4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
Since we yesterday paid our respects to the great Bela Lugosi, it only seems right that today, we should honor Boris Karloff. By all account, Boris Karloff was a remarkably gentle and friendly man. Perhaps that’s why he could find the soul in almost any character, even the ones who didn’t have one.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Boris Karloff Films
Frankenstein (1931, dir by James Whale, DP: Arthur Edeson)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir James Whale, DP: John J. Mescall)
Black Sabbath (1963, dir by Mario Bava, DP:Ubaldo Terzano and Mario Bava)
Targets (1968, dir by Peter Bogdanovich, DP: Laszlo Kovacs)
I have really mixed feelings about the new Uncharted Movie, based on the trailer. I don’t doubt that it can be fun ride, but having finished all of the games save for the last one, I’m not completely sold on it. Still, Hollywood looks for longevity, and having a younger cast makes for more sequels. Tom Holland’s in a perfect place for this, as filing Nathan Drake’s shoes are no easy task. Mark Wahlberg isn’t the Sully I envisioned, but he should be good with the major action sequences.
Again, it’s just a trailer. The movie overall should make for a great popcorn film. I hope to cheer along.
The DC Fandome is currently underway! DC and Warner Bros. are showcasing the lineup for some of their new movies, shows and video games. One of the first offerings was a peek into Black Adam, starring Dwayne Johnson. Black Adam was a long term project, as Johnson is an executive producer for Shazam!
With Black Adam playing as an adversary to Shazam!, that should make for an interesting battle. We’ll see when the movie releases next year.
The trailer comes by way of both the DC FanDome and IGN
Show of hands — who remembers that time when Superman died?
Okay, that looks like everybody. Now, how about when he was replaced by a handful of impostors after he died? Or when he rose from the dead like another favorite fictional character?
A few less hands, but still most of you. Let’s go a bit deeper : how about the time he got electrical powers and turned blue and adopted a new costume to go with his new look an abilities? Or when he broke into two separate beings, the other one red, when the whole “electric blue” thing started to run out of gas? How about when he became an evil cyborg? Or when he lost his memory? Or when he left Earth “forever”? Or when he quit being a hero to live a normal life?
The point here being, if you hadn’t guessed already, that while…
“Bisexual Superman in a kids’ comic? They are literally trying to destroy this county!” screeched one Josh Mandel from his twitter account, underneath a picture of the Jon Kent iteration of Superman kissing his purported new love interest, Jay Nakamura, taken from the forthcoming Superman : Son Of Kal-El #5.
A quick perusal of Mandel’s timeline shows that these kinds of histrionics are basically the guy’s stock in trade, with gems including “Christopher Columbus was a great American” (uhhhh — dude, don’t know how to break it to you but he wasn’t any kind of American), “You can’t spell panDEMic without DEM — is this a coincidence?,” “The Bible and the Constitution aren’t supposed to be separate, ” or the one that probably made me laugh the loudest, a poll where he asked “Of the various types of illegals flooding across the border, will more crimes be committed by Muslim…
I’m loathe to start things off on a “housekeeping” note, but in this case I think it’s in order — when I re-tooled my approach to this site about a month back with an eye toward broadening out its scope beyond small press and self-published comics, I figured I might occasionally look in on what the “Big Two” were up to — but I honestly never imagined that just a few weeks on from writing a multi-part series on Captain America By Ta-Nehisi Coates Vol. 1 that I’d be embarking on yet another long-form essay/rant on the funnybook mainstream. And if you’d told the me of a month or so back that my second foray into critically less-familiar waters would be to talk about a comic I had almost no intention of reading and certainly no intention of buying, I’d have asked for your dealer’s number because for 50-year-olds like…
From the directors of Ready or Not comes yet another chapter in Wes Craven’s Scream series. I’ll admit I’m liking the cast in this one. We have Melissa Barerra (In the Heights), Jenna Ortega (Yes Day), Dylan Minnette (30 Reasons Why), Jack Quaid (The Boys), Marley Shelton (Planet Terror), Kyle Gallner (Jennifer’s Body), and Mikey Madison (Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood)
Then you have the returning cast, which includes Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette. Most importantly, it appears that Roger L. Jackson is voicing the Ghostface again! On a side note, Jackson was also responsible for Mojo Jojo’s voice in The Powerpuff Girls. (“Curses!”)
January movies don’t always do very well, but we’ll see what happens with this one.
This is a true hidden gem. Both this filmmaker and his spouse NEED to be hired by EVERYONE! I review A LOT of garbage. It can get straight-up soul-crushing. However, when there’s a hit, there’s a hit. This is a hit!
The short opens with a woman tied up in a basement with a purported axe-murderer ready to make short work of her. Just as we are about to see something horrible- Shiny Shiny begins to play and the seeming axe murderer does something completely unexpected!!!! This is a must watch and Jeff and Sara are must hires! Please watch this!!! PLEASE!!!!
What if OK GO went psycho? This short explores that premise. The protagonists Milton and Paul are much like OK GO, talented, yet a tiny bit pompous. Although OK GO hasn’t murdered anyone…yet, I’m sure that if they did start a life of murderin’ that they would murder like this.
Milton and Paul have just been laid before getting tenure. This fact made me like them less because I despise professors. I’m sure that some are not lazy, sanctimonious, garbage-people, but they must be in hiding or retired because even this week, one of my professors just didn’t show up for class- Just didn’t feel like it. I assuming his thoughts were as follows: Too bad, so sad lowly students – I’m going to roll around in my unearned money now like the thief that I am…. or something like that.
Try getting these holier than thou gasbags held to account and it will take you a year to get your money back and this wasn’t a For Profit school either- NO NO NO…These were public schools; so, take that taxpayer. In my case, it was Uncle Sam’s money that I demanded back because a calculus professor didn’t show up for the entire quarter for either of his classes; yet, he still expected to be and WAS paid. For me, hearing that two professors got fired in this film, made me wonder if I was watching fantasy and if a dragon would appear any minute. I swore heavily in an earlier draft, but I held back for you.
These two professors were fired and decided to kidnap those whom fired them and kill them using Rube Goldberg machines. My main critique is not the jokes or writing- those were fine; overall, the short was entertaining. No, my problem was that they didn’t spend enough time making the Rube Goldberg machine complex enough. Try harder, but then again, perhaps that lent some realism to the film because there is nothing lazier or worse than a college professor. We could put them on the same Herpes-Infected-Horny-Racoon-Island (HIHRI) where I’d like to put all of the sanctimonious politicians. Now, that is a platform we can all get behind!
Through the Shattered Lens 