Tag Archives: Viola Davis

“Fences”: Living On After the Dreams Have Died

January 31, 2017 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fences!

My annual Oscar-quest begins anew! Every year since 1997 I’ve endeavored to see every film nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards race, even if its place in the running can be attributed to blatant studio machinations, even when I know a film and I will be at odds with each other the entire running time. Fences, on the other hand, met my high expectations and then some. The only real issue I had wasn’t the film’s fault. I misread the theater seating chart, bought the wrong assigned seat, and got myself stuck in the second row from where the the cast all looked like towering monster heads.

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Yes, There’s a Scene During the “Suicide Squad” End Credits

August 7, 2016 By in Comics/Lit, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Suicide Squad!

Not the Bad News Bears reboot we want, but maybe the Police Academy reboot we need.

Midlife Crisis Crossover calls David Ayer’s Suicide Squad the best DC Comics film since The Dark Knight!

To be candid, that’s not too much of a compliment if you reconsider the competition. I suppose it’s a close race with The Losers, but I think of that more as a DC/Vertigo movie even though the original Losers were an old-time DC property. Suicide Squad has quite a few flaws in need of fixing — or, quite possibly, unfixing if you believe the press — but the overall studio-approved package contains a lot of well-crafted elements, some inspired performances, and a pretty faithful approximation of the 1980s Squad of my teenage years.

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MCC 2014 Pilot Binge #13-15: “Gracepoint” / “Murder” / “Stalker”

October 9, 2014 By in Meta, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments
Gracepoint!

Our Heroes prepped for their roles by attending a seminar on “Surviving an American Remake of a European Series” and then reading viewer complaints about The Killing.

This very special, pretty unwise MCC project continues!

I’m combining three entries in one for simple bookkeeping reasons. See, some MCC entries get Likes from fellow WordPress users. Some MCC entries see an uptick in site traffic. Some rare MCC specimens are blessed enough to garner both. Up to this point most of the MCC 2014 Pilot Binge entries have been earning neither. Even spammerbot accounts are looking at them and thinking, “This no good! We go spam other bloggers! You call when you go back to posting photos! THEN we link you to counterfeit Louboutins long time!”

I refuse to quit the project because that’s the kind of mule-headed fool I am, even if means more TV viewing discomfort. A few pilots may still merit individual entries in the future, but I’ve received the message loud and clear that not every impression I have is worth 700-1,000 words. It doesn’t help that my tastes are sometimes confounding and governed by peculiar guidelines. Regardless, we’ll see what we can do with this silent input and go from there.

And now, a few words on three pilots about MURDER.

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“Ender’s Game”: Kids Kill the Darndest Things

November 3, 2013 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Asa Butterfield, Ender Wiggin, Ender's GameIf the stakes were catastrophic enough, the training techniques were sufficiently intensive, and the world were just that unforgiving, who’s to say preteens couldn’t be accelerated to maturity and transmogrified into hardened soldiers like today’s eighteen-year-old American military volunteers?

Thus is the foundation laid for Ender’s Game: in a future where millions have perished at the hands of insectoid aliens (the predominant taxonomic class of Hollywood aliens), Earth’s last hope — and who knows how many hopes were wasted before the story begins — lie in an interstellar military system built on targeting the most gifted junior high students for recruitment, instead of the older kids least likely to go to college.

So, about that big-budget sci-fi thingie…