X-Men: Days Of Future Past makes me uncomfortable

Earlier, after my first viewing of the new X-Men film, I set fingers to key and cranked out thousands of words about how much I enjoyed the film. And I do. The good parts are very good. Just like Rogue, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler, Quicksilver gets an introduction that ensures viewers never forget him.

Nightmare On Elm Street series: looking back in Blu.

Until its recent demise and incorporation into the folds of its parent company (Warner Brothers), New Line Cinema could be considered the most successful of the upstarts that got into the motion picture business during the deregulation frenzy of the 1980s. Granted, it started a bit earlier than that, but it was not until one particular success that New Line moved beyond its origins of buying independent productions and exhibiting them on circuits consisting of things like university campuses.

Ed Wood. The man, his films, and their meanings.

I will say this much to start with: I am a fan of the films of Ed Wood. In fact, Ed Wood‘s work can be considered a reason to be grateful for the joys of home video and film preservation. Without either of those things, we, the plebs of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century would not be able to enjoy his work. But this also provokes a myriad of questions. Like every celebrity that walks or walked an unusual path, Ed Wood‘s work and life prompts a number of questions that one can learn from by answering.

Much ado about nothing: Christopher Nolan’s Batman films…

I will come out and say this off the bat. I do not “get” the hero worship of the director named Christopher Nolan. No, wait, let me rephrase that. I get it just fine. It is just that once I get it, I do not want it anymore. As I have mentioned, I have insulin-dependent diabetes. I have had it since I was a little shy of ten years old, and have been promised an imminent cure ever since. So when I tell you that “…it’s time for my shot…” offended me more in that moment than two Rain Mans put together, I want you to understand my full meaning here. People who crap on that Christopher Nolan is some awesome director who can not do wrong can blow me. Their opinion has less meaning to me than the life of Jenny McCarthy.

The Thing versus The Thing: a critical comparison.

There are some films that a person with a good or overactive ability to visualise, like myself, can watch during the wee hours of night, and feel unsettled by for hours after the fact. Granted, I was still a bit young at this point (VHS was still the only viable home video medium at this time). But the John Carpenter version of The Thing is a film I will have to go senile in order to forget at all.

The Running Man: An exercise in how to bear the loosest possible relationship with your source material.

During the 1980s, an author by the name of Stephen King was in such wide circulation that a new film based on one of his novels seemed to be getting released every year. With the film industry of the 1980s progressively showing greater and greater effects of deregulation, and the competition becoming more akin to a street fight, adaptations of King novels progressed in identifiable stages. Specifically, faithful (somewhat), loose, looser, and related only by title.

Musing about home video again: The Alien Anthology BD set.

As a semi-early adopter of the Blu-ray Disc format, I have noticed two distinct patterns in terms of which releases I will line up to buy next. On the one hand, I will buy a lot of discs where I have heard good things about the film therein (or seen it as a rental) and am willing to take a punt. Examples of that include Crank: High Voltage or Machete. On the other hand, there are films I saw repeatedly as a boy and, since coming to fully grok the benefits of progressive video and lossless audio, have been dying of curiosity to learn how they scrubbed up on the new format. Aliens and the series it is part of (to one extent or another) is an example of that.