This is the second part of a three-part series. The first part, where I talk about the superhero genre’s place among other quintessentially American film genres, is here. The Best of the Fourth Genre What I was going to do here, in the interests of giving you the wisdom of crowds and critics, was one… Read More The Fourth Genre: The Best Superhero Movies
The Fourth Genre (Just in Case You’re from Space and Haven’t Seen The Avengers) Before I watched a bunch of DC animated movies, I watched A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. In that doc, Scorsese says there are three American genres, genres which sprung up in their fullest forms in American movies:… Read More The Fourth American Genre: The Superhero Movie
As any true -holic knows, a little grace goes a long way. As I read through and listened to dozens of Best of the Decade lists, I tried to apply a truth I’d always kept close about list-making: it’s about what’s not on the list as much as it is what’s there. To some extent,… Read More Top 100 Movies of the Decade (2010-2019): The Painful Cuts
Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Liev Schreiber This is the kind of superhero movie I imagined when I was a preteen: witty, action-packed, heartfelt, and most of all absolutely overflowing with possibility. Multiverses are cheating, fine, but here’s an example. The first superheroes I ever got into were… Read More Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
1) The first thing I did, before I even began making predictions or thinking about how things might go, is check to see if any of these movies out for Best Picture had 11/2 odds. I speak, of course, of the 15% rule that The Ringer’s Kevin Clark frequently refers back to, which proclaims that any… Read More 91st Academy Awards: Quickly Scribbled Thoughts
Seeing Things Secondhand 