Rust Belt Rivals: What Marvel & DC tell us about Cleveland & Pittsburgh
If you live in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, you probably have Dec. 8 and Jan. 1 marked on your calendar. Those are the dates when the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cleveland Browns are scheduled have their two regular season clashes. The Browns, the underdogs with very loyal fans, have only won four of the 24 contests since 1999. In that same time, Pittsburgh has gone to three Superbowls and won two. The Pittsburgh/Cleveland rivalry goes deeper than just sports. While the Pennsylvania city has been heralded as an example of rust belt revitalization, Cleveland continues to have an identity struggle. It’s still butt of pop culture jokes (anyone who watches 30 Rock or Hot in Cleveland knows exactly what I’m talking about) and is desperately trying to shake the industrial era thinking, or at least the perception of it. I’m...
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Superhero film set pics: You’re f*cking with the magic
There’s a little story back from the early days of Google. The Google guys go to visit Viacom, and they show the then-head of the media conglomerate how the Google ad model worked–with trackable and measurable analytics. The Viacom executive, who had made his reputation on traditional blind TV ad buys, looked at the Google ad model and said, “You’re f*cking with the magic.” The internet has been f*cking with the magic for years now. I’m writing this on a blog, for example. And there are a lot of blogs, aren’t there? As someone who has spent the last 10 years of his life following movies online and writing about them, I’ve seen the community grow. But I’ve never seen anything like the excessive coverage of The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, and Man of Steel. I understand that...
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Why AMC fired Darabont from THE WALKING DEAD…
In the good ol’ days, Hollywood kept its fights behind the scenes. We’d wait a few years, maybe decades, for a good storyteller to come along and really put the pieces together. Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution and Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures are just two recent examples. Those days are long over, of course. But even by today’s standards, AMC’s battles with the creators and studios behind Mad Men and Breaking Bad were highly-publicized. (Nobody in Hollywood likes a winner, especially a creative upstart like AMC.) Nothing, however, disrupted the basic cable network’s public reputation like its recent falling out with Frank Darabont over The Walking Dead. There’s been a lot of talk about why Darabont and AMC parted ways. I’ve mentioned to people that Darabont, a writer who directs only every few years, might not have made the transition to the...
Read MoreTHE KING’S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, THE FIGHTER… and the Oscar delusion
I haven’t written much about the Oscar race this year. That’s in no small part due to The Social Network’s critics award sweep early on in the race. Yes, I’ve had a chip on my should since David Fincher’s Facebook thriller, dark comedy, social satire, Shakespearean morality tale… whatever it is… won the National Board of Review’s Best Picture award in December and flattened the competition in every major critics poll after that. The Social Network reigned until Oscar nomination day, when The King’s Speech scored 12 nominations, more than any other picture. The King’s Speech has since won the PGA prize. And the SAG ensemble acting award. And the DGA prize for Tom Hooper’s direction, which is the most consistent Best Picture bellwether. Hooper’s victory and the sudden surge in popularity for The King’s Speech isn’t really surprising. Sony/Columbia can’t campaign for...
Read MoreYear in Review – Best Films of 2010
I was fully prepared to start out this post calling 2010 the worst year for film in my moviegoing lifetime. Part of that stems from the fact that many Hollywood movies were really bad in 2010. Terrible even. But there’s also this: I’ve had to sit through an Oscar season where good but not great films like The Social Network, True Grit, and The Fighter are being heralded as masterpieces, along with high art torture porn like Black Swan. By time I got around to even thinking about this post, I was exhausted and frustrated. Then I looked at my running list of 2010 movies screened. Going through all the great films I’ve seen this year, I realized that it wasn’t a bad year for everyone… just American narrative film (docs excluded). That sounds really pretentious, I know, but my...
Read MoreYear in Review – Best Films of 2009
I saw fewer new movies this year than in any other since I started putting together my top ten lists. That’s not bad news. I just cut out a lot of… well… crap. No, I didn’t see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and no, I didn’t see Sherlock Holmes. I love movies, but what’s the point in watching all the bad when there’s so much good out there. (That doesn’t explain how I ended up seeing Nine, though. Ugh.) The good, in fact, was so good that I could have chosen any one of the 11 pictures on my top 10 list to be the best movie of the year. That’s a testament to the quality of all the pictures listed below. All the films on my list, from Tarantino, Reitman, the Coen brothers, Bigelow and more, may very...
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