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Coyote vs Acme: Of Course You Realize This Means War

David Zaslav is an idiot. That’s pretty common knowledge at this point but it is good to have such a forceful demonstration of that as Coyote vs. Acme , the movie his regime at Warner Bros. tried to have buried as a tax write-off only for it to eventually be rescued and at long last released -turning its David and Goliath story into a strikingly meta-textual screed on its own gestation and ultimate triumph. Perhaps it’s better the movie isn’t distributed by Warner Bros. -it would be too embarrassing for them to bear. A reason for the lack of confidence in the film, which I don’t know of Zaslav or his board said so directly, is the lack of faith at Warner Bros. in their own cartoon icons. The Looney Tunes are arguably the most vital staple of that studio, mascots nearly as ubiquitous with Warner Bros. as Mickey Mouse and the gang over at Disney. And yet they have not bothered to utilize these characters over the past few decades, risking their evaporation in the cultural lexicon of ...
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Futurama Reviews: S11E05 -"Catfish Hunter"

Well, there’s some unfortunate timing on this episode’s part. Or maybe on my part because Hulu dropped it a few weeks back despite being out of order and I haven’t watched it until now. Either way it’s weird at this moment to be seeing a caricature of Dolly Parton in a Futurama episode. Perhaps that’s not exactly what Idabelle Sue is meant as, but Tress Macneille is very clearly doing a Dolly Parton impression for her generic sultry southerner voice. It’s a connection hard to miss and it is a little distracting -though that is of course not any fault of the episode “Catfish Hunter”, which is rather good otherwise. An episode about scams and catfishing, naturally it is a Bender show. It also naturally begins with unfortunately an instance of elder abuse. Bender takes Fry to visit his Abuelatron (as seen in “The One Amigo” ) who has left Mexico and moved into a nearby retirement home called Rusty Acres where Bender has made a point to see her once a year. Against the snapshot of her dour...
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Back to the Feature: Summer of '42 (1971)

I and other critics like to bemoan movies that operate on pure nostalgia. But I get it, the comfort of the past is so alluring that it is easy to want to escape into -hence why it feels like such a lazy device in movies. The 2020s are awash in nostalgia in a cynical effort to cash in on fond memories and youthful feelings, and while it’s never been as prolific a characteristic it is not without some precedent. Previous decades and other generations had their own nostalgia-bait though it took on different forms and wasn’t entirely tied to pop culture. Still, it was driven by that same sensation. In the 1970s, perhaps the best nostalgia picture was George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its image of carefree California youths in the early 1960s pre-Vietnam. But an equally popular one was Summer of ‘42 . Summer of ‘42 is an interesting nostalgia film though because its nostalgia is melancholy in nature. It is reflective of a period of youth marked by innocence but also the loss of it, fe...
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A Breezy, Engaging Tony Encapsulates a Summer of Self-Discovery

       “I was -to be frank- a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Not a lot of biopics will open on a quote like this from their subject -usually their goal is to celebrate said subject and not emphasize the flaws in their character so starkly. But Anthony Bourdain was nothing if not frank, one gets the sense he would not want to be misrepresented as some two-dimensional genius chef who made the world a better place. That quote sets the tone for Tony , which limits its scope to merely Bourdain’s second summer during college -not exactly a period of high esteem for most of us, let alone an insecure kid with a big ego who is a pathological liar. That is the image that this movie presents of Bourdain and it is incredibly compelling for that. The film is directed by burgeoning Canadian treasure Matt Johnson -his first American movie and first real test of his abilities in the Hollywood ...
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The Joy of Imagination and Childhood Whimsy Fuels The Magic Faraway Tree

Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books were written in the 1930s and 40s, and watching their first film adaptation many decades later, you can really tell. It’s style and language of fantasy are very quaint, derived more from children’s fancy and fairy tales than the more sophisticated storytelling that came about in the wake of The Lord of the Rings . There is a real charm to those kinds of stories - At the Back of the North Wind , Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and perhaps the big one Peter Pan . But it is hard to imagine them connecting now in quite the same way. Writer Simon Farnaby and director Ben Gregor make their best attempt though. And Farnaby has experience translating old British children’s literature through his involvement in the Paddington movies (he wrote Paddington 2 -the best received of them) and Wonka . And certainly The Magic Faraway Tree has a similar earnestness to it, unbothered by the cute or saccharine elements of its premise, using smart but kid-frien...
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There's Something Wrong with The Wrong Girls

It’s weird that a mediocre ston er comedy somehow hit on a brilliant idea for a superhero comic that seemingly none have tried yet. Heroes come into their powers via so many routes -alien DNA, spider bite, radioactive waste; why couldn’t they just come from taking a bad drug? I suppose the Comics Code Authority would never allow that in a medium that is predominantly all-ages in output, but The Wrong Girls doesn’t have to worry about that. The directorial debut of screenwriter Dylan Meyer, it is the second effort this year after Pizza Movie to revive the stoner comedy -though while Pizza Movie took its stylistic cues from a modern kind of rapid-fire absurdist internet humour, The Wrong Girls is more in the traditional vein of something that Cheech and Chong might have made: a pair of stoners caught up in a ridiculous premise where their intoxication factors more into the humour than the trip itself. This approach means that more of the film is carried on the back of the personaliti...
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Sex, Death, and the Mesmerizing Mindscape of Camp Miasma

“Now if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” You don’t see a lot of movies about sex anymore, not really. The mainstream film industry has been generally pretty sexless for a while now, but even apart from depiction there’s just not much of an interest in discussing sex with a genuine curiosity as to its complexities. Granted it was never a regular occurrence, but through previous decades there was every once in a while an Eyes Wide Shut or Crash that would show up in the zeitgeist and strike up conversations. It increasingly feels like that may be something that is needed again. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as its title suggests a movie about sex and death -and it is very intentional that the two are linked. Whether Schoenbrun was driven to their choice of genre structure by these themes or if their compulsion to explore them came about as a byproduct of the kind of film they were already drawn to pursue, it is rather ideal that the slasher mov...
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