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Category Archives: Mixed Media

Everything that isn’t related to comics.

The Unfortunate Return of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival

Last year I came up with the idea of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival. One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was the at-home accessibility of film festival screenings. The Telluride Horror Show and Nightstream Film Festival aligned in such a way that their virtual screenings meant two weeks of watching new films from the comfort of my couch. It was one of the highlights of an otherwise depressing year. As we went into 2021 my assumption was film festivals would return to normal, virtual screenings would come to an end, and I’d finally make it to Telluride in person. 

Alas, just as no one could predict the pandemic, no one could predict we’d still be faced with such uncertainty. No one could predict we’d still be dealing with ICUs at capacity due to COVID.

Due to the circumstances, there are multiple ways film festivals are approaching their return. Telluride Horror Show chose the all in-person option. Fantastic Fest is taking the hybrid approach and doing a little of both. Overlook Film Festival, the one that brought me to Nightstream, is sticking with all-virtual.

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Warner Bros. Pictures provides cinemas a long runway for reopening

Warner Bros. Pictures is saving cinema. 

In early December of 2020, I first sat down to write this article. That first line was going to be my headline. The same day HBOMax/theater release strategy felt like the best possible decision considering the state of the world. Not every theater in the country was closed. Those that were open had become dependent mostly on limited run and re-release films. Warner Bros. was making the risky decision to keep their film slate moving while offering open cinemas a bone. A very tiny bone, but a bone nonetheless. That was my gut response, but, holy cow, it was not the popular response.

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Nightstream Review: Ema

In no particular order: intoxicating, boring, horny, punk rock, hilarious, horrifying, bewildering. 

Those are all of the adjectives that passed through my brain during the viewing of this delicious puzzle of a film.

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Telluride Horror Show Review: 12 Hour Shift

In this day of age, Internet misinformation is just something we expect. We’ve almost reached a point where if something lands in front of you on a website or social network the instinct is to disbelieve. That hasn’t always been the case. One of the very first Internet rumors to take hold on a mass scale was that Marilyn Manson was a child actor on the television show The Wonder Years. In that falsehood, Manson used to be the actor Josh Saiviano who played the character Paul Pfeiffer. The actor grew up, changed his name, and became an industrial icon. An extra special version of the Internet story was that Manson had ribs removed so he could give himself a blowjob. 

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Frankensteining a pandemic horror film festival

The last time I was in a movie theater was March 13, 2020. COVID-19 had finally arrived on the U.S. shores and we weren’t quite sure what it would mean, but everything was starting to shut down. I figured it would probably be one of my last opportunities to visit the cinema for a couple of months, so I chose the earliest screening of Valiant’s Bloodshot.

It was an uncomfortable experience. The theater was mostly empty but one of the few other attendees chose to sit two seats away from me. He spent the film coughing, snorting, and, at least twice, spitting. I was pretty sure that was going to be it. My zeal to get one last film in would result in hospitalization from this virus we were still trying to understand.

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Does Netflix Really Have a Cancellation Problem?

If online media publications are to be believed, Netflix has a cancellation problem. That is literally the headline of a Motley Fool article published after the streaming service dropped Santa Clarita Diet. E! News suggested Netflix is on a “cancellation spree.” If you scroll through Twitter you’ll find plenty of people making the same assessment. Clearly, the belief is Netflix cancels more of their shows than any network.

More specifically, Netflix is perceived as being most likely to cancel a show with three or fewer seasons. It is true that Netflix seems to have a financial bias to only produce three seasons of a show. Even with that stipulation, I wasn’t completely convinced Netflix is any worse when it comes to canceling shows than networks and other streaming services. I’ve been watching television for more than a few of Earth’s spins around the Sun and I’ve had my heart broken by cancelations more times than I can count. Cancelations simply seem like a fact of media consumption life, so why are people getting so specifically upset with Netflix? 

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Hulk Snap: Worse Than Thanos Snap?

It probably doesn’t need to be said but this article has significant spoilers for Avengers: Endgame. If you’re okay with spoilers jump past this picture of the Hulk and keep going. If you aren’t? Well, stop right here or Hulk smash.

Hulk Snap: Worse than the Thanos Snap?

If you spend way too much time thinking about Avengers: Endgame you’ll start to realize the “Hulk Snap” may have been a terrible decision. Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed Endgame and am firmly in the “just enjoy the movie for goodness sake” camp, but for funsies I decided to sit down and (over)think about all of the ways Tony Stark’s requirement for the “Hulk snap” was actually kinda, sorta selfish.

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Captain Marvel crushes completely ridiculous success metric

Captain Marvel has become the seventh film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to break $1 billion. It’s an incredibly significant metric for multiple reasons but perhaps most importantly because achieving $1 billion was a made-up measure of success by people looking for reasons to call the film a failure.

It wasn’t until after Captain Marvel‘s record breaking opening weekend that sites pushing for the film’s failure started to move the goalposts. Before the opening weekend, sites like Bounding Into Comics and Cosmic Book News had started telling their readers the film would be a complete failure if it didn’t break $100 million.

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Comic Book Shows: The Definitive Live-Action List

Have we reached peak comic book shows?

We’re living in the heyday of shows based on comic book properties. There was a time when live action shows came out every couple years and the quality was always questionable. Shows like Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Smallville were few and far between. We’d gnaw on every little morsel thrown our way in hopes it would boost ratings leading to more adaptations. Remember Ultraverse’s Night Man? Or The Crow: Stairway to Heaven?

How the times have changed. In the first half of 2018, there are were nearly 30 shows based on comic books. It isn’t slowing down. The already long list will be joined this fall by Titans (please be good enough to justify a “Titans Hunt” storyline), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and possibly Umbrella Academy. 2019’s new comic book shows include Doom Patrol, Deadly Class, and The Boys. If we want to keep our sanity (and have a social life) we need to now make sacrifices of shows instead of sacrificing our free time for questionable quality.

With impending comic book show doom on the horizon, I thought it might be a good time to take stock of what’s out there and what brings me joy. Below is a list of live action comic books shows I’m currently watching and what I think about each one. At the end are shows I stopped watching and shows I’ve yet to watch.

Note: This article about comic book shows is full of spoilers about every single one of these shows.

Note II: Updated November 28, 2018 to include The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. December 26, 2018 to include Titans. February 23, 2019 to include Happy! season one, The Punisher season two, and Daredevil season three.

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Endgame Plus Dark Phoenix Equals A Secret Wars Film

We can preserve the X-Men and Avengers Universes while still bringing all of the heroes together. The stingers for Avengers: Endgame and X-Men: Dark Phoenix should start setting up a Secret Wars film. Here’s how…

Avengers Endgame plus Dark Phoenix equals Secret Wars film

Disney has acquired Fox and with it comes the Marvel’s X-Men and all of the related properties. We don’t know when we’ll start seeing mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we do know it’s coming. This fact is cause to celebrate for fans who believe the MCU should reflect the comics. For others, (*raises hand*) there’s some hand-wringing as to what Disnification might mean for what’s become one of the more cinematically adventurous Universes under the superhero film genre. We’d be happy if the X-Men stayed in their own Universe (also, I’ll admit I’m one of the few people who would be totally fine with the Spideyverse staying with Sony).

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