Zoolander was one of a handful of movies that was shot on location in NYC before 9/11, but released afterwards. Ben Stiller chose to remove the Twin Towers with CGI. So it’s kind of funny that he’s already altered this movie to eliminate a painful reminder of one local trauma, but is now leaving in a cameo from the…

I would sum up Verhoeven’s career-long thesis in this way: “Your biggest weakness is that you’re unable to override the needs and desires of your lizard brain — and I’ll prove it to you by exploiting that weakness for two hours.”

Furiosa kind of had a thin backstory in Fury Road, which was largely resolved by the plot. Like, we saw the all-woman outpost she was kidnapped from, we met the guy who kidnapped her, we saw what happened to the Green Place, and we know exactly where she winds up in Joe’s organization. To the extent the Star Wars…

Fun fact — despite first playing the president 24 years ago, Bill Pullman is actually a spry 66 today, and therefore 8 years younger than the current president, and 11 years younger than the next president.

I’m surprised there were still 84 people willing to die for a Vanilla Ice concert in 2020.

Pete is vocally anti-racist, but he doesn’t hang out with black people or do anything to elevate any black employees to his level at work. The show did a good job of showing how Pete’s rhetorical anti-racism, while well-meaning, also has sharp limits when it comes to action. But I did like how Pete was a generally…

Anthony Weiner learned nothing from Anthony Weiner!

Yeah it was something I only really thought about when I was showing my kids Batman 89 the other day. I grew up in NYC in the 80's and remember when certain parts of the city were “scary” and it felt like some lowlife could pop out of nowhere and mug you at any time, even though nobody in my family has ever actually…

It’s especially weird in that the plot of Begins and TDKR are both, in different ways, reliant on the geography of Gotham. Begins shows us that most of Gotham City is on the mainland, with the Narrows being a small island separated by a drawbridge. TDKR’s plot requires most of Gotham to be on a Manhattan-like island…

It’s kind of weird how the two Burton movies are still, to this day, the only two live action movies that present Gotham as a fictional city with its own unique history and architecture. Schumacher’s Gotham is totally incoherent, with no sense of geography or style beyond putting neon lights on everything. But Nolan…

Would Justice League really have been that much better if we’d gotten standalone Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg movies beforehand? While Warner Bros. is guilty of rushing to the team-up (that email browsing session in Batman v. Superman is just embarrassing), the real problem is that they didn’t nail the casting, and the…

This is a film in which the characters are constantly talking about politics, and the story literally stops at multiple points for a Ken Burns style history lesson. Spike Lee has earned the right to polemicize as much as he wants, but not every viewer needs to agree with everything he says. As a straightforward war…

It’s not just that they invert Helen and Bob’s roles and otherwise remake the movie — *every single action sequence* involves the supers using their powers to stop a vehicle.

This was the Pixar movie where it first really bothered me that so many of their movies have a climax that involves animals / toys / other non-human characters essentially breaking the story’s rules and physically affecting the human world in ways contrary to their nature.

I kept feeing bad for how Lawrence is going to have to deal with the stress of being a father to a baby he never really wanted with his ex *during quarantine*. Obviously that was never part of the plan for the character when they set up this plotline for next season, but whenever the show returns from hiatus they’re…

I take it more as Spike Lee worrying that Allen’s filmography — which is of incalculable importance to the medium of film in general and NYC filmmaking in particular — is in danger of just being erased from the canon. As a fellow famous NYC filmmaker, it’s probably a lot easier for Spike Lee to empathize with someone…

I think the name change was more evil than lazy, even before it turned out they were stealing a black woman’s identity — everyone knows what the A really stands for, so changing to Lady A was a way for them to perform wokeness while still winking at fans that the pre-war South is what’s up. It’s like when Kentucky…

At some point the studios are going to have to accept that nobody’s going to movie theaters until there’s a vaccine, right? It sucks they spent billions of dollars on movies that have to go straight to streaming, but even when they finally release these movies it’s going to feel weird that a 2021 movie has characters…

So how is all this working for people who aren’t married or cohabiting? Are any single people really sticking to Zoom dates and going three months without sex, or has everyone been breaking the rules the whole time?

I grew up watching the Christopher Reeve movies so much that I can never really accept another actor in the role. I think Cavill could carry a fun Superman movie, and most of the problems with his portrayal stem from Snyder’s woeful misunderstanding of the character. But, he can never define the role as his own the…