Keanu Reeves is American cinema’s greatest action star. Wait, what about — nope. It’s Keanu. Over thirty years in showbusiness, dozens of revered films to his credit, an inarguable pop culture icon with chameleon-like genre versatility, and it took until 2014’s majestic, breathtaking sleeper hit John Wick for the man to finally start receiving, in slow drips,... Continue Reading →
(Spoilers from word one.) M. Night Shyamalan and I have always had a complicated viewer-filmmaker relationship. He directed three of my most beloved movies — Signs, The Sixth Sense, and Unbreakable, the latter an underrated masterpiece. He also made one of my most loathed, The Last Airbender, a tone-deaf white-washed adaptation of the stunningly progressive animated series of... Continue Reading →
What’s a Women In Horror series without Jamie Lee Curtis? Not just the most famous Final Girl in cinema history but one of the most influential and a main originator of the term, Laurie Strode is, for me, the queen. Future horror heroines would emerge from the building blocks of Laurie’s character and develop in... Continue Reading →
Mothers get a bad rap in horror movies. They’re either defined as the angelic defender, seen in The Exorcist, The Shining, and Poltergeist, or an inherently corruptive evil: Carrie, Psycho, Friday the 13th. That latter characterization evolved into a prominent sub-genre, the Bad Mother, a force of terrifying violence born from an inability to conform... Continue Reading →
“I kind of use Luke Cage as a Trojan Horse to talk about everything else I’ve ever wanted to talk about in terms of New York hip-hop and black culture.” (Cheo Hodari Coker) Stories influence and reflect our world. It’s been that way since ancient mythology and prehistoric cave paintings— we try to understand ourselves and... Continue Reading →
Announcement! I got to write about my childhood heroine, Ellie Arroway, for btchflcks.com’s Women Scientists week! I take a personal look at how she affected my career track as well as the inherent sexism she experiences in a male-dominated professional field, and how the film treats her character overall as an example of much-needed female representation. That’s... Continue Reading →
(Plus other thoughts on reboots, fandom gatekeeping culture, and what qualifies as feminist representation.) I can’t remember the last time so much controversy surrounded a movie sight-unseen prior to the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters — most of it from appalling misogynistic chucklefarts that don’t deserve a word more devoted to them. For those of you concerned about... Continue Reading →
Do you love the movie Labyrinth? Are you interested in reading about how it boasts a pretty radical feminist message? Then you should check out my article on Bitch Flicks! I wrote “You Have No Power Over Me”: Female Agency and Empowerment in ‘Labyrinth’ for their “Ladies of the 1980s” theme week, and I’m so thrilled... Continue Reading →
It starts small. An unexplained noise. A bodiless whisper. An object moves on its own. A shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye, behind you, under the bed. There’s something wrong in your home; something evil is here, something inescapable, powerful, and it wants to kill you. Director James Wan knows how to... Continue Reading →
Eight years before Iron Man, when Marvel’s interconnected movie universe was just a studio’s daydream, there was X-Men. In many ways we have Bryan Singer to thank for establishing the success of today’s superhero blockbusters. Singer grounded his mutant world in realism and heart, proving that movies based on crime-fighting, cape-wearing people with funky abilities... Continue Reading →
