seeing this in a theater for the first time ever drove home something I can't believe I've glossed over for decades: Frank Miller probably loves this movie. chiaroscuro vistas, rough scenes of hostile masculinity dripping with peculiar sexual undertones, big shots of scaly wildlife where shadows fall into the crevasses of dry flesh, and forbidding elliptical storytelling -- you could have told me this is a Sin City prequel when I first saw this and I'd have believed you. of…
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Barbarella 1968
zero-gravity strip shows, bande dessinée hanky-panky, stoic angel men who know the cosmic ways of love, and at the center of all of it, primetime Jane Fonda -- people are quick with aphorisms like “they don’t make ‘em like they used to," but when it comes to comic strip movies, they really don’t. and that’s a shame; imagine what it might have done for some of these weirdo gen-z prudes who decry sex scenes and other romantic stuff in films…
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Transformers: Age of Extinction 2014
(screened via IMAX 3D at Regal Cinemas, Chicago)
There’s a moment in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age Of Extinction where two of our protagonists follow an elderly property owner through a decrepit theater house—the dust and desolation suggests it was abandoned around when CinemaScope became a thing—and we’re listening to the codger cluck over the state of contemporary cinema. “Nothing but reboots, sequels and remakes… nothing but crap,” he sniffs, nodding towards a poster for Howard Hawks’ El Dorado, the 1966…
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The Batman 2022
a Gotham City stunner that thunders, booms, and pounds those dreary milquetoast Marvel doldrums into paste. grapples with a moral quagmire raised by the mere existence of its subject and gets to work building a better superhero saga for the modern age. finding that elusive sweet spot between Tim Burton’s gothic nightmare world and Christopher Nolan’s stark post-9/11 realism, Matt Reeves’ vision of Gotham arrives feeling very much of our current moment while also looking like an emo kid music video…
