Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guest Raymond Creamer, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.
So this week, Troy Miller’s Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.
Years before they embark on a cross-country roadtrip, lovable idiots Harry Dunne and Lloyd Christmas strike up an unlikely friendship in high school. However, they quickly find themselves drawn into their principal’s sinister scheme to embezzle money by exploiting the school’s students to create a privately-funded special needs class.
At time of recording, it was ranked 52nd on the list of the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
I published a new piece at The Irish Independent this evening. With the release of Obi-Wan Kenobi next week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the slow and steady rehabilitation of the Star Wars prequels.
To a certain generation of Star Wars fans, the prequels will always be an abomination. Over the years, the three films have become a punchline to a joke that nobody began, an impression reinforced through popular culture. However, recent years have seen an appreciable shift in how the prequels are portrayed, with fans seeming to come around on the films and Disney seeming to fold them into the larger marketting of the brand. It’s interesting to look at how (and why) that happened.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard and Richard Newby for the twenty-first episode of the year. With the release of Black Widow on streaming and in cinemas, there was only one movie to discuss. So we went for a deep dive into Marvel’s interquel, its character-centric movie for a dead Avenger.
I had the pleasure making a guest appearance on Filibuster with the great Lee Hutchinson, who very kindly invited me on to talk about the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. It was a welcome invitation, as I’ve been writing reviews of the show by my schedule and other commitments mean that I haven’t always been able to keep up. So it was good to talk about the season as a whole; what I liked about it, what I didn’t, what I’d like to see more of going forward. Indeed, how much I’d like to see more going forward.
I’ve always wondered who thought prequels are good ideas. I mean, the ending is a foregone conclusion. It has to end as the other film started. No matter how much danger your leading character is place in, he has to live through it. In fact, the very idea of a prequel is to play out events that you’ve heard about already – so even then you know roughly what’s going to happen and how it’ll turn out before the film is even written. Sure, there are particulars that need to be specified, but it’s an incredibly risky venture – those particulars need to be really awesome in order to justify the film.
No point fighting over the prequels, the third one is the only okay one...
The Hobbit is dead. Long live The Hobbit. Look, we all know it’s going to happen. Like the next James Bond film, the economics of the situation dictate that it must happen – a spin-off from The Lord of the Rings is too lucrative an opportunity to pass up, it’s an excuse to print money. Think of all the simple/theatrical/standard/deluxe/super/extended versions of the films have been released on video/DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray. Now double that. So now you know why The Hobbit is going to happen, eventually. Unfortunately, I think we all know it’s not going to happen soon. And I’m here to tell you why Del Toro departing the film is actually a good thing.
Down the hobbit hole...
Note: This is part of a two-part article. Andrew over at the always wonderful Andrew at the Cinema is offering this article a jolly good rebuttal. Pop over and give it a read. Just make sure to spend a few minutes appreciating my flim-flam arguments before he pretty much destroys them with his advanced reasoning.
Can you remember a year when the summer wasn’t dominated by sequels or spin-offs or reboots or prequels? If you can, most of them were probably adaptations. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth recently about the abundance of such films in the summer lineups, so I thought it might be worth a little exploration into the history of the sequel and of Hollywood blockbusters, and also worth considering the suggestion that has been mooted a lot recently: are movie-goers tiring of sequels?
Even death couldn’t keep Spock out of the next Star Trek movie…
Whatever happened to originality? This is the first weekend since Wolverine kicked off the blockbuster movie season a month ago that there isn’t a sequel, prequel or reboot opening at the multiplexes in America. Despite the fact that Pixar’s Up and Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell are reviewing very strongly, most box office folk seem to think that this will be a relatively quiet weekend at the old box office, which is a shame really when we’ve got two of the best reviewed movies of the year going head-to-head. Still, what happened to Hollywood’s originality?
the m0vie blog 