You can find the full list of the top 100 blockbusters since 1972 here, as well as an index for other posts in this series. The Godfather, as I think I might be obligated to say, begins with a wedding. It’s a violent movie, occasionally even gory and lurid, and when it detours for tenderness… Read More Top 100 Blockbusters of the Multiplex Era: The Splitting of the Nuclear Family
This is the third piece of a three-part series. First up was a collation and analysis of forty critics’ rankings of Pixar movies, and then a quick digression into my own rankings. This third part is, in my eyes, the most fun. By bothering people I know, entreating people I know to bother people they… Read More Pixar Poll Results
I started this meta-analysis hoping to have somewhere between fifteen and twenty lists to go on. In the end I found forty, because the results kept shifting when I’d enter new data. For the Tarantino analysis, for example, adding more lists would basically just solidify where every movie landed. Here, though, there are multiple pairs… Read More Pixar Meta-Analysis
The landing page, with rationale and links to other posts in this series, can be found here. When people get worked up about Pixar not being what it used to be, here’s what they mean. The premise of Monsters, Inc. could, in the wrong hands, be absolutely opaque. Some wonderful person has the clip on YouTube which, frankly,… Read More Disney/Pixar Rankings: 15-11
Dir. Dan Scanlon. Starring Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Helen Mirren The girls are at summer camp. They report something strange is in their cabin. None of them are frightened – in fact, some even seem a little giddy. Regardless, forest rangers and other law enforcement quickly evacuate the girls before heading in. Slowly, quietly, cautiously,… Read More Monsters University (2013)
We kept the last one to an hour. This one, not so much. We had many things to say about The Incredibles – Helen Parr, the best Pixar character and Syndrome, faceless victim to Bob Parr’s Howard Roark – and not so many things to say, comparatively speaking, about Finding Nemo. Listen to find out… Read More Baumann and Burch Podcast #4 – Feminist Icon Helen Parr (Pixar, Part 2)
Dir. Pete Docter. Starring Amy Poehler, Kaitlyn Dias, Phyllis Smith That’s my Middle West – not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows… Read More Inside Out (2015)
Monsters University was greeted the same way that Brave was by critics and moviegoers alike: “It was cute. It would’ve been really good for a Disney movie, but it wasn’t what we expected from a Pixar movie.” The statement is, of course, doubly patronizing, and rather more unfair to one than the other. As hard as it is… Read More The Sorrows of Aging Pixar
Seeing Things Secondhand 