The tension was palpable. In the moments (and days?) following Julia Roberts’ announcement that Green Book had won Best Picture at the 91stAcademy Awards, there were almost as many cheers and celebrations as there were anxious and angry responses. While some denounced it for simplifying racial arguments and a ‘White Savior’ complex, others proclaimed that it… [Read More]
The Year of the Dragon (1985): Bringing the War Home #TBT
Michael Cimino, of The Deer Hunter fame and Heaven’s Gate notoriety, shoots the gap between his Oscar wins for the first and the derision of his work for the second in Mickey Rourke’s The Year of the Dragon. While Rourke had collaborations with Steven Spielberg (1941), Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat), Barry Levinson (Diner), and Francis Ford Coppola (Rumble Fish) under… [Read More]
Starsky & Hutch (2004): The Remake Revolution #TBT
Before SWAT, Hawaii Five-O, MacGuyver, Lethal Weapon, and Magnum P.I. were remade as television dramas, studios seemed fascinated with remaking old television shows into slightly more offbeat films. In between films like I, Spy, and later films like The A-Team and 21 Jump Street, Starsky & Hutch took the old 1970s buddy cop show and twisted it, hard. Thanks to Warner Archive Collection, the Blu-ray… [Read More]
Instant Family: Fostering Kids Takes Guts
Sean Anders and his wife adopted children cross-culturally, undertaking a more difficult task than making audiences laugh with We are the Millers, She’s Out of My League, and the Daddy’s Home films. Thanks to the success he had writing and directing those other films, Paramount Pictures’ greenlit Anders’ more intimate project, Instant Family. Here, Anders told his story, and the… [Read More]
Creed II: Let Adonis Creed Be His Own Man
In the second installment of the Creed saga or the seventh chapter in the Rocky series, depending on your perspective, Sylvester Stallone’s script finds Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed wrestling with fatherhood, marriage, and the ghosts of the past, namely Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu’s Viktor Drago. Drago is of course the son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the fighter who… [Read More]
