Once a year, the geeks of Chicagoland, the Midwest, and beyond make a trek into Chicago for a pop culture extravaganza known as C2E2. The Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (hence C2E2) is one of the many general pop culture conventions that occur around the country in a year. I call them “general” in the sense that the convention does […]
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Joseph Hall once wrote “Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.” In other words, like it or not, death is an inevitability for all of us. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that death features prominently in popular culture. Countless films, books, poems, and songs feature death as a prominent theme, often in an […]
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Hoo, boy. I know I’m inviting a whole storm of anger by suggesting that The Hunger Games is a movie that needs fixing. This is a series with a passionate and vocal legion of fans, and which has reached a cultural saturation unseen since the Twlight novels. It’s made a pretty penny at the box office, to say the least, and has […]
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With C2E2 almost set to launch from the McCormick Place in downtown Chicago, I wrap up my three part series on superheroes with this entry, in which I attempt to answer this question: do religious figures and the heroes of legend fall under the definition of “superheroes,” as outlined in part I? First, let’s look at the heroes of legend […]
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We all have gaps in our cinematic knowledge, films which, if we confess our ignorance of, someone, somewhere will say, “How have you not seen that?!” Catching Up is about these films, and viewing them so long after seemingly everyone else has. Some of these entries may be shocking, some are embarrassing, but all of them are classics. The Film: […]
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Cinema is an interesting art form, in that it is made up of a number of other art forms, including theater, painting, music, and writing (among others). Not all films can be considered art, nor should they all strive to be, but when they do rise to that level, they become something that can help us better understand ourselves, and […]
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As a lead up to the Chicago pop culture extravaganza that is C2E2 (where I will be officially stalking John Barrowman, Val Kilmer, and John Cusack), I started a series in my last article that focuses on one of the current driving forces in American pop culture: superheroes. In the previous article, I focused on working out just what exactly […]
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I’m much like my grandmother in the way that my ears get nervous just like hers do. Whenever “CSI: Miami” is turned up too loud on her television she gets incredibly irritable and uncomfortable and complains that her ears are nervous. What the hell is my point? My point is that SILENT HOUSE made my ears nervous. The house is […]
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John Carter has received a mostly negative reaction, both from critics and movie fans. General audiences appear to have shunned the film as well, in America at least, although you can blame that on a botched marketing campaign more than the film itself. But I liked the movie. Quite a bit, in fact. It’s infused with a rousing sense of […]
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There is a long tradition of films that mix horror and comedy, going at least all the way back to the Harold Lloyd film Haunted Spooks (1920). Sometimes it works (An American Werewolf in London, Shaun of the Dead), but quite often it doesn’t (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Evil Toons). The reason so many films that attempt to mix […]
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