A Quick Note On Grading Movies

I don’t like grading or ranking movies. If you read this site with any regularity, that probably doesn’t come as a surprise. Assigning a grade intended to indicate quality and value feels reductive and overly simplistic. No movie is 100% perfect and no movie is 100% worthless—there are positive and negative elements to every film and I dislike the idea of quantifying art and pitting artistic endeavors against one another.

'Minding The Gap' (2018) Movie Review

For skateboarders, their sport means so much more than rolling around on a nicely shaped plank and four urethane wheels. It’s a way of life, a metaphorical act, an artistic endeavor, radical self-expression; it’s a survival mechanism, a way to create order in a world that doesn’t always make sense. Whatever significance a particular individual attaches to the act, it goes so far beyond kickflips and board slides, past concrete banks and handrails.

I Have Questions About 'Annihilation'

I try as best I can, and for the most part I’m successful, to keep books and their cinematic adaptations in separate compartments. They’re drastically different mediums. You can do things in a book that you can’t in a movie; novels have space to spool out and expand, while movies have a more rigid time structure. No movie is ever going to ruin a book, no matter how much it changes. And though I don’t expect that to happen in this instance, I have questions about Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanerMeer’s Annihilation.

Read Brent's Essay 'Welcome To The Gun Show'

Hey, sometimes I do things other than write movie reviews and talk trash on the internet. A narrative nonfiction essay I wrote, “Welcome to the Gun Show,” was just published by Gris-Gris, a literary journal out of Nicholls State University in Louisiana. It’s about the first time I ever shot a gun, which didn’t end well. But don’t worry, I still manage to talk about movies quite a bit—it’s really all about the discrepancy between my lifelong fascination with ultraviolent cinema and a general abhorrence of real world violence. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but it’s a damn good time. Hit the jump to give it a read.

'Dazed And Confused': It'll Never Be This Good Again

Like many of you, my introduction to Richard Linklater came in high school with his first feature, Slacker, which, to this day, is one of the first images that pops into my mind when I hear the phrase “independent film.” Made on the cheap, using non-professional actors, and told in an unusually structured, seemingly plotless way, it’s the kind of movie that, especially at the time, when the new wave of American independent cinema was quietly building steam on the down low, a 15- or 16-year-old kid might spend weekends getting high on a couch in a buddy’s basement and watching, dissecting the philosophical ramifications of each individual segment, as well as the movie as a whole. Linklater’s follow-up feature, Dazed and Confused, served a similar purpose, though in a very different way.

Star Wars, Spoilers, And What The Hell Were They Thinking?

In this line of work, I’ve become fairly immune to spoilers, partly out of necessity, partly because, as long as the story is structured well, the reveal can still have the appropriate impact. One example is that, going into season three of Game of Thrones, I already knew all about the events of the “Red Wedding.” It’s a hazard of the trade, and since I don’t have HBO and had to wait until it hit Blu-ray months after the fact, there’s only so much you can ask out of the internet. But it is told in such a way that I was still floored when it went down, even though I knew what was going to happen. That’s the sign of a strong story, I knew what was going to happen from a mechanical standpoint, but that didn’t dilute the ultimate impact.

Do Motion Capture Performances Deserve Your Awards Consideration?

For the most part, end of the year awards are complete and total bullshit. We could go through list of films from every single year and pick out which movie should have won and Oscar, what actor or actress deserved the Golden Globe, and point out all the best picture winners that have faded into obscurity while movies that didn’t even get a nomination have become universally regarded as classics. Awards are little more than a way for the movie industry to congratulate itself, and many serious movie fans don’t put a great deal of stock into them as anything more than a curiosity. Less than a year later I barely remember who took home what trophy. Still, with the release of Matt Reeves’ phenomenal Dawn of the Planet of theApes, the subject of praise and actors wearing motion capture suits has come up quite a bit.