Years of this bull$*!%
A grim, gorgeous epic that renews yet regresses… The Batman has answered the question of whether or not it belongs, and has earned its place as a separate universe and franchise right alongside whatever newly-re-rebooted, or magically-revived, or clumsily-redirected, or finally-focused version of the “DCEU” comes out of these new efforts from Zaslav leading Warner Bros Discovery.…
I hope the young male Dana’s of these tumultuous days are able to turn away from the example of Dana White Jr. in his slavish continued loyalty to not only Donald Trump but also all the precepts and requirements of “being a man” that White and his fellow man-o-sphere circus barkers like Joe Rogan exemplify. There is a healthier, deeper, more real “masculinity” that comes from inside……
Given the dour headlines regarding box office performance and second week for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad… the size of its audience remains uncertain. But if you’re out there reading this right now—mythical mirthful gore-hound—and you haven’t yet seen it, let me reassure you. The Suicide Squad is gory and funny and heartfelt and great: it’s the Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil of super-hero movies.…
It’s very easy to understand people wanting to go back in time, to pick up not only the DCEU serial story where it left off five years ago, but the sense of potential of a planned universe and story-line executed by a stellar cast and crew of talent assembled. But, with the time that has passed and the changes in both the people involved and the market in which these stories compete, is it even possible to #RestoretheSnyderVerse?…
Unlike the roles most actors portray, when we take on the role of being a father it’s one we take on for life. It’s never Something You Leave Behind. If Picard: Season 2 wants to bring the most satisfying closure to the biggest cliffhanger left at the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by bringing back Captain Sisko, they need to ensure he should already have returned home long ago… after all Ben Sisko is Star Trek’s Best Dad!…
In the utopic future of the Federation, we needed to be humbled by being taken to ground, before we opened up to other possibilities. Our systems of greed and fear and power-mongering had to fail us, before we would be ready to change and meet a race like the Vulcans who advanced themselves to the stars with a social system designed entirely around logic.…
Both follow-ups have a similar relationship to their predecessors, and a similar nature as a response to them. To be blunt, for both, the latter movie is a dumb mess; a corporate course correction in response to a lot of outrage from a group of internet detractors with loud voices. It dropped all of the plot threads from its predecessor, completely changed in tone, and wrecked some of the more interesting and universe-challenging questions asked by the movie before it.…
I’m amazed that young Dana thought to note his concern but entirely missed the meat of the story: where the issue came from. I insisted quite mistakenly, in fact, that there was “no reason.” I had a very good reason for weird shit to be happening to my fingers. See, when I was sixteen I went on a trip to Vegas with my family, and there I went through a fairly stupid misadventure which practically destroyed the fingertips on my right hand, and left them without fingerprints for months.…
It’s funny looking back now at the things that haven’t changed. I’ve never been to Maine, but I did spend a lot of my teenage years reading Stephen King’s bibliography, and I’ll bet a lot of my early writings in here will show a great degree of imitation of his work–not really intended as flattery since I didn’t have the level of self-awareness at the time to label it such. I suppose that is what makes imitation flattery’s sincerest form.…
Loot boxes, as a general rule, are not gambling as currently legally defined… but the longer the self-regulating forces hide behind the cash out distinction as the reason to ignore these developments, the more they risk being accused of secretly advocating and tolerating business practices that are already being labelled as predatory.…
