If you’re currently married or you were ever married, I’ve got news for you: your marriage is insane. I hate to be the one to tell you, but there it is. People you know, people you love, will take stock of your relationship and life choices and say, “They’re cuckoo banana-pants. No doubt about it.” […]

Anything can be funny, right? There are two schools of thought, there. The first is the theory that anything has the potential to be amusing. Comedy is all about puncturing bubbles of pretention, going after targets that deserve skewering. As long as the joke teller is punching up instead of punching down, the only limitation […]

“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.” That quote comes from the under-loved Avengers: Age of Ultron. Upon its 2015 release, we were 11 films deep and there were two schools of thought about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a sprawling epic of interconnectivity. Eager nerds like myself were excited. Comic book creators and imagination machines […]

What do we mean when we talk about whitewashing? It’s a practice that’s been around since the beginning of cinema, and it’s the practice of casting white actors in roles that were either originated by non-white actors or should have been played by non-white actors. Maybe when you hear that term, you think of older films from […]

With a few exceptions, nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Whether the filmmakers are confident or delusional, they start out with good intentions. But here’s where it gets tricky. In order to make a good movie, you need a compelling story, interesting characters, and a way to bring the two together organically. Sounds […]

Every week before I see the movie I end up reviewing, I talk to my kid about it. He’s 8 years old, bright, and possesses a goofy sense of humor. Sometimes he’s interested in what I’m going to see. Other times, his attention is captured by more lofty subjects.* I mentioned offhandedly to him that […]

For anybody who likes movies, especially those of us who are approaching or have already reached a certain age, there’s a temptation to drag out the hoary old chestnut of, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” That statement is the rhetorical equivalent of Schrodinger’s Cat, where it is both true and false at the […]

  In 2008, the fledgling Marvel Studios released Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. Before the release, there were rumblings that the film would fail, and fail big. How could it succeed? It was a movie about a superhero that only hardcore nerds like me had heard of. Plus, Downey was best known not as a […]