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Ranking Movies Between Laundry and Taxes #001: A 95th Oscar Primer

Ranking Movies Between Laundry and Taxes #001: A 95th Oscar Primer

Posted on by Matthew Santiago

So the 95th Academy Awards are quickly approaching, a time when we all wait for Oscar Claus to come down our chimneys and grant us our myriad of movie wishes. We all pray Oscar Claus will give us that pony or that laptop or, I don’t know, a nomination for any woman director, but it’s safer to just expect a pile of plain, predictable, and very white men’s socks.

But who cares, right? That’s the question we ask ourselves each year. The celebrities wearing their shiny gems and gowns will again trade some more shiny things amongst themselves, and we will watch while eating our Hot Cheetos in one hand and Googling in the other where to stream My Year of Dicks. Who cares, indeed?

Okay well, this is embarrassing, but I do care. Part of me still believes in Oscar Claus and knows that, if you wait long enough and you’ve been really good, you might just get a Best Picture win for Parasite. Mostly, I just fricking love the movies. I love watching them, celebrating them, analyzing them, and having healthy debates about them far, far away from the Twitter mosh pit. I’m the guy that says you really should watch The Revenant, and, yes, you’re supposed to feel like a pulverized lemon by the end. I’m the guy that recites Nicole Kidman’s AMC monologue at parties. Yep… that’s me. Sorry about that.

Like I said, I love movies. I don’t love movie politics. I don’t care whether or not a movie won at SAG or BAFTA or ESPN and what that statistically says about its chances this coming Sunday. I just care about good movies being watched by more people. So, I’m not going to list my Oscars predictions for each category at stake, as many journalists might. I’m instead going to highlight the 2022 movies I watched and suggest the ones you should watch. Continue reading “Ranking Movies Between Laundry and Taxes #001: A 95th Oscar Primer” →

Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds

Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds

Posted on by Mike Gold

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine; tomorrow belongs to me. “Tomorrow Belongs To Me,” written by John Kander for the play “Cabaret.”

I loathe going to movies alone. If the flick is great, I wanna talk about it. If the flick sucks, I wanna commiserate with a friend. Most movies are somewhere in between, and if I picked the right companion the after-movie discussion can be better than the viewing experience itself. In seeing Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, I was joined by my dear friend Martha Thomases, of DC and Marvel fame. We’ve enjoyed some great movies together, although some would be defined by critics as shitty.

Is a movie shitty even if you had a good time? Well, perhaps by consensus, but that should not humble your experience retroactively. Portal-to-portal, going out to the movies these days is an expensive proposition: the old phrase “coming soon to a theater near you” is obsolete because the vast majority of humanity no longer lives near a movie theater (Martha is a lucky exception). So when you add up all of your expenses, assuming you are willing to pay the going theater rate for a quarter’s worth of pop corn, seeing any movie in the theater is likely to cost the better part of a mortgage payment. Of course, those few surviving movie palaces of yesteryear are now showing live theater and kinda-live concerts, so we’ve got to shoehorn ourselves into little boxes made of ticky-tacky and endure twenty minutes of commercials before we get to the trailers.

But it’s a choice we, as the paying audience, choose to make. Not so much the movie critics. They have to see damn near everything, and I sympathize. They’ve been subjected to so many flickering images it’s a wonder they’re not all epileptics. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds” →

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #081: Tired of your Marvel Malaise

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #081: Tired of your Marvel Malaise

Posted on by Marc Alan Fishman

The murmurs and mumbles of mediocrity started as early as Thor 2: The Dark World. They got louder with Black Widow. Louder still with Eternals. Then came the ire and fanboy rage over She-Hulk. And now it’s perhaps getting a bit too loud over Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 

I’m sick of it.

In my day (shh, Mike Gold. Shh.) comic book movies were — at best — loud, kitschy affairs. For every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or ’89 Batman… we also got Howard the Duck, Superman III and IV, and Captain America. In the 90’s, Batman plummeted in quality, and was met by early CGI nightmares like Spawn, or obnoxious barely-based-on-their-source popcorn flicks like Judge Dredd or Tank Girl. And while these films were watchable… they were hardly of a caliber that one could present opposite more lucrative blockbuster sci-fi and action romps.

And then came Marvel.

It started unassumingly with Blade. Unlike so many neon-lit counterparts released prior… Blade felt like a horror action-movie. It was clearly inspired by the comic book origins and broad strokes of the character, but made smart choices in costuming, sets, and the watered-down plot. It wasn’t hokey. It was a blueprint.

1998’s Blade begat Bryan Singer’s X-Men. Similar to the vampire hunter… these were well-dressed (“what, you’d prefer yellow spandex?”) superheroes with well-thought-out effect work that made their mutant abilities feel believable. Combine this with the gravitas and star power of Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan, and slowly but surely, the zeitgeist was changing. 

Take a side-step from the mainstream, and you could see Hollywood begin to lean into the pulp and paper world. Ghost World, From Hell, Road to Perdition, and my personal favorite American Splendor showcased that comics beyond the punchy kind would also be applicable to mainstream (if a bit arty) America. But I digress.  Continue reading “So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #081: Tired of your Marvel Malaise” →

Super Bowl LVII Movie Trailer Recap Featuring The Flash, Guardians, and More

Super Bowl LVII Movie Trailer Recap Featuring The Flash, Guardians, and More

Posted on by Bob Harrison

As one of the biggest entertainment machines in the US goes into it’s off season, we are left with a few very interesting film trailers to ponder and salivate over as necessary. We collected the most important trailers from Super Bowl LVII here. In terms of quantity, there have been other Super Bowls with more trailers and of more massive import. Overall, the quality we got here was pretty good.

Before we get into the trailers, I had one note about the commercial advertisement aspect of this Super Bowl. There is a concept that was utilized by a few advertisers in which the commercial acted as a teaser/redirect to the internet. Several commercials asked me to take my phone and scan a QR code, ostensibly from the TV,  so that I would get more information on the website for the product. Some of the trailers were also taglined with “Watch the FULL TRAILER on the Internet now.” It is definitely a shift in entertainment consumption. In the past advertisers and television executives wanted the viewers to sit on their hands and keep their eyes glued to the tube.

Now that we are done with noticing the evolution of media consumption toward a more interactive model, let’s take a look at the trailers. We are focusiong on the movies that are fit into our wheelhouse here at PCS, and have listed them by release date:

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
In theaters March 31, 2023

PCS Notes: This movie looks fun, but I am totally stoked about the Owlbear and the Gelatinous Cube.  Continue reading “Super Bowl LVII Movie Trailer Recap Featuring The Flash, Guardians, and More” →

Brainiac On Banjo: Should Hope Reign In Burbank?

Brainiac On Banjo: Should Hope Reign In Burbank?

Posted on by Mike Gold

Hope for the best, expect the worst! Some drink champagne, some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it’s going. — Mel Brooks, Hope For The Best (Expect The Worst)

When Warner Bros Discovery revealed James Gunn and Peter Safran would be running their all-new DC Studios (as if there’s more than one), many of us lifted their faces out of our own puke in the hope it was the dawning of a new day. Well, with luck, it will be… although you can’t really blame us for taking a wait-and-see attitude.

I certainly appreciate and trust James Gunn. I love his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy and Peacemaker, and his The Suicide Squad was great fun. Better still, he treated my oldest friend and honored collaborator John Ostrander right, and that means so much to me I’d throw Gunn’s bail.

What I do not trust is, in order: 1) The “Hollywood” bureaucracy. 2) Warner-anything merging with anybody, be it Time Inc, America Online, AT&T or Discovery. Each merger made things worse for creators and end-users alike. 3) Warner Brothers Discovery in particular, and particularly how they turned the ridiculously overpriced HBOMax into a ridiculously overpriced, frustrating, mindless, and ultimately useless turd rapidly floating downstream into the sewer. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Should Hope Reign In Burbank?” →

Breaking News: James Gunn Reveals the Plan for the Near Future of the DC Universe in Film and TV

Breaking News: James Gunn Reveals the Plan for the Near Future of the DC Universe in Film and TV

Posted on by Bob Harrison

James Gunn, the co-custodian of the DC Universe (DCU) for Warner Bros. Discovery announced today the plan for what is coming out now and what is to come and it is amazing.

Gunn, along with Peter Safran, have addressed the properties that are currently in the pipeline, and in his video he details how they fit into the new vision which is being developed as an eight to ten year plan. The first “Chapter” of the DC story will be under the umbrella of “Gods and Monsters.”

There was so much exciting proposed content in this six minute video. We encourage everyone to check it out. Gunn’s enthusiasm about the DC characters radiates through the clip. It is infectious. I am more excited about these films and shows coming to fruition than I have been in a long time.

Here is a list of what is new on the docket in the first portion of “Gods and Monsters”: Continue reading “Breaking News: James Gunn Reveals the Plan for the Near Future of the DC Universe in Film and TV” →

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #079: “Dear Dwayne”

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #079: “Dear Dwayne”

Posted on by Marc Alan Fishman

Dear Dwayne,

I know you prefer to be called by your full moniker,  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but I want to speak to the person behind that particular mask. Put the eyebrow down. Send your posse on a 20 minute break. Place your phone on airplane mode, and place it face down on the table in front of us. It’s just you, me, and the millions (AND MILLIONS) of my fans reading this. Cool? Cool. 

You need to stop it. Seriously. C’mon, man. You know what I’m talking about. Really? You’re going to make me say it out loud? Fine.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

We loved when you dabbled your toe into acting. That turn as your own father in That 70’s Show? Great. Playing an alien version of yourself in Star Trek: Voyager? Uhhh… let’s come back to that.. And hey… your first trip to Saturday Night Live? Pitch perfect. Seriously. Better than any “sports stars” they featured prior. You then took the summers off in 2000 so you could become the Scorpion King (which, I assume was why you were on SNL). Like many fans… I actually went to the theater to catch your first starring role. Because it would either be good, or we’d have something to replace that one flick where Hulk Hogan made a dude crap himself.

And hey. It was fine. 20 something years later? I can’t recall a single scene, line of dialogue, or action sequence. But I do recall you fighting the late Michael Clark Duncan, and thinking it was cool. 

After that? I really want to commend you. You started taking interesting roles. Get Shorty. The Rundown. Walking Tall. Southland Tales. Were you “generic badass tough guy” in most of them? Sure. But the scripts were smart. And because of it, you looked smart. Not just catchphrases and stuntman body slams. Versus previous wrestler-turned-actors — Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and Jesse Venture — you seemed to have more depth, better comedic timing, and pathos (when called for).  Continue reading “So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #079: “Dear Dwayne”” →

With Further Ado #231: Don’t Refuse This Offer

With Further Ado #231: Don’t Refuse This Offer

Posted on by Ed Catto

I didn’t realize that Hogan’s Heroes, The Longest Yard (with Burt Reynolds) and The Godfather were all connected, but The Offer, a fantastic series on Paramount+, helped me understand the big picture behind it all.

I still like the original Star Trek series (TOS) quite a bit. So, when Paramount+ announced they were producing a series about the crew of the Enterprise before Kirk, Spock and the old gang, I was all in. I initially thought that’s the only show I’d use my Paramount+ subscription for.

Now, one of the podcasts I listen to is The Inglorious Treksperts. It’s a celebration of classic Star Trek, hosted by industry professionals who grew up loving Star Trek. These professionals talked about how much they enjoy this series, The Offer, but made point to say that many of the facts got stretched in the making of this show. That’s ok by me, and good to keep in mind. (And after watching Babylon on the big screen last month, this seems like a tame documentary!). Continue reading “With Further Ado #231: Don’t Refuse This Offer” →

With Further Ado #229: Bullet Train – The Art and Making of the Film – Review

With Further Ado #229: Bullet Train – The Art and Making of the Film – Review

Posted on by Ed Catto

To me, movies are still a big deal. I’m still stinging from that Christmas two years ago when Wonder Woman ’84 “ruined” Christmas. And this summer, seeing Top Gun: Maverick on the big screen was a real treat.

I missed seeing the stylish thriller, Bullet Train, in theaters, but just enjoyed it at home. Wow – what fun it was. (In some ways, it seems like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt may be the last movie stars.)

This is a stylish adventure movie about several assassins, all doing assassin-y things, on a high-speed train in Japan. And boy is it slick! This tightly woven story is from a Japanese book by Kotaro Isaka, although western audiences can enjoy the translation from Sam Malissa. Continue reading “With Further Ado #229: Bullet Train – The Art and Making of the Film – Review” →

Milestone Generations on HBOMax is Comic Book History That Must Be Watched

Milestone Generations on HBOMax is Comic Book History That Must Be Watched

Posted on by Bob Harrison

Comic books is an artform that is founded on community. The best comics are ones that reflect and explore humanity through both realism and fantasy. The people who make comics do it because they love it. The new documentary released on HBOMax Milestone Generations is about a group of people who loved comics and changed the industry by believing in themselves and making comics that had not been done before.

The film follows the foundation and the rise, fall, and resurrection of Milestone Media. It is full of real stories of how the inception of the groundbreaking comic company went down. It chronicles the successes and downfalls that the creators went through. The theme that is conveyed throughout is that the company is and always was about telling diverse stories about diverse people created by diverse people,

Throughout the history of Milestone, their comics have dealt with important and sometimes controversial issues facing society. Sometimes those issues caused backlash, and the film does a good job of highlighting some of those events. Continue reading “Milestone Generations on HBOMax is Comic Book History That Must Be Watched” →