Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...
Some will say, "We don't need another edgy superhero!" But that's not what makes the utter mediocrity of DC's new Supergirl so devastating. People were saying "We don't need another X superhero" since 2012, and the post-Infinity saga stupor we've slogged through was not triggered by piling one-too-many superheroes onto the camel's back. The Flash sucked because its perversion of the butterfly effect theory was convoluted and ham-fisted. Black Adam sucked because nobody on that film knew what a moral dilemma actually looks like. "Love and Thunder" sucked because, despite what everyone thought in 2017, Waititi's style only barely worked in "Ragnarok" and was not going to work in a script which feels like it was farted out half-past midnight. Supergirl had none of those issues. The real tragedy of Supergirl is that it so easily could have worked. Drifting around the universe has mostly worked for Sup...