Recent Articles
All Hail His Dudeness: The Big Lebowski’s Blithe Ascension
There are hits, there are cultural phenomenons, and then there’s The Big Lebowski.
Some movies make such an impact on culture that they become monuments to a time and place. The most successful inspire sequels, prequels, reboots and a treasure trove of crappy merchandise that becomes recycled throughout the generations. The Big Lebowski did none of that, but it did inspire its own religion. Described as an An ancient philosophy that ‘preaches non-preachiness and practices as little as possible’, ‘Dudeism’, also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude, has more than 450,000 Dudeist Priests worldwide, and promotes itself as the world’s ‘slowest-growing religion’, a statement that is apt in more ways than one […]
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Who is the Man in Black?
That was the question on most fan’s lips when the credits for Dominique Othenin-Girard’s Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers rolled. Not content with the body count aspirations of the movie’s predecessor, the director would make it his goal to avoid such trappings in spite of studio demands, aiming instead to “retain the structure of the original Halloween from Carpenter/Hill; a structure following the Hitchcock rules of suspense, not mixing the genres like the script they had given me.” Of course, that kind of filmmaking had not been seen in the genre for close to a decade, and with the likes of […]
Phantasm II (1988)
I’m a stickler for order these days.
Even before the age of massive serialized movie properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where everything is connected and the movies just assume you’ve been keeping up, I felt weird about jumping into the middle of a series. I’m always afraid I’ll be missing out on cool in-jokes, vital backstory, or emotional beats. I can’t just walk into the latest Mission Impossible movie without knowing the full details of Ethan Hunt’s marital history. I need to understand the deep emotional subtext built into the Fast and the Furious franchise […]
