I believe that the margins of the Half Blood Prince textbook is the only place that Snape wrote out the specifics of his bloodletting spell that Harry used against Draco.  It’s a really nasty spell, so I guess they’re assuming if they hide that book, no one could ever learn that spell again.  Of course, it’s been a…

It wasn’t just the title.  More Human than Human was a song about Blade Runner.

It’s not.  It made more money if you consider all the revenue streams than other movies that media writers trumpet as having higher box office, but those movies did, in fact, have higher box office.

Kind of crazy how ‘the greatest wizard of his age’ kept hiring Death Eaters to be the new DADA teacher over and over again.

I think you’re right.  Of the three, younger Spielberg probably would have had the best shot of making a successful film within the Marvel restrictions.  Kubrick probably would have ended up taking 7 years to make a Marvel movie that people would have argued for 50 years whether it was a masterpiece or trash. …

We don’t really need to make any assumptions about it.

I don’t know if she is or not.  My impression, from distilling all of the reviews, is that there is a real pacing issue with The Eternals and that she attempted to make a genre of storytelling a slow burn that doesn’t lend itself well to the slow burn.  That doesn’t mean she’s a one hit wonder at all, but it does mean…

Yeah, you’re right, the phenomenon certainly wasn’t unknown in prior decades, but it just certainly seems like it’s a lot more prevalent from the 2010's onward.

I didn’t say that festival movies that hardly anyone sees don’t count as movies. As I said in my first post, ‘1 film of note.’ Her festival films simply weren’t very noteworthy. They, at the very least, demonstrated to the people who had the power to hire her for projects that people will see that she had a basic…

Well, yes, she did have a couple of festival features that almost no one ever saw and a couple of short films and some television shows, so I guess you can say that she directed other films prior to Selma, but the reality is that she was given A Wrinkle in Time almost solely on the performance of Selma at the box…

Oh, yeah, I agree.  There are plenty of directors over the years who have had really good films and really bad films and other directors who have specialized in certain types of films over others.  With this modern batch of directors, the media types just need to stop hyping them up as this ‘amazing get’ if they’ve…

I think a lot of it has to do with the very modern trend of crowning a given director after they’ve directed 1 film of note. A lot of them just turn out to be mediocre to average storytellers who used up all of their best ideas on their first film. I am not saying that Chloe Zhao is one of them, but the director of A…

Well, there is a way to read Rotten Tomatoes that way. In comparison of Marvel movies for 2021, Black Widow got an average critic score of 6.9/10, Shang Chi got one one 7.5/10, and the Eternals got one of 5.7/10. Comparable movies in DC terms - Man of Steel had a 6.2/10 average while having a slightly lower…

Even months later, the AV Club still refuses to admit that Black Widow, when all revenue streams are considered, comfortably made a lot more money for Disney than Shang Chi did.

I don’t think either is.  Both were extremely good movies that were diminished by gradually worse and worse sequels.

Why is it necessary to drag the Clint Barton character and declare the Kate Bishop character ‘superior’ in every single minor article the sit writes about the Hawkeye series?

I tend to disagree with Dowd a lot of the time, but I think it’s telling that a film that attempts to introduce 10 characters at once doesn’t seem to be successful at introducing any of them. This has been sort of a running problem with ‘team’ superhero movies for awhile and it’s sort of telling that the most…

The Old Guard was pretty good.

“Disney made five Star Wars movies and only The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi Rogue One could conceivable be called better than the prequels. So they look better by default.”

It was always essentially a burnoff.