The Northman

The Northman

A defining feature of movies in general since Cultural Ground Zero movies isn't so much a lack of quality as a lack of humanity. As visual effects have advanced and budgets ballooned, vision and authenticity have vanished from the silver screen. One current film maker whose works have bucked that…
April 26, 202210 Comments
sorcerer

The Sorcerer’s Harem

Regular readers here know that the West is afflicted with a crisis of meaning, and we have been for a long time. It's a target-rich environment for clever con artists with no conscience and a penchant for spinning tall tales. Author JD Cowan brought up a Twitter thread by Lin…
March 7, 202212 Comments
Last Action Hero

Last Action Hero

It's often said that the mark of a good parody is that you could take out all the jokes, and it would still play well as a straight genre film. The best parodies start with that ingredient and add a deep love for the source material. Due in part to…
February 4, 20227 Comments
diverse hollywood

Diversity Devours Hollywood

But like a snake eating its own tail, the film industry's autophagy can go on indefinitely. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences—the industry’s central nervous system—had been founded in 1927, and now it had 8,469 voting members. It had tried over the years, and especially since Donald Trump’s…
January 13, 202220 Comments
Anchorman

Anchorman

About twenty years ago, comedy movies enjoyed something of a renaissance under Gen Xers like Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips. That class of early-to-mid aughts film makers didn't produce high art, but they did turn out the movies your stoner friends quoted incessantly. These were the last comedies to feature…
December 23, 20215 Comments
Travis Bickle Loser

Biggest Loser

Regular readers know I'm always on the lookout for new cultural insights. To that effect, a recent Twitter thread just caught my eye. This thread resonates with a post I wrote earlier this year about the same phenomenon. The only difference is the decade. If you want to gauge how…
October 19, 202112 Comments
Falling Down

Falling Down

I don't like to use the word "God" because it' overused in the United States ... it's been politicized and has become an attack--like if you don't believe in Jesus, you're not one of us! -Falling Down director Joel Schumacher Bar none, the movie that readers ask me to review…
October 18, 202121 Comments
Typewriter Monkey

A Million Digital Monkeys

Hollywood gets short shrift around here, and it's easy to see why when they not only insist on accelerating ever farther out of touch, but reveling in it. Actress Geena Davis's latest role is getting artificial intelligence bots to monitor movie scripts to make sure Hollywood remains politically correct. The…
October 11, 202125 Comments
The Game

The Game

From time to time I like to revisit movies from around Culture Ground Zero. Since Western pop culture is now fully in the grip of a fanatical cult bent on memory holing the past, it's beneficial to look back on what we've lost. One of the most tragic casualties of…
October 4, 20213 Comments
Escape from LA

Escape from LA

In the early 21st century, an American presidential candidate wins a highly unorthodox election by leveraging a national disaster. As the front man for an extreme moralizing movement, he oversees the implementation of sweeping neo-puritanical directives to enforce his sect's moral vision nationwide. Federal law enforcement is tasked with prosecuting…
September 27, 202110 Comments