At the 96th Academy Awards, Diane Warren failed to win Best Original Song for the fifteenth time in fifteen tries. Shockingly, “The Fire Inside,” written for the movie about the guy who did not in fact come up with the idea for hot Cheetos, did not win. On the other hand, I’m willing to wager… Read More The Warren Index: Will They Win a Competitive Oscar Before Diane Warren?
The actor: Michael B. Jordan The character: Killmonger The film: Black Panther The line: “Is this your king?” Google “best mcu villains” and you’ll get the usual suspects (Collider, Empire, Nerdist, Mashable, etc.) listing the usual suspects. The top three on these sort of lists are nearly invariable. Thanos gets one of those spots because… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #3
To read my introduction to this set of rankings, go here. I’ve broken the twenty-three movies from this franchise into tiers of irregular size. I still have a fairly firm ranking in my head for each of them, but I include the tiers to give a sense of what movies roughly match each other in… Read More Infinity Saga/Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies Ranking – Part 2
To read my introduction to this set of rankings, go here. I’ve broken the twenty-three movies from this franchise into tiers of irregular size. I still have a fairly firm ranking in my head for each of them, but I include the tiers to give a sense of what movies roughly match each other in… Read More Infinity Saga/Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies Ranking – Part 1
Dir. Ryan Coogler. Starring Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B. Jordan Everything else being equal, all of us can choose between a Golden Corral steak and a filet from a good steakhouse; the tougher choice comes when the Golden Corral option disappears and is replaced with a lobster. There are two good choices in Black… Read More Black Panther (2018)
The Luminaries is an enormously enjoyable novel, with emphasis on the adverb. At more than eight hundred pages, it is the longest novel to win the Man Booker International Prize, and its author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest to ever win the Man Booker. (She was twenty-eight when it was published, which makes me wish I… Read More Casting The Luminaries for TV: Utter, Wishful, and Shameful Fanfiction
Created by David Simon. Starring Dominic West, Larry Gilliard, Jr., Sonja Sohn I remember how frustrated I was watching Glee, a show which in its first season gave meaningful screen time and plot directions to, by my count, at least sixteen different characters. Plot arcs which could have sizzled and developed over the course of… Read More The Wire, Season 1
Seeing Things Secondhand 