I don't know which is worse, frankly — I wasn't ever bored by The Prestige, but I hated everybody in it, and would never want to watch/read them again.

It's not just that, it's that del Toro always has Good win in the end, though the costs may be terribly high. Is there anything sadder than Liz as the lone mourner in the rain, because Trevor's other children are too injured and/or too monstrous to attend his funeral?

Hellboy 2 is a scathing indictment of world politics, Hollywood, and the comics industry itself. Hellboy 1 is a straightforward allegory of world politics, at least as straightforward as an allegory that links the myths of Theseus, King Arthur, Doctor Strangelove and Aliens can possibly be…

Hellboy 1 is a direct sequel to both Devil's Backbone and Blade 2, with additional embedded references to Mary Renault, the Alien movies, Dia de los Muertes, the Prophecy of Merlin, and Pinocchio. Blade 2 is a dark AU (or rectifying, depending on your perspective) of The Tempest, and continues the Minotaur theme of…

You didn't see that Hellboy flows directly out of Backbone, with the opening visuals being the continuation of the Espinazo ending scene where the "band of brothers" heads out into the wartorn world, leaving the desecrated sanctuary behind, under the mouth like arch…mirrored by the GIs moving into a desecrated…

Clearly mileage varies — I take it you didn't grow up on a diet of old monster movies, old war movies, old sailing movies and Japanese mecha from the Seventies? "How are they going to combine all of these things into one Platonic Whole of live-action Space Battleship…

Oh, it was bad too. A travesty of Japanese legends and mythology, with a white guy at the center only he's not really white he's half-fae, so that makes it fine!

On the other hand, it was made into a stage play with bunraku-style puppets that has been an enormous cathartic hit with Iraq War veterans, in England. I suspect that the play (which I've never been able to get to see) is both closer to the book than Spielberg's film, and more spare and stark dramatically than either.

Even I, as a general Pixar fan, can't make it through one without at least two major cringe moments where I wish I could just disappear, and without imagining how much better Studio Ghibli would have handled the same moments, sans the cheese.

It's as illogical a revision of a classic as Prometheus. When the underlying story architecture doesn't hold up, I don't really care how fancy any of the set pieces are, and as a life-long devotee of science fiction AND history, there's nothing surprising or jarring or original in its themes, let alone its darkness.…

A Bridge Too Far

Like Suspicion, where Alfred Hitchcock tried to make Cary Grant into a full-on sociopathic killer villain (he isn't sadistic, just ice cold under a cheerful facade) but the studio stepped in after panicking that it would damage the Cary Grant brand, and overrode at the last minute with a mandated "it was all a…

Now, now, let's not play the Blame Game here…

There was a thriller I recently picked up — the usual sort of popcorn/airport fare, I thought, only one that turned out to be more in the Alistair MacLean than the Tom Clancy vein, and it dealt with this problem in what felt to me, as an outsider but one who's travelled a bit and listened a lot in many parts, more…

I just think it's funny I honestly can't tell from the sidebar headlines which are, you know, Onion-Onion articles and which aren't:

Time for a Think-piece!

Watch it and get back to us.

I have to say that having recently watched Jason & the Argonauts for the first time since I was a kid — except for the skeleton warriors that always get played in Harryhausen retrospectives — I was extremely impressed with the opening scene, including the credits!

Teresa Moreno FTW!

Well, Kenneth Branagh was an exception to that, and their attempt to replace him with someone more malleable and less distinguished/distinct, aka Alan Taylor, resulted in exactly what you'd expect from a hack-for-hire…