Captain America was created by men. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were his real-life fathers, and Dr. Abraham Erskine turned puny Steve Rogers into the Sentinel of Liberty. The tale as originally told i…

America has a crisis of masculinity. Apparently. Headlines and talking heads say young men, in particular, are struggling. They don’t know how to talk to women like human beings. They’r…

The Far Right is obsessed with IQ these days. “Low-IQ individual” is a standard insult that Donald Trump likes to lob at his enemies. Not coincidentally, these low-IQ enemies are almost always mino…

James Cameron notoriously called Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) a “moral cop-out” last year. He very soon plans to rebut Nolan’s tale of the creation of the Atomic B…

The First Power (1990) and Extreme Justice (1993) have a few things in common. These two movies star Lou Diamond Phillips. He plays a Los Angeles police officer in the former and the latter. And, m…

ALT: The Warriors: Baseball Furies Confrontation

It’s a simple question: does the lion Scar (Jeremy Irons) know about the existence of Rafiki (Robert Guillaume) the mandrill in the 1994 movie The Lion King, the 32nd animated feature from Wa…

Russian icons are a unique artform that developed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity over a millennia ago. These icons are considered a fundamental facet of religious practices and cultural tradition…

“Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?”-Chico Marx, Duck Soup (1933) The horrific events in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026 reveal that reality is a matter of willpower. Everyone ha…

This is crazy, Dewey. Ain’t nobody gonna wanna listen to music like this. Standing there playing as fast as you can…singing like some sort of punk. -Dave, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story…

God has been in the details of the Halloween series from the very beginning. In the 1978 original, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) says that the supernatural serial killer Michael Myers (Nick Cas…

Lady and the Tramp (1955) has the iconic scene with the eponymous dogs eating spaghetti. But there’s another moment involving food that stood out to me in a recent viewing. Though my daughter…

Long-time readers (do I have those?) might think I like picking fights with other film writers. After all, I devoted whole blogs to refuting Roger Ebert’s hatred of Swing Kids (1993) and Sara…

There’s a strange moment late in The Punisher (1989) involving a Japanese man wearing women’s high-heeled shoes. Frank Castle (Dolph Lundgren), the eponymous Punisher, has been stretche…

Just checking in six months into Trump 2. How we all doing? Yeah, not great. Strangely, I often find comfort these days in dystopian science fiction. In those stories the enemy is powerful but appa…

Sex is under attack in the United States. Congress has just introduced a bill, the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA), to try to outlaw pornography. Not only is criminalizing porn a bad ide…

The trailers for 28 Years Later (2025) have been giving a “folk horror” vibe: 28 Years Later is, of course, the long-waited sequel to the movie that resurrected zombies as a pop culture…

I like the idea of tales that can be different interpretations and different meanings from, and the different meanings they have are actually all truthful because they’re truthful for the peo…

YouTube video by Green Day

I hate Bryan Johnson. The 47-year-old millionaire techbro is obsessed with reversing his age. This obsession is the focus of Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. The newly-released N…

I wrote about Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and patriotism back in 2018. The blog post did not go over well on social media. Actually, I originally wrote the piece back in 2012 for a now defunct site …

The 50-year-old Texas Chainsaw Massacre series has always been about transformation. Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) evolved that theme even further into transhumanism. At the heart…

Nazis and white supremacists probably aren't what you remember about Timecop (1994). A soft core love scene with Mia Sara, Jean-Claude Van Damme doing his patented splits, that cool time portal ripple...

Video games play a surprisingly important role in Alien: Romulus (2024), both in the diegesis and as a lens through which to view the movie. This focus on video games could be viewed as an expression ...

I stumbled upon a new term during all the recent JD Vance couch-fucking hoopla: "Ecstatic truth." Filmmaker Werner Herzog coined this term some years ago and has discussed it many times. During a 2010...

James Gunn is obsessed with hordes. From Scooby Doo (2002) to Peacemaker (2022), he repeatedly returns to mass possessions, monstrous mobs and groupthink. Perhaps he best explored this theme of resist...

George Lucas is not known for writing the best romances. The Star Wars prequels ruined his reputation for that. But would you be surprised to know that Lucas has pondered love from the beginning of hi...

There are many, many playable characters in Batman: Arkham Knight (2015): Batman (Kevin Conroy), Catwoman (Grey DeLisle), Nightwing (Scott Porter), Robin (Matthew Mercer), Azrael (Khary Payton), Harle...

“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun!”  Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894) Dev Patel is a fan-favorite choice to play ...

You and I are old;Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;Death closes all: but something ere the end,Some work of noble note, may yet be done,Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. “Ulysses,” Alf...

You probably don't think of Neil Gaiman's seminal comic book series The Sandman that was published between 1989 and 1996 when you watch director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023). Well, ma...

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2023) is just a few months away. I can't help but think about the new movie's predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and the only movie writer/director George Miller made in-be...

Water can symbolize many things: Birth and cycles of rebirth, femininity, sexual desire, freedom, transformation, memory and the unconscious mind, purity and baptism (along with many other Biblical al...