Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The latest Fantastic Four flick is an abysmal flop of such proportions that multiple outlets have run what-went-wrong-style pieces in its wake. Today’s comes via The Hollywood Reporter and it is utterly delicious. Kim Masters’s “Fantastic Four Blame Game: Fox, Director Josh Trank Square Off Over On-Set ‘Chaos’” tells the story of a spandex-hungry studio…
In 1994, Fox called upon Roger Corman, legendary director of decades of forgettable B movies, to produce a Fantastic Four movie. The finished product was never released—but lucky for all of us, it’s now online. Fascinated fans have flocked to watch the film after Reddit spotted it at Dailymotion. Here it is, in all its B-movie…
Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four has been getting hammered this weekend—at the box office, by critics, and by audiences. The question everyone’s asking is: was the material bad from the get-go? Or did studio interference make this a bomb before it was even filmed? Earlier this weekend, Trank tweeted out that the movie that he envisioned…
The video “Pantone Pixels,” published in 2011, was an independent art project that used a swath of colors to illustrate a picture of the creator’s parents. Last week, Vimeo took it down. Turns out it was too similar to “Pixels,” a 2015 movie starring Adam Sandler. A reasonable human being might wonder what a tiny…
LGBT activists are calling for a boycott of Stonewall, Roland Emmerich’s film about the riots that are often cited as the beginnings of the gay rights movement, after claims that the director has “whitewashed” the protest, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The trailer for the film, which is being touted as a potential Oscar contender,…
Superhero movies have tried hard to leave behind some of their Silver Age comic-book trappings in the past decade. We’ve seen darker, grimmer versions of Superman and other heroes—but the new Fantastic Four reboot goes beyond darkness, into actual self-loathing. It’s kind of bizarre. Fantastic Four seems honestly mortified to exist. This movie’s central storyline…
Courtesy of Marvel (Evans, Pratt); Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures (Cooper); From Moviestore/Rex/Rex USA (Taylor-Johnson). The lack of equality in talent behind the cameras in Hollywood has been at the center of conversation many times this year. And while we know that kind of inequality bleeds into the stories we see in front of the…
end of ShanesHouse1 Moviegoers love a nice cliché. At least, if ticket sales for superhero comic films are any indication. See what I did there? I just used one myself. (Actually, two.) As a writer, I’m obligated to turn my nose up (three!) at clichés, wherever I see them. But my snobbery is hypocritical: I…
Watching Fox’s Fantastic Four feels like taking a cheese grater to your soul. Why would you want to take something beautiful and precious and grind it up into flaccid, soggy pulp? It’s impossible to explain. ######## BEGIN SNIPPET ######## Maybe we should ask the people who made this dumpster fire dressed as a movie. That…
Where are all the ladies? (Photo courtesy of Lionsgate) The woman on America’s silver screen is young. She is white. She is straight. And she is vastly outnumbered by men. From 2007 to 2014, women played a mere 30.2 percent of all speaking or named characters in the 700 biggest box office hits, according to a…