Category: Articles
Who Wore It Better: A Cinematic Smackdown
News flash: Hollywood is derivative. I’ll pause here to let that sink in. I know it must come as quite a shock. So I suppose if I’m a producer and I’m plunking down 50 mill on two hours of fantasy, I’d want as much assurance as possible that an audience would actually come see the…
5 Classic Monster Movies That Are So Bad They’re Good
Monster movies haven’t always had a good run. For much of Hollywood’s history, we’ve been presented with bad stories, poor funding and somewhat terrible special effects. Rarely do films in this genre get the same kind of love you find in superhero films or war movies. But sometimes they get something right. Every now and…
Jason Bourne and everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today
The five biggest movies that opened in the USA in the last weekend of July, 2016 had the following Rotten Tomato scores: 76, 62, 58, 57, 50. For those of you who don’t know, RT considers a movie to be “Fresh” if it has 60 or higher, and “Rotten” is it falls under 60. So,…
A Tip for Film Writers: Always Be Writing
Many times I hear writers say they are stuck or are in a writer’s slump because no ideas are coming, or because they don’t know what to write. They want an original idea for a film that nobody has ever seen before. They want the next great original idea that rocks the film world. Some…
The Trotsky and Youths’ Red Life
The first time I watched The Trotsky (dir. Jacob Tierney) I was nineteen years old and had just finished participating in my local Occupy. Huddled underneath a blanket awkwardly wrapped around my body, there I sat in my unheated bedroom, a fierce winter wind howling just metres from my small cinema; though I was cold…