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Movie Curiosities: Heart Eyes
February 13, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Heart Eyes comes to us from writer/producer Christopher Landon. While he’s probably best known for Happy Death Day and its sequel (and getting jettisoned from Scream 7 after its producers kept finding new ways to fail), Landon is also responsible in some capacity for Freaky and We Have a Ghost. Also on board is Landon’s recurring collaborator, co-writer Michael Kennedy, who previously wrote the aforementioned Freaky and It’s a Wonderful Knife. The third screenwriter is Phillip Murphy, who previously wrote The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard; and the director is longtime CollegeHumor alumnus Josh Ruben. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Love Hurts
February 10, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
We should all be profoundly grateful that somebody saw Everything Everywhere All At Once with the takeaway that Ke Huy Quan deserved his own action movie vehicle. Even more grateful that the “somebody” were the geniuses at 87North, the ongoing standard-bearers of modern action cinema. But then came the trailer for Love Hurts, and a little red flag came up. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Love Me
February 9, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
AI is a notoriously thorny issue right now, and AI bots are a key reason why. Everywhere you go online nowadays, there’s some algorithm pulling photos and posts from social media, pretending to be human so they can talk with us and bait us into clicking some link. In fact, a great many AI bots are romance scams, playing into our sexual lust and/or our need for connection. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Companion
February 2, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Last year, we got a little movie called Strange Darling. Quite notably, the promotion for that movie told us basically nothing, except that it was “from the producer of Barbarian.” Never mind that Strange Darling had a tenuous connection with the 2022 sleeper hit, invoking the title sent a clear message. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: September 5
January 29, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Yes, September 5 is a movie about the Munich massacre. There have been quite a few depictions of this horrible incident, most notably with Munich in 2005, the Steven Spielberg project that took quite a few Oscar nominations and failed to win a single one. (Yes, the movie lost Best Picture to Crash that year. Have I mentioned recently that 2005 was a fucking awful year for movies?!) For those who need a refresher, let me bring you up to speed. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Nickel Boys
January 28, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
In recent years, there’s been some controversy over the matter of film length. In general, the mainstream attitude still tends to prefer shorter runtimes, as they’re less costly to produce, less taxing on the audience, and easier for theaters to screen more runtimes during the day which in turn leads to greater box office revenue. There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions — The Brutalist, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Irishman are all recent examples of movies that got heavily criticized for their runtimes in surplus of three hours. Which seems rather odd, considering how nobody seems to mind the Avatar films and some MCU flicks running near or over three hours. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: Presence
January 26, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Stephen freaking Soderbergh. The magnificent bastard. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities — 2024: The Wild Rides
January 23, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
We come at last to my favorite films of 2024. They may not be awards darlings or hailed as “true cinema” (though some of them are, surprisingly), but these are the ones made me laugh and cheer and pump my fist, proud to be a cinephile.
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Movie Curiosities — 2024: The Disappointments
January 22, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
As a general rule, I try my best not to make this a “Worst of” list. I sincerely try not to dignify movies that stand no chance at all of being good. That simply wasn’t feasible this year.
Movie Curiosities — 2024: The Masterpieces
January 21, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Here we have my choices for the greatest films of 2024, which are not to be confused with my favorites. What’s the difference? Put it this way: Schindler’s List is a great movie, but ain’t nobody putting it on to unwind after a hard day. This is a list about the awards favorites, the critical darlings, the films that are destined to be film school staples in the years to come. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: 2024 in Review (preface)
January 20, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
I’ve said — early and emphatically — that 2005 was a historically bad year in cinema. There are of course any number of contributing factors, but I’d argue that the big one was 9/11. After all, it can take two or three years to make a film of Hollywood quality, and the industry is depressingly slow to respond to global and/or cultural changes. Four years after 9/11 feels like it’s right in the sweet spot after the film executives realized — too late — that we were never going back to the way things were before 9/11, but before anyone had figured out what new cultural paradigm was going to take its place. Read the rest of this entry →
Movie Curiosities: The Last Showgirl
January 19, 2025 in Blogs, Curiosity Inc.
Wow, talk about sneaking in under the wire. Read the rest of this entry →
