This month Rooster Illusion‘s writers are taking a look at some of the important films they’ve shamefully only now gotten around to seeing. Sarah Lawrence and Aubrey Fox finally caught some horror and animation essentials respectively, and my superhero alter ego Capes on Camera watched Superman for the first time. Growing up around Philadelphia, it…
The common dig at the late career of Johnny Depp is that the actor’s roles more often than not feature an overabundance of makeup and prosthetics and considerably less character depth. It’s funny, then, that Depp’s turn in Black Mass (2015) as famous Boston crime lord James “Whitey” Bulger, his best performance in several years* (which,…
I’ll be the first to admit that the fact that I’d never seen Richard Donner’s Superman is a pretty big miss for a guy who spends a good portion of his time on this site writing about old superhero movies. That it’s taken me so see one of the first significant capes on camera– the superhero blockbuster…
The tensest moments in Straight Outta Compton are the moments when a police car cruises through the frame; the ones where red and blue lights flash in the background of a shot, growing closer and closer. Every time a cop car shows up, it’s only a matter of time until the members of N.W.A. are shoved to the…
Capes on Camera is a look at comic book adaptations from the days before Whedon and Nolan made the superhero flicks a summer movie staple. Some are hidden gems, some noble failures, and other are best relegated to the quarter bin of history. When I first pitched the idea for the Capes on Camera column…
The thing to keep in mind before going in to Trainwreck is that, at it’s core, it is still a romantic comedy. In fact, that might be the key to its success. The moments that have been codified as the modern romantic comedy (or chick flick, if you’re into gendering movies/ kind of suck), the meet-cute, the…
The major complaint leveled at the current crop of Marvel movies (aside from a tendency towards shallow villains and the overstuffing of movies with set-ups for other movies), is about the large, city smashing, collateral damaging stakes of the exploits. While Daredevil and Age of Ultron addressed that first issue, Ant-Man feels like a movie made squarely to challenge that last…
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