Behold the fabled Prestige Film! There are some for whom this hook is repellant: the worm dangling like a flaccid organ, poised to ejaculate manipulative emotion like award-attracting pheromones. Look at the pretty British actors! Playing people who were significantly less pretty in real life! Sprinkle contrivance and season the historical record with Hollywood tropes, […]
Dagger Movie Night: “Fist Fight” — A Lot of Jokes About Fighting, But Missing a Punchline
One of the very last images we’re treated to at the end of 2017’s first alleged comedy is a literal pile of horse shit. Don’t ask why, and don’t ask how; it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s there, and that the camera tilts down to see it: a visual metaphor that manages […]
Dagger Movie Night: “Fifty Shades Darker” — Is Female Subjugation Still Sexy in Trump’s America?
You might have heard about this story everyone’s talking about on TV, on the radio, or around the water cooler: all about this rich, creepy weirdo who uses his money and inherited power to objectify and possess women, even going so far as to commit sexual assault in public locations? No, I’m not talking about […]
Dagger Movie Night: “The LEGO Batman Movie” – Lighthearted Superheroics That Don’t Wear Out Their Welcome
Welcome to the age of the Comic Book Movie, an era in which no child (or adult) is at risk of being shoved into a locker for knowing the backstories and minutiae of even the lowest-ranking superhero from the respective Marvel and DC pantheons; if anything, we as parents are morally obligated to keep our […]
ROGUE ONE: The Star Wars Prequel No One Asked for that Transcends the Ones We Did
No sooner had the Star Wars franchise gotten back on track with The Force Awakens, a film even whose detractors grudgingly accepted as a safe but necessary course correction for a franchise stigmatized by the word “prequel,” the new Lucasfilm handlers at Disney announced the release date for Rogue One…which, by the way, happens to […]
