I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With Avatar: The Way of Water continuing to push its way up the list of highest-grossing movies of all-time, it is interesting that James Cameron’s sequel hasn’t dominated the discourse to the same extent as comparable blockbusters like Avengers: Infinity War or Avengers: Endgame.
Truth be told, there is something innately charming about that. It’s fun to have a big and bombastic blockbuster that hasn’t become an online shouting match, a film that audiences have just turned out to see and then gone back to their lives without making the film’s performance or reception a key part of their identity. Whatever problems there may be with The Way of Water, there is something to be said for a film that manages to entertain that many people without causing too many ripples.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
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.
Willow is very obviously a show steeped in the fantasy and the blockbusters of the eighties, reflecting the originl film on which it is based. However, the show is rooted much more film in that era than it might appear. As the show approaches its middle point, it becomes clear that showrunner Jonathan Kasdan has built Willow as an extended metaphor for familial dissolution, tapping into the themes of divorce and separation that permeated so much pop culture during the decade.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new piece at The Escapist during the week. With the most recent seasons of both Stranger Things and Obi-Wan Kenobi playing the same familiar trick, it seemed like a good time to talk about one of my bugbears in modern pop culture.
In recent years, it has become customary for piece of popular culture to indulge in a phenomenon best summarized as “the fakeout death”: a beloved character dies, the audience feels sad, and then they are magically restored and resurrected. It has become ubiquitous in the past five or so years: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker, The Book of Boba Fett, even the recent Scream movies. Pop culture feels incredibly reluctant to kill off any characters with any popularity, and the result is part of the reason so many of these franchises are stagnating.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
We’re thrilled to be launching a fortnightly video companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch every second Monday, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel. And the video will be completely separate from the written content. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.
With the end of the second season of Star Trek: Picard and the launch of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the larger Star Trek franchise, which has become increasingly backwards-looking in recent decades. While a lot of fans will place the blame on the franchise’s more recent output, the truth is that this nostalgic impulse took root much earlier than many fas will acknowledge.
I published a new column at The Escapist earlier this week. It’s been an interesting few weeks and months in terms of pop culture. There’s been a lot of debate about critics and the role of critics, there’s been a lot of news about pop culture that the internet doesn’t seem too excited about, and there’s been a lot of coverage about mundane aspects of The Batman.
All of these things speak to an interesting and ongoing anxiety about the “monoculture”, the idea of pieces of pop culture that are seismic enough to become part of the shared vernacular. The pandemic has had a number of major impacts on the production and the consumption of popular culture, and part of that has been an increasing sense of disconnect from a shared sense of the monoculture. However, is the monoculture truly dead? Or is it simply resting?
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the twentieth anniversary of Shrek, it seems like a reasonable opportunity to take a look back at the film and its sizable pop culture legacy.
Shrek emerged at the turn of the millennium as a response to the kind of animation that had dominated American cinema during the nineties. In contrast to the calculated earnestness and sincerity of the Disney Renaissance, and its many imitators, Shrek‘s irony and cynicism felt like a breathe of fresh air. It was a film that didn’t take itself too seriously, indulging in knowing jokes and winking references. It was a bold counter-cultural statement that nobody expected to succeed. However, it did succeed, and ironically became one of the defining films of the twenty-first century.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Jess Dunne and Alex Towers, The 250 is a fortnightly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.
This time, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
Billionaire Richard Hammond is building a new sort of theme park. However, when an accident on site makes the investors nervous, Hammond is forced to invite a panel of experts to his remote island for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that doesn’t go exactly according to plan.
At time of recording, it was ranked the 165th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with the Monday article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film channel – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.
It’s not the 8th of January yet, so it still seems like an appropriate time for Christmas movie discussion. As such, I took a look at one of the great film debates of our time: whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. The new season of Cobra Kai launched on Netflix today, so it seemed like a good excuse to take a look back at the Karate Kid franchise.
The Karate Kid franchise is often overlooked in discussions of the American action movie, particular the American martial arts movie. However, the films offer a fascinating snapshot of the tension that existed within Hollywood around martial arts during the seventies and into the eighties. The genre was largely imported from East Asia, however it was quickly reworked and reinvented as an American genre. Indeed, one of the recurring tensions within the Karate Kid franchise is the idea of appropriation – of who karate “belongs” to and what happens when others try to take it.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published an In the Frame piece at Escapist Magazine earlier this week, given the release of new concept art for the Avatar sequels.
Much as been made of the extent to which Avatar left no tangible pop cultural footprint, despite its massive financial success. It’s a fascinating conundrum, and almost impossible to imagine in this age of fractured fandoms and hot takes. Indeed, that lack of a strong cultural footprint might even be the best thing about it. For better or worse, Avatar was a film that millions and millions of people saw and enjoyed, before getting on with their lives. And in an era where films increasingly feel like religious events, there’s something vaguely comforting in that.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
That said, I do also suspect Disney have more thorough polling on this than any of us Twitter folk.
We can probabl… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…...around... 12 hours ago
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a trend.
If “Guardians” bombs, it’s a trend. However, i… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…...around... 12 hours ago
“Spider-Verse” is an animate sequel to a beloved film - with Spidey! Who even remembers “Blue Beetle” is coming out… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…...around... 12 hours ago
“The Marvels” is where this fatigue theory is tested. It’s the next superhero film without “… but… if…” variables.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…...around... 12 hours ago
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