All articles filed in Movies

In 1941, Fleischer Studios – the animation studio who brought Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor to movie screens – released the first animated episodes of the Adventures of Superman. The series, which ran for two year and seventeen episodes, were visually brilliant, with major flourishes of art deco and noir stylings, plenty of two-fisted…

Who doesn’t love a good kung fu movie? The action, the drama, the sound effects, the excitement … But there are times when it seems as if kung fu movies are repetitive. The same plotline. The same action sequences. Which brings me to this film from 1979. In America, the film was released as The Crippled Masters, and it…

By now, you must have heard that this little film has entered the public domain. That’s right, this Mickey Mouse film Steamboat Willie, is now available for anyone to use as they see fit. This one, in case you haven’t really sat through it. But here’s the big secret. Why is it called “Steamboat Willie?” Who’s Willie? Is Mickey…

Many years ago, there was a Hollywood film called Juwanna Mann, a comedy about an NBA washout who tries to rejuvenate his career by dressing in women’s clothes sand joining the WNBA. It was about as funny as a fart in church. I wrote about Juwanna Mann last year as part of a larger blog piece…

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that when the last film in the Mad Max series, Mad Max: Fury Road, hit the theaters in 2015, I was completely stoked. I wanted another adventure of the cop-turned-vigilante Max Rockastansky. I wanted car crashes and action scenes that just screamed big-screen entertainment. And I had waited…

So there was this film in 2007 – a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, where the two directors would each create a full-length low-budget film that celebrated the classic “grindhouse” films of long ago. They would release the two films – Rodriguez’ “Planet Terror” and Tarantino’s “Death Proof” – as a double feature,…

Think about this for a moment. The Three Stooges built a career that lasted for nearly 50 years. They went from vaudeville to sidemen to their own long-running series of movie shorts. And even in the twilight of their careers, they found success in feature films – both as stars in pictures like Have Rocket,…

I’ve blogged in the past about Winsor McKay’s greatest creation, his Sunday cartoon Little Nemo in Slumberland. I’ve also noted that there was a time, in 1911, when Winsor McKay created a short animated film featuring Nemo and the rest of the Slumberland characters. Here’s that film. Well, in the 1980’s, there was an attempt…