Articles tagged with: The Dark Knight
Cinema and Television, Jan/Feb 2010 »
When it comes to fan films (as opposed to other media), resource constraints tend to impose upon the creativity a little more heavily, since the creation of an aesthetically successful motion picture requires a delicate alchemy combining the best of every kind of artistic medium invented to this point. It can be expensive, and it can be even more difficult to find collaborators whose enthusiasm for a project is matched by their skill. That’s why a fan film as tremendous as Grayson, directed by John Fiorella, is a major accomplishment. Beyond being such a great example of the fan film, it arrived at a pivotal moment in pop culture, emerging as the quintessential superhero film of the decade.
Cinema and Television, March 2009 »
Seriously, my world just turned upside down.
Early in the year I forced myself to sit through Christopher Nolan’s painful but much hyped follow-up to the dreadfully mediocre Batman Begins. You know Christopher Nolan, the guy who made the brilliant and ambitious movie, Memento, following it with one of the decade’s smartest American movies, The Prestige. As a Batman fan, sitting through The Dark Knight was a physically painful affair: dire, clichéd rubbish, an overly traditional man vs terrorist setup soaked to the brim in an unquestioning philosophy a mile or …
Cinema and Television, Literature, March 2009 »
Huge lot of comics fans that we are, the Playtime Staff sat down for a roundtable on Zach Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Matt Kessen, our resident Watchmen expert was tapped to conduct the discussion, especially in regards to how the film differed from Moore’s graphic novel. The following takes place over the the week before and after the film’s release. If you are interested in continuing the discussion, feel free to jump into the fray on the forum.
Page One: Quis custodiet ipsos custodis? The Pre-Game
Page Two: Why I Am Not Seeing …
Cinema and Television, March 2009 »
Milk is of a piece with Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain in the blunt sense that it is a comfortable, digestible mainstream drama that makes explicitly gay themes more palatable to mass audience members who might defend their appreciation for the film with a phrase like, “It was a good story, even if there were homosexuals in it.” This is important. Milk is a pan-cultural call to arms for advancing gay rights – though this isn’t a “gay rights” movie; it’s a movie about people fighting for human rights
Cinema and Television, February 2009 »
It seems as though 2007 and 2008 are mirror images of each other. 2007 was a year in which blockbuster summer entertainment hit an all-time low, with unimaginative sequels and threequels failing creatively left and right. However, there were a lot of great films that came out outside of the bloated summer mold that were fantastic, so many that putting together a list of my favorites that year was almost impossible and actually ranking them was out of the question. This year was the opposite, the summer movie season was …
