Copied from my Facebook post early in the morning after the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident at the Oscars. To anyone defending Will Smith for defending his wife. NO! Chris Rock’s job is making mean jokes about the audience. Literally! It’s a roast. It’s why the Oscars hire him every year! It’s what he’s paid to…
I’m teaching a class called “Written Professional Communication” at the University of Pittsburgh. Amongst other things it’s about… well, communicating professionally in writing. Currently we’re working on “responding to complaints”. In order to generate some complaint s to respond to I instructed my students to write a complaint letter as though they lived in the fictional universe of their choosing:
I just watched the trailer for Cats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtSd844cI7U I have some thoughts… but first some caveats: When I was a little kid, I actually loved this musical. I don’t know why… but Rum Tum Tugger was just one of my favorite songs. I have this movie as one of my picks in the VoxPopcast Box…
I haven’t seen the new Captain Marvel movie yet, so this is not my review… it’s more of a pre-review? I guess? Preview sounds weird. Anyway, I think one of my favorite things lately is reading the pre-release buzz about Captain Marvel. In particular, I’m loving the one very particular type of criticism. In the…
So once again I’ve been too busy to post movie reviews. I’ve sen a bunch, but I just haven’t gotten to writing them up. I do talk about films (in a different way) quite often on my podcast, VoxPopcast (cheap plug), so you should totally be listening to that. But if people want me to…
It’s all about the supporting actor… I happened to check in on Facebook at the movie theater when I went to see the new remake of A Star Is Born and I got an interesting comment from a friend of my wife’s that it “doesn’t seem your type of movie.” I found that funny. If you…
I’ve been too busy to write movie reviews lately. I’ve been seeing a bunch of movies, of course, but I only have so many hours in the day and most of my writing has been going towards either my dissertation, some upcoming academic conferences and publications I have, or the podcast. Even I can only…
I’ve been busy the last couple weeks and unable to review the films that I’ve seen. Of course I’ve seen them. Two big superhero movies came out, both sequels: Incredibles 2 and Ant-man and the Wasp. Obviously I had to go to both of those… and I did… I was just too busy to write something up.…
Usually I try to not give spoilers when I give a movie review. Every once in a while one comes along that’s impossible to spoil. This is one of those movies. If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know the basic plot. A group of five lifelong friends continue to play a game of tag…
Decided to check out the late night screening of Solo: A Star Wars story last night (thanks MoviePass, I’ll sure miss you when you die). Well, I guess this is what movies are now. One of my normal criticisms films that are franchise reboots or sequels or prequels clearly based on extending IP rather than…
I’m not a fan of Deadpool comics. I get why so many people are, but it’s never really been for me. And that’s fine. Not everything has to be for me. And that’s fine. It’s just not my thing. That said, I really liked the first Deadpool movie. I liked it far more than I…
So I’ve seen Infinity War twice now. That’s rare for me to do before I write a review. I saw it originally Thursday night and then again on Friday. I wanted to really think it through so I could find a way to review it without spoilers. I did write up a “call for comments”…
I have a billion things that I should be doing. A podcast to edit. Two more academic conferences to get ready for. A couple of papers to write. I should pack. I should clean my house. So what did I decide to do? I decided to go see Ready Player One at the movies last night,…
You know what I haven’t said about a movie review in a long time… “well, I guess that was a movie.” Usually when I say that, it’s when there’s a movie coming out that I feel like has a lot of expectations behind it, that seemed like maybe it was going to fail and which…
Who wants to do an Oscar pool? I love the Oscars. Everyone knows that. Oh, you didn’t know that? Well, then you haven’t been paying attention… how the hell are you even reading this? To me the Oscars are almost as exciting as the Super Bowl (come on, last year’s last minute buzzer beater by…