Last night, Watson completed his route of Jeopardy competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, ushering in our new “computer overlords.” 1 Appropriately enough, this comes roughly a week after a Massachusetts man tweeted a message to Detroit Mayor David Bing: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for […]
What begins as the exploration of an urban legend evolves into a glimpse at how society needs to manufacture visible boogey men to alleviate internal guilt and disassociate from that which is labeled “evil,” despite our tendencies to walk a thin line between what makes us comfortable and what makes us squirm. Cropsey, the impetus of the […]
Shuffling through the final papers of the semester, I encounter one that discusses Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! and the genius of how Jake’s quotidian routine is parasyntactically laminated over Lincoln’s birthday radio speeches and other media pronouncements that render his activities patently and ironically more meaningless by playing the myth over them, to which I stand back […]
Two of my guilty pleasures are Under Siege and The Rock, which might be the only Nicolas Cage movie that doesn’t make bile creep up my throat. However both of these movies have one thing in common: they advertise themselves as action movies, guaranteeing an adequate amount of dialogue to fashion semi-plausible plot lines and provide some […]
Born to a cacophony of jeers at Cannes, Antichrist blurs the line between the beatific and profane, forcing the audience to witness violence beneath the sensual. Coiled around each other in rapturous fornication, He (Willem Defoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) fill a beautiful, monochrome screen that casts the feminine face in a shade of light gray before […]
“You know when you meet someone for the first time and there’s this instant attraction?” asks Alex Forrest of Dan Gallagher over a drink, echoing the trope of love (or lust) at first sight that provides and sustains agency within characters progenated in hundreds of plays, books, or movies. “This instant attraction,” she says with a grin […]
My brother married a Canadian woman. They exchanged vows in an Ontario border town situated at the most eastern and most southern point of Lake Superior. For the reception, the bride’s family–who had emigrated from Italy–supplied enough good wine to fill up all five Great Lakes. (All of it was consumed.) The maid of honor made a […]
As a few million of you might know, Inception opened this past weekend to the delight of many and the derision of a few who expected a summer movie to be a masterpiece. Please note: there is no “second coming” in the summer. If you’re privy to the recent heat wave that has blanketed the Northeast, summer […]
This graphical breakdown of career director arcs over on Into the Abyss is pretty damn fantastic. What author Todd Miro did was compile all the Rotten Tomatoes scores for all the movies made by a director and then chart those critical rankings on a line graph to show how well each director’s flicks were received over time. […]
Jun30
If It’s Summer, There Must Be a Whole Bunch of Ex-plo-zhe-uns at the Movie Theatre
by 
Tim Adkins
Homer Simpson is a simple man. He likes enormous portions of everything that he likes. Donuts. Bacon. Beer. And all of the other things that make life worth living. Homer, as a good many of you know, also has some experience with ex-plo-zhe-uns. I didn’t learn gluttony from Homer. But I probably learned how to do it […]