MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD… 2016 sure was a year full of unpleasant surprises, huh? If you recall our December box-office predictions, I along with four of my fellow Agony Booth film reviewers predicted that Passengers...
While watching Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, I noticed that I was feeling something that I was unaccustomed to experiencing while watching a Star Wars movie. That feeling was boredom, which is an understandably unusual reaction to movies famous for space battles, blaster shootouts, and lightsaber duels.
History time, kids! Once upon a time, in a magical land of wealth and opportunity commonly known as the US of A lived a humble country lawyer named Huey P. Long. The nation had just emerged as one of the victors of a bloody World War and was going through an exciting period of technological progress and prosperity, blissfully unaware of the looming Wall Street crash and the ensuing Great Depression.
Welcome to the Agony Booth’s first ever Bad Superhero Movie Showdown, in which we compare two justifiably reviled superhero movies to definitively answer the question which one fails the most.
I’ve rewatched the four major sequels that were released in 2015 and 2016 to see if I was right about the nature of releasing a sequel to a property that’s been dormant for almost a decade.
I was left with the realization that beyond all the “clever” dialogue and manic pace, Sherlock simply is not as good as people think. In fact, Zero Effect did it better in every way.
Even if I could joke, the chilling Cold War nuclear specter evoked by The Dead Zone has put me off it for now. I find it hard to be jocular while thinking about the fact that in several weeks, an irascible simpleton will have control over the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet.
January is upon us, which as we all know is the time of year reserved for that curious mix of Oscar bait finally going wide, obvious duds that got pushed back from summertime/holiday releases, and the rare diamond in the rough taking advantage of a total lack of competition. In other words, expect Rogue One to dominate the box office for the foreseeable future.
Because it’s the holidays and a slow time of year around these parts, I figured I’d have a little fun and take a break from contemplating the Grim Reaper’s current mass celebrity killing spree and post this term paper I wrote back in college. Yes, even before this blog existed, and in fact before any blog existed, and even before the internet, I was writing long-winded essays about movies.
Lex Luthor is a rather unique example in this series of Movies that Predicted Trump, in that he actually is based on Trump.
Maybe Trump watched A Face in the Crowd at some point and took that lesson to heart, or maybe he just genuinely returns the love of his audience in a way that Lonesome Rhodes was too cynical and self-aware to be capable of.
Feeling like the end of days is coming? Or perhaps you’re just hoping they are? If so, you might enjoy The 5th Wave, which takes viewers on a post-apocalyptic trip involving aliens, child soldiers, and teenage love triangles.
Rogue One takes a different approach, and is both a prequel and an interquel, taking place between Episodes III and IV (immediately before Episode IV, as it eventually turns out) and details how the Rebellion managed to get hold of the Death Star plans that served as the MacGuffin of the original film.
So on the one hand, these two movies, which were released within less than a year of each other, couldn’t be more different. But given that both were released in the middle of the American Film Renaissance of the 1970s, it can be argued that there’s a kinship of sorts between these two classics.
A whole year ago, the world was treated to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first live-action Star Wars movie in over a decade. I sat down to write my review of that film way back then and… nothing. Blank. Couldn’t write it.
The movie does take place in 2021; it’s not too late to start making jump suits and boots a thing. And plastic plaid jackets. Can’t forget those.
The prospect of watching Rogue One—apparently the very first Star Wars film without any Jedi or Force-sensitives among its main characters—becomes all the more exciting. How will the protagonists solve their problems without the help of Force powers? More importantly, how could the absence of any Jedi in a Star Wars film affect the series’ good-versus-evil narrative?
Bob Roberts is a film that could never be made today. This is the kind of stock phrase you see applied to anything made more than a decade ago, usually as a segue into a rant about how much more sensitive our modern society is. Whether this is an indictment of modernity or lambasting an ignorant past is up to whoever’s writing the article, but that’s not the reason Bob Roberts could never be made today…
Breaking all rules of political etiquette, a candidate starts behaving outrageously, offending sensibilities with outlandish racially-tinged comments and unhinged acts of buffoonery. Sounds familiar, right? Except the year is not 2015 or 2016 but 1996, and the man in question is a fictional liberal Democrat named Jay Billington Bulworth.
For such a “smart” sci-fi film, Arrival sure hangs its hat on a tenuous understanding of a scientific theory (which it then proceeds to sloppily misapply) in exactly the same way as a stupid sci-fi film would.
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