisonment and is hiding somewhere in Paris, searching for Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), who apparently survived being completely fucking obliterated in the first movie. Wizarding authorities now suspect Barebone is actually Corvus Lestrange, the last in a long line of pure-blood wizards who was thought to be lost at sea as a child. Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) cannot fight his former lover Grindlewald, and sends Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to Paris in his stead. Scamander is joined by U.S. auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz), who would be Barebone’s half-sister if authorities are correct, as he searches for Barebone.

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Decent ‘Overlord’ fails commercially

Posted on November 30, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

5/10 Overlord is a quiet little action/horror movie about Nazi zombies that passed through theaters without much notice, failing spectacularly to stronger intellectual properties like Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter.

Overlord follows Private Ed Boyce (Jovan Adepo) and demolitions expert Corporal Ford (Wyatt Russell), two members of a paratrooper squad sent to destroy a German radio tower in an old church to prepare for the D-Day invasion. When they get there, Boyce discovers gruesome Nazi experiments on the French locals surrounding the apparent distillation of a zombie serum.

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