Tag Archives: mad men
Jenna Ipcar on ‘Nightcrawler’
Nightcrawler (2014)
Written & Directed by Dan Gilroy
117 min.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. On so many basic levels, it’s just flat out bad—Nightcrawler is what I would call a full-blooded B movie. How exactly it’s been getting rave reviews, I can’t say I particularly understand. I assume we’re just so desperately hungry for movies that aren’t based off comic books or teen romance novels that most of us will just take whatever we can get.
Yet, as I left the theater, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something deliberate about the heavy-handed execution of the whole thing. What if these aspects that seemed like missteps were really just deliberate choices made in order to hammer the point of the film home? After all, there did seem to be a very specific point to Nightcrawler: to shine a light on the dangers of unchecked, amoral startups in an economy saturated with entrepreneurial go-getters.
10 Subtitled Movies For People Who Hate Subtitles
Stalker (1979). Not all subtitled movies are this, people.
Personally, I’ve never understood the hatred people have for subtitles. Sure, there is a level of inconvenience that comes with being unable to focus entirely on the visuals, since your eyes have to dart between it and the text. I mean, you’re watching a movie because that’s what you want to do—watch something, not read it. However, it seems to me in this age of text messages, the internet, scrolling news tickers, and billion hit Youtube videos from around the world, you’d think we’d be over the stigma of subtitles by now.
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10 Audacious Zombie Movies
A gorgeous shot from The Plague of the Zombies (1966).
Now that Mad Men‘s back and I’m watching AMC, I keep seeing ads for The Walking Dead. I really, really, really don’t like The Walking Dead.
Even setting aside its dubious social politics, I think it’s thoughtless and ugly and boring. It has a routine as codified and rigid as Scooby Doo, but instead of that show’s good-natured-if-dull hippyism, it’s got nothing but contempt for its characters and audience. It’s a death march to samesy gore scenes in which the human body pulls apart as easily as tissue paper full of spaghetti sauce. I’m not impressed, and I resent it.
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