When I was a little boy my dad (a man with anger issues) took me to the movies to see some kids’ film, and we accidentally went into the wrong theatre and saw a different kids’ film.  My dad was seething with palpable tension throughout the whole thing but he was too much of a coward to admit defeat and remove us/go…

There is something just, I dunno, silly? about the conflation of “parallel dimensions” and “different versions of the Batman film franchise”.

Capitalism at its finest, man. Oh, these aren’t different attempts at commercial exploitation of a property, they’re different timelines.

I can’t think of a single instance in the last 15 years where I’ve watched a trailer, felt basically good about what I was seeing, and then the movie has turned out well. I know that’s rather the point of trailers, but I watched this and I thought: oh there’s some stuff in there that seems kind of interesting, I’m not…

Hi, me again again.

It’s funny to be a horror fan and find yourself objecting to gruesome violence, isn’t it? I love gore, I love slasher films that use gore, and I think that gore can represent so many different things, and engage you in so many different ways, that it’s a useful and important tool in the horror…

Carpenter is one of those directors who matches his influences. You can tell he grew up on classic 50s horror and EC comics and SF literature and all that obvious stuff, but observing his craft is like watching Howard Hawks and Hitchcock collaborate. We talk a lot about that lean, economical approach he’s developed…

Nah it’s the rights.  If they stray too far from the Avengers they find themselves reliant on a character they don’t own.  Despite the Avengers becoming the stars of the MCU (largely, one suspects, because they can’t get the X-Men), Spider-Man is surely still the most popular Marvel character.  I’m sure Disney/Marvel…

That would be the rights issue though wouldn’t it? Marvel/Disney still don’t own Spider-Man in film, they use him under licence, so I suspect they don’t want to get into a position where they’re too reliant on a character they don’t own.  Hence his walking the line between “comparatively frivolous solo outings” and…

The thing that got me momentarily excited in the lead up to Halloween 2018 was a comment that McBride made in an interview in which he observed that in the original, Michael Myers is a creepy stalker more than a murderer. I’m not sure when he changed his mind but the original observation points to why none of the…

That’s so kind of you! I’m truly humbled. Thank you for taking the time to write that, I’m really grateful. I think about Halloween a lot, so I’m very gratified that the post spoke to you.

These “new” sequels are as lame as the old sequels. Honestly, and it feels weird to say this, H2O seems to me to be the most compelling follow up to the original. Even H2 doesn’t authentically sit next to the original, despite Mr Carpenter’s perfunctory involvement. The original may very well be my favourite American…

Isnt "I can impersonate one guy really well" a weird audition piece though?  Like nobody has said "we are inviting Robin Williams auditions" have they?

The image of the big Thor-style hammer turning into a tank is genuinely cool, though.

Chibnall’s strengths are “getting a job he’s not remotely capable of doing” and “inexplicably tricking large swathes of people into believing, against all available evidence, that his writing hits even the most rudimentary of quality baselines”.

I dunno, it could be ravages: “The Ravages Of Time” and all that.

That's great stuff.

Yeah that show had more wit and insight than you might have expected from a spin off cartoon in that era.  Indeed it was probably the last time this franchise had any wit or insight.

That’s because Thatcher dismantled the domestic pixelart industry.

Fundamentally the difference is that the US has never had a (white) Labor/Workers movement of any great stake in the mainstream, whereas the UK has a stronger and longer history of that sort of thing. This is not to say that it is (or ever was) some socialist paradise, but the working class remains a core part of the…

Capitalism turns us all into the things we once resented. I think of all the cool stuff that I liked from earlier decades, all the stuff that had transformed me into a shit Romantic hero lamenting my being born in the wrong era, and I think of all the people who thought I was a moron for thinking that the 80s was…

Nah it looks different on Netflix.  They've re-matted back to 4:3 and stretched it.  iTunes and previous streaming platforms used unmatted masters.