Posted on December 31, 2022 by Darren
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week joined by special guest Richard Drumm, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.
This time, Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash.
Andrew Neiman is a young music student at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory in New York City. A jazz drummer, Andrew dreams of great things, of becoming a legend like Miles Davis or John Coltrane. However, he falls under the influence of band leader Terence Fletcher. Fletcher sees potential in Andrew, and draws the young musician into his orbit. The two find themselves trapped in a toxic push-and-pull relationship, with the stakes escalating quickly.
At time of recording, it was ranked 42nd on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: abuse, aggression, ambiguity, art, bullying, damien chazelle, films, imdb, jk simmons, masculinity, Miles Teller, Movies, podcast, richard drumm, The 250, training, violence, whiplash | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 30, 2022 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of White Noise on Netflix, it seemed like a good opportunity to discuss Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s classic postmodern novel.
White Noise has long been considered unadaptable. However, Baumbach zeroes on a consistent throwline that guids his weird and eccentric adaptation through its various shifts and turns. White Noise is fundamentally a story about death. It is about the way in which so much culture – sex, media, consumerism – is designed as an effort to drown out the encroaching and inescapable sense of mortality. Baumbach presents a broad and cartoonish exploration of man’s inability to grapple with that universal certainty. In doing so, he tells a strangely moving story.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: adaptation, awards, column, consumerism, death, don delillo, in the frame, netflix, Noah Baumbach, Oscars, sex, white noise | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 29, 2022 by Darren
I published a new piece at The Escapist this week. With the release of The Witcher: Blood Origin on Netflix, it seemed like a good time to discuss an unsettling trend in modern television: the idea that modern shows are really just super-extended movies, and the consequences of that.
Blood Origin demonstrates what happens when a studio treats a television show like a movie. The series was written and filmed as six episodes, but was horrible cut down in the editting bay. Two whole episodes were stripped out of the show, leaving it incoherent and nonsensical. In many ways, this was exactly what happened with Joss Whedon’s cut of Justice League, which was similarly cut down to have a runtime of under two hours. If television shows are just films now, they are subject to the same sort of meddling.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: blood origin, cutting, executive meddling, films, justice league, media, Movies, structure, studios, Television, the escapist, the witcher, the witcher: blood origin, trimming | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 28, 2022 by Darren
I published a new piece at The Escapist this week. Because it’s that gap between Christmas and New Year, there’s been a bit of editorial leeway. And so, I got to write a little bit about Eternals, one of the more interesting and complicated recent Marvel Studios blockbusters.
Eternals doesn’t quite work. It’s important to acknowledge that upfront. However, the movie is interesting because of how it engages with superheroes. Eternals is not so much a superhero movie as it is a movie about superheroes. It’s about these stories that dominate the popular consciousness, this web of corporate-controlled mythology in which so much modern culture is tangled. It asks what the function of these characters and these stories should be.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: characters, chloé zhao, Eternals, evolution, growth, marvel, Marvel Studios, mcu, mythology, status quo, superheroes, the escapist | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 27, 2022 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist earlier this week. With the release of Babylon over Christmas, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at Damien Chazelle’s latest feature film.
Babylon is a movie that obviously exists in the context of great Hollywood movies about Hollywood. In particular, Chazelle draws overtly and heavily from Singin’ in the Rain in this parable about Hollywood’s migration from silent films to talkies. However, Chazelle does something interesting, stripping out a lot of the romance of these narratives in favour of something approaching brutal honesty. Chazelle rejects a lot of the romantic nostalgia of these sorts of films, instead offering a much grittier take. At times Babylon feels like the coke-addled evil twin of something like Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: damien chazelle, escapist, hollywood, hollywood history, in the frame, Movie, once upon a time in hollywood, singin' in the rain, the escapist | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 26, 2022 by Darren
I published a new piece at The Escapist last week. With the recent chaos at HBO Max and the removal of content from the service, it seemed like a good time to discuss of film and television have suddenly become ephemeral again.
One of the big selling points of the streaming age was that everything would be immediately available to audience members at the click of a mouse; vast libraries of content would be made available to stream via these services, representing a boon for conservationists and archivists everywhere. Nothing would be lost, because everything would be at hand. However, the removal of entire shows from HBO Max illustrates that these projects are as intangible as they have ever been, and that they can removed and even destroyed without any warning whatsoever.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: access, archiving, availability, HBO Max, history, lost destroyed, preservation, record, streaming, Television, westworld, wiped | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 25, 2022 by Darren
I published a new piece at The Escapist last weekend. Since James Gunn and Peter Safran have taken over the running of the DCEU, they have made a number of dramatic cuts and decisions, including the reporting scrapping of the company’s Wonder Woman and Aquaman franchises. There is some suggestion that the entire primary cast of the shared universe is gone, and that the team is starting over to rebuild a new shared universe from scratch.
It is a bold decision, and one that sidesteps a fairly obvious question: why are DC so excited for a shared universe? After all, it was the company’s over-enthusiastic pursuit of that ideal that left their continuity feeling like a mess in the first place. For all the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, shared universes are not easy to build, and DC has enjoyed a surprising amount of success with standalone projects like The Batman and Joker. Why is the company throwing everything away to try a strategy that already failed for them, and is showing signs of wearing off for their main competitor?
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: comic books, continuity, dceu, James Gunn, share duniverse, shared universe, the escapist | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 24, 2022 by Darren
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week joined by special guest Richard Newby, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.
This time, a Christmas treat, Terry Jones’ Life of Brian.
Brian Cohen is a young Jewish man living in Jerusalum at the same time as Jesus Christ. Desperate to impress a girl and reeling from revelations about his heritage, Brian commits to join a local revolutionary paramilitary to resist Roman rule. However, nothing is quite as simple as it may initially seem, and Brian finds himself swept up in a messianic fervour well beyond his control.
At time of recording, it was ranked 245th on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: belief, comedy, controversy, Eric Idle, graham chapman, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John Cleese, Michael Palin, monty python, religion, space, te life of brian, terry gilliam, terry jones, The 250 | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 23, 2022 by Darren
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Glass Onion on Netflix, it seemed like a good opportunity to look at Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery.
There is a sly and self-aware gag buried at the heart of Glass Onion, one of the two Knives Out sequels that Netflix paid almost half-a-billion dollars for. Johnson’s latest film is a satire of tech disruptors, focusing on fictional visionary Miles Bron and his company Alpha. However, the movie’s social satire has a particularly pointed edge. Johnson is parodying precisely the sort of reckless tech disruptors that upended the cinematic landscape. In its own weird way, Netflix is perhaps the villain of Glass Onion.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: benoit blanc, commentary, disruption, edward norton, glass onion, in the frame, netflix, Rian Johnson, tech disruption | Leave a comment »
Posted on December 22, 2022 by Darren
I am doing weekly reviews of Willow at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Wednesday evening while the show is on, looking at the legacy sequel as it progresses from one episode to the next.
With Willow officially past the midpoint of its first season, the show hits a sizable bump in the road. Wildwood is the first episode of the show that feels purely functional rather than narratively engaging on its own terms. It’s a very mechanical piece of television, with the plot grinding to a halt so the series can run down a checklist of character and plot beats that it needs to articulate for the audience before moving any further. It does a lot of necessary place-setting, but stalls the season and the show around it.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: escapist, exposition, Narrative, show, stakes, streaming, structure, the escapist, wildwood, willow | Leave a comment »
the m0vie blog 
New Escapist Column! On How “Glass Onion” Disrupts the Disruptors…
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Glass Onion on Netflix, it seemed like a good opportunity to look at Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery.
There is a sly and self-aware gag buried at the heart of Glass Onion, one of the two Knives Out sequels that Netflix paid almost half-a-billion dollars for. Johnson’s latest film is a satire of tech disruptors, focusing on fictional visionary Miles Bron and his company Alpha. However, the movie’s social satire has a particularly pointed edge. Johnson is parodying precisely the sort of reckless tech disruptors that upended the cinematic landscape. In its own weird way, Netflix is perhaps the villain of Glass Onion.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: benoit blanc, commentary, disruption, edward norton, glass onion, in the frame, netflix, Rian Johnson, tech disruption | Leave a comment »