Great point about Chigurh and Smalls drinking their own Kool-Aid — they are presented as not being entirely of this world but they find out that they are, that they can be hit and more importantly balked.

Ah ha ha, you believe this pig to be carbon-based, requiring oxygen to animate itself, to feel, to live. This is a silicon organism, essentially a breast implant with a noise orifice.

Yup, and none of those subversions feel heavy-handed, like the author(s) are smacking the characters around. It only takes one screw-up. And here’s another sidetrack — I rewatched Raising Arizona for the billionth time the other day and realized that it is in many ways a dry run for No Country, if it weren’t for the…

I have not even heard the pig’s voice and its mere design inspires a cold, furious loathing. Bland and smooth meat, the very picture of a hormone-pumped swine. A butcher, when presented with such a pig, would only have to scoop away the bloodless cuts with a spoon. And the music producer would laugh at the…

Heh, this is a peril of the youth entertainment franchise, isn’t it? Thinking of how I saw the first two TMNT movies in the theaters and wouldn’t have gone to the third one at gunpoint. That’s kids’ crap!

Frank Jacobs is the guy who wrote nearly all of these and he was brilliant. MAD put out a book of his stuff a little while back and Weird Al wrote the forward, very much acknowledging his debt.

This line from the review — “This being a del Toro picture, we of course pity him” -- is a huge red flag. Pity sucks! It’s a mealy-mouthed, self-congratulatory feeling and it stank up Shape of Water. I know del Toro loves his monsters and feeling sad about their rejection but he’s been mistaking flat storytelling and…

Post office murals rule and are yet another casualty of the criminal oversight of USPS, as office are closed these can be lost if people aren’t careful.

It’s cool Spielberg is giving this a shot but his update can’t hold a candle to the Jacobs/Drucker version:

“It’s all one long dark night, a grungy smuggled noir of the digital wasteland, and we’re never really sure what’s going on, except that a lot of it involves characters watching things on screens. That, too, feels dead-on accurate.”

Now this is the real revival to get behind. 

I really need to check out Mitchells. And I love Spider-Verse and its brilliant animation, but are its humans that distinct from the ones in Encanto? There’s a conversation above about house style and how there isn’t that much differentiation over the years sometimes, and I think that’s true. But I think it’s also…

“But it’s the same thing with the Disney live action remakes, especially those that try to be faithful to their source material. The stories remain the same, and though the recycled nature of them is its own set of issues, just from a visual standpoint, it can’t work. Live action is not vibrant, fluid, or elastic…

The “one ordinary member of a magical family” dynamic is making me think of Ray Bradbury’s stories about the Family and in particular “Homecoming,” which has a similar setup. Probably too sad to be adapted into a movie like this, though.

Is it just harder (read: costlier and more time-consuming) to come up with different character design in this mode? Where a different shape likely requires a lot of different modeling? Because it is pretty stale to my eyes but I am also heavily biased against this style anyway.

This movie is unnatural! God made All About Eve, not All About Steve!

During the shutdowns of the pandemic independent bookstores in my area (Boston) pushed gift cards or their online equivalents as a way to give the stores some money in the short term, I’m surprised those didn’t get mentioned here either. Obviously it’s not the same in actual gift-giving season but for people who live…

Pegg is incredible in World’s End, but I always want to stick up for Frost there too -- like Pegg, he’s stretching out but into normal competence instead of slobby comedy (which he is great at!) and he nails both the resigned rejection of Pegg’s good-time enthusiasm and how that gives him a base for heroism and…

I believe Baby Driver was also an idea/screenplay Wright came up with some time ago and returned to once he got the money and ability to make it. Which is not necessarily a bad thing but it’s really obvious how juvenile the movie is next to the Cornetto movies, in particular World’s End, and even Scott Pilgrim, which…

I think his parents had struggles of their own to deal with, going by these photos his mother had to live with the constant pain of wearing a ridiculous wig.