Saturday, December 6, 2014

Chelsea Peretti Says “LIKE” 430+ Times in Her New Comedy Special

Readers be like, "430 times, huh? He actually CLOCKED THIS?"
Yes, I did. It’d be easy to write a clickbait headline exaggerating something along the lines of “Chelsea Peretti Says ‘Like’ a Hundred Million Times” but I couldn’t in good conscience write an article based on hyperbole. (I tried to make a cool visual chart of the data, but failed miserably. If anyone has the skills to do so, feel free to download the CSV of "likes as lap times" here. )
I had picked Chelsea Peretti’s special “One of the Greats” over the multitude of stand-ups now on Netflix because, if she was good, I'd enjoy watching “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” just a little bit more. The first gold star for her was rolling up on that motorcycle in in front of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. No wussy little cruiser. A badass sport bike. I was getting turned on… maybe it was her Clint Eastwood voiceover, but regardless, her mission was already half-accomplished.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

What is a Movie Review?

I am a big movie buff. My favorite genres include comedy, action, horror, and occasionally sci-fi. That said, I don’t get a chance to go out to the movies as much anymore and therefore I tend to read a lot of user reviews before deciding which film to make the effort for. 
Why user reviews over critic reviews? I think they are just more honest and fun. Also, when looking to brush up on some old cult films or pulp classics, it's good to dig through user reviews to see which likeminded film fans agree are the truly classic films still worth an hour and a half of anyone's time. Horror film franchises especially benefit from the user review community - which saved me from the disasters of movies like "Critters 4" and "Hellraiser 9" ... well I skipped 3 & 4, 6-8, too, but "Hellraiser: Inferno" (2000) wasn't bad for straight-to-video.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

A Celebration of the Horror Anthology (or Compilation)

First of all, let’s touch on the difference between a Compilation and an Anthology. I am not the expert on this, but for the sake of this article, an anthology is the collected works of a single group or artist, whereas a compilation is a collection of works by a variety of artists. Further, I would say that all anthologies are compilations, but not all compilations are anthologies. Like squares and rectangles.
I am not going to be exclusionary, as both anthologies and compilations have their strengths. The best thing about a horror anthology in particular is that when you have a good director, such as Lewis Teague who helmed “Cat’s Eye” (1985) or George A. Romero who directed “Creepshow” (1982), then you have a unique opportunity to let a talented storyteller take you on multiple rides for the price of one ticket. Not all stories need an hour and a half to be told. Basically any horror film that involves teenagers going camping is already wasting 15 minutes of precious “scare time” with the lame character setups as they all travel to wherever it is that they will eventually die bloody painful deaths. Why do we need to know which one is the slut, the jock, the nerd, or the good girl? We just came to see them die, and the sooner you get to the action, sex, or SFX, if not all three at once, the better.