From now on, I’ll be doing everything at one website.
‘80s All Over is the official website of the podcast that I started with Scott Weinberg and Bobby Roberts.
On that site, I will also be maintaining my own Pulp & Popcorn blog.
That’s where you’ll be able to find the actual release of Pulp & Popcorn on Wednesday.
Sorry to keep jumping around. It’s all a function of finding the right place to host everything, and I think this solution should work pretty well.
My desktop right now.
Okay. So here’s the deal. I know I said November 30. But that’s before everything went batshit crazy with end of the year Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards stuff. We vote this coming Sunday morning, and after that, I am once again “funemployed.” So let me restate the invitation for you. On Wednesday, December 7, one week from now, I’ll be releasing the first issue of PULP & POPCORN.
What is that? Well, I’m still answering that question for myself. A week from now, you’ll tell me what it is. A twice-monthly magazine featuring original serialized fiction, movie reviews, and longer-form film-related writing? A vanity piece for a guy between jobs? A huge mistake? It could be all those things and more! But you’ll be able to see for yourself in a week. And when you do read it (if you do read it), I hope you are gentle with me.
Triple Threat sounds cool; Iko, Tiger, Tony Jaa Asses will be kicked
BEE mouths off Batman fans go nuts again Hope the screenplay works
Comic book dead end Goldsman on Avengelyne What year is it now?
Singer on Freddie Sacha couldn’t get it done Is Rami M right?
Marvel seems to be aware of just how dangerous complacency can be for an ongoing film franchise.
At this point, I think it’s almost silly to pretend that this is anything less than one single giant interconnected film series called Marvel. Some chapters are about Iron Man, some are about Captain America, some are about Hulk or Thor or Black Widow or Ant-Man, and in many of the chapters, various combinations of those characters also occur. But it is all part of one big narrative, and if you really want to understand the scope of this thing that Marvel has done, you have to watch it all. There’s a new Marvel Studios logo in front of the film, and it uses film clips from everything they’ve made so far to help set the tone and immerse you in that world from the very start, reminding you of just how far they’ve come since the release of Iron Man in 2008.
Seen as the latest installment in this big strange sprawling story they’re telling, Doctor Strange feels like both business as usual and a radical left turn, and it’s interesting to see how they handle an origin story that introduces such big ideas, since much of what they have planned for these characters in the near future depends on the success of Strange. First, there’s the character, who will definitely spill over into other movies and other series. We have already heard that we can count on him playing an important role in the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, and this film makes a strong case for why he would be important. More than that, though, when he is initiated into the way of magic in this universe, it creates storytelling opportunities that literally change everything that we’ve learned so far about the way the Marvel world works.
Wednesday, November 30th.
9:00 AM PST.
Be here... or be somewhere else. I’m not going to be pushy about it. But it’s coming. Consider this a warning.
… just… drifting… along…
… is a pleasant-enough feeling for a while, especially when you’re dealing with the big issues. It’s safe to say that the end of my relationship with HitFix is going to end up being a defining moment for me, no matter what happens next. I have been pushed out of the proverbial nest and have no idea what exists below. It is as strange and aimless a feeling as I’ve had in almost 20 years. When I think of the milestones in my life, they are typically moments of great upheaval, and this feels like one of those moments.
But one can only drift for so long before you start to feel unmoored. I may have made the choice to spend a few weeks holed up and radio silent to make myself feel better, but I did so knowing full well that it was just a temporary thing. I’m going to try to start posting some more regular things here as a way of warming back up. Over the weekend, I started to write a piece about Shin Godzilla, and I realized it was turning into a Film Nerd 2.0 piece just by default. That was a pleasant-enough feeling, and I was just rounding the homestretch when the Devin Faraci news broke, and I quickly stepped back to watch what was happening and to try to make sense of it.
Hey, guys. I hope no one expected me to jump over here and keep the same pace that I’ve kept at HitFix for the last eight years. In some ways, I feel like a marathon runner who just sat in a massage chair for the first time. “Holy shit, you mean there’s something besides running?” It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t churn out content for a living how it feels, but I think the phrase “churn out content” gives you some idea. I love writing. I love communicating. I love explaining how art makes me feel and talking about the ways it illuminates us as people. I have, for the most part, enjoyed everything I’ve done for the last nineteen years. But it also demands a sort of constant engagement where you are always on, always working on something, always moving. There is no real down time. I worked on vacations. I worked on weekends. I worked in the middle of the night. Everything I watched, I had to put through the filter of “Is this the right use of my time right now? Is there something else I should be watching instead?” I still haven’t been to a press screening since being unexpectedly fired from HitFix, and I’m not sure when I will attend one. I have plenty of invitations, but I don’t feel the same burning push to see everything the second I can. I am meeting people, talking about possible opportunities, and carefully considering what I really want to do next. In the past nineteen years, I have had two online homes. That’s it. I know just how lucky I’ve been, and that means I need to really think about what this next section of my life is going to look like. So many people have e-mailed me or texted me or called me or reached out in some ways, and it has been empowering to realize how many of you genuinely care what’s next. Rest assured, something’s next. What it looks like will no doubt surprise me as much as it surprises anyone else. That’s one of the joys of being knocked completely out of your comfort zone. Everything becomes possible. And how can I possibly complain about that?
Oooooh. Lovecraft anime. I like the mood of this first glimpse at a short film by Shuhei Morita. Explicitly based on the Cthulu stories and mythology, this looks like it creates a visual style to match the essentially unseeable things that populate Lovecraft’s work.
One artist. 60,000 drawings. 4 years. Nova Seed is an animated pulp sci-fi film, and it is amazing. I want to write about it at length. It just played at Fantastic Fest, and it is exactly the sort of film that I have spent the last 19 years writing about, something new that is the result of someone’s genuine passion. Did I mention I love this movie?
Watching Death Wish 2 for ‘80s All Over, and, boy... Michael Winner sure did love people, huh? </s>
Taken as a movie by itself, Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is fine. There are things it does very well, and it leans heavily on the casting of Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Vincent D’Onofrio, who waddles away with every scene he’s in. Like the original Magnificent Seven in 1960, this film exists in the planet-sized shadow of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and like the original Magnificent Seven, it’s solid, sturdy, movie-star dependent entertainment and nothing more. I’m fascinated by just how many times this story has been bent or twisted or overtly remade. I am particularly fond of the variation in which the group who is approached to defend the village from the bad guy turns out to be frauds. Three Amigos! and Galaxy Quest are both terrific examples of that version of the story. Maybe my favorite straight-up retelling of the original film is Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, and like every good remake or riff on the original, the thing they get right is creating a good enough bad guy and a big enough challenge to make the eventual showdown feel like a real payoff. There was a moment where Zack Snyder was trying to get Lucasfilm to commit to a standalone Star Wars film that would have been a straight-up retelling of Seven Samurai, but there’s already a pretty great Seven Samurai/Star Wars mash-up in the first season of Clone Wars, an episode called "Bounty Hunters.” Instead, Snyder’s doing his Seven Samurai riff with Justice League, and I think his love of the basic bones of the thing may make all the difference. The truth is, I just don’t like Fuqua that much as a filmmaker. I think this might be his most purely entertaining movie. The script, credited to Nic Pizolatto and Richard Wenk, doesn’t really land the big punches. Peter Sarsgaard minces and slithers as the bad guy, but a good example of the ways the film fumbles would be an early scene in a church. Sarsgaard gets up in front of everyone and brings up a kid and makes an elaborate point with a jar of dirt and it makes no sense and doesn’t come across as particularly menacing. At least, not until he burns down a church and starts shooting people. Enough of the film works that I would recommend it, and you will get exactly what the previews are selling. But it’s not really a Western in that it doesn’t have anything to say about the West, either as history or as metaphor. It is more concerned with other Westerns than any authentic vision of the American West, and casting Denzel in the lead means the first scene plays closer to Blazing Saddles than Django Unchained. Denzel’s tongue is firmly in cheek as the film starts, and then gradually eases back into place as the film gets more and more serious. I’m guessing it opens big, and people will enjoy it generally, and I’ll even give them a little extra credit for not worrying about the franchise and telling a story that ends pretty conclusively with this film. But it’s product. It’s slick, it’s fun, and it’s product. This is pretty much MGM’s only move at this point, cranking out remakes of recognizable titles they own, and it seems fitting that they’re remaking slick studio product as slick studio product. Just don’t ask for anything more.
Toshi’s old enough now to start watching subtitled movies, and he is boundlessly curiously about his namesake. When we watched 1941 recently, he was excited to see Toshiro Mifune show up. This is going to blow his mind. I can’t wait to watch it with him.
