Like George Lucas (and George Carlin!), my first name is actually George.
Unlike George Lucas, only telemarketers and other such salesmen call me George.
Like George Lucas, my greatest creative work yet (the blog Darkadaptedeye has been judged roughly equivalent in artistic merit and cultural impact to The Empire Strikes Back, according to the handful of departed low-level Trump Administration officials whose breathless kudos I just made up) was entirely self-financed.
Unlike George Lucas, my greatest creative work did not have a standalone budget of $54 million dollars (adjusted for inflation).
Also unlike George Lucas, my greatest creative work did not have a budget at all. Though I do occasionally advertise it in $12 chunks on Facebook.
Gremlins isn’t a Christmas movie per se and yet it is my favorite Christmas movie, observing all 360 degrees of the holiday season – the warmth of simple pleasures and gathered family as ward against the cold; the balm of home and hearth belying some of its tackier trappings and base consumerism – through an appealingly dark lens while, counterintuitively, still treating the festivities with more heart and care than might your average “Santa is/toys are/elves are real/magic/cute” kiddie tract or “I’ll be home for the holidays” made-for-television romantic schmaltz. Joe Dante’s 1984 hybrid Americana monster movie/comic thriller, in which the improper care of an exotic house pet unwittingly unleashes a destructive plague of mischievous beasties upon an unsuspecting small town, is a savory Christmas confection coated in arsenic and wrapped lovingly in exploding sandpaper. Continue reading “Movie review: “Gremlins” (1984)”→
The other day, while discussing boxing in detail with a knowledgeable co-worker – and there’s a opening I never would’ve thought I’d possibly write five years ago – I casually reminded him that Saturday night’s Boxing After Dark card would technically be the final telecast of HBO Boxing after 45 years of standard-bearing quality and omnipresent, sport-influencing significance. He professed mild disappointment when hearing that the best card the network could apparently assemble as its swan song was a triple-header featuring two matches from the nascent and still relatively obscure realm of women’s boxing. I found myself neither particularly surprised by his knee jerk response nor my general agreement with it. Boxing fans are always hungry, after all, rarely satisfied, and can be exceedingly hard to impress. Continue reading “Ceremonial Ten Count: A Requiem for HBO Boxing”→
In the privacy of my home, or a friend’s, or the relative safety of a Steeler bar or especially rowdy corner table, believe you me, I’ll gladly rag on your team, and your players, and your fanbase, and your ownership, your stupid, overrated city, and adorable but misplaced civic pride – and the refs (especially the refs) – until they are all bleeding like sieves from multiple metaphorical wounds. No enemy is technically within earshot and so, in my view, no one technically gets hurt. I fully expect and endorse the same treatment from opposing fans, so long as I’m not around to hear that either. Convenient, no? Venting one’s spleen in a controlled, friendly environment can be terribly therapeutic. I wish it wasn’t strictly necessary, of course, but outside of vicarious onfield accomplishments – which, let’s face it, are fleeting and never, ever a given – it’s just about the only solace to be reliably found in sports. There is a very good reason that I keep my in-person trash talking to a bare minimum, however… or, rather, two. One – I’m not convinced it’s always harmless fun, nor am I without shame. I have evolved over almost forty years as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan into an anthropomorphic cauldron of bubbling hatred, wrapped in decorative black and yellow ribbon and exceedingly thin skin. As we share a perhaps overly emotional bond to a merciless game, I can’t trust you to be 100% civil and maintain perspective face-to-face any more than I do myself. I’ll certainly buy you a beer after, and we can maybe talk about something less divisive and triggering, like politics.
Since it was a foregone conclusion that any review I might attempt to write for the Queen/ Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody would consist of an opening excess of “full disclosure” statements, I suppose we might as well start. First: Freddie Mercury is my favorite singer of all time. Period, full stop. I don’t honestly even know who qualifies as runner-up. Most likely it is a ten-way tie, with the pack mired ten miles or so behind our winner. Beyond his famous flamboyance and extravagance, his room-leveling outward confidence and revolutionary, simultaneously invigorating and hypnotic stage presence, there is the undeniable fact of Mercury’s voice, a dynamic, multi-octave nuclear missile of near-unlimited range that unquestionably ranks among the very greatest in the history of recorded music. Continue reading “Movie review: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018)”→
“It’s Halloween. I guess everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”
John Carpenter’s Halloween is no easy (or advisable) act to follow. Heaven knows many have tried. Over forty years, all manner of reverent pretenders, well-intentioned imitators, and outright thieves have approached the throne, even a couple bearing Carpenter’s own tacit seal of approval. The now-eleven official Halloween films feed into a self-writing narrative concerning the blight and bloat of horror’s most lucrative, long-running franchises, and Halloween sits comfortably alongside Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street at the top of any list of genre royalty, whether as the target of praise or scorn. Though, outside of scattered moments in the first movie and its 2018 “sequel”, Halloween has always taken itself with the utmost seriousness, the franchise’s chronic issues with continuity, motivations, and common sense have become something of a running joke. Continue reading “Ranking, dissecting the “Halloween” series”→
“Your world is not so ugly after all. It will almost be a shame to watch it end.”
All I really know about the towering, terrifying, slobbering, needle-fanged, ludicrously extreme comic book anti-hero Venom, I learned from Topher Grace in Sam Raimi’s schizophrenic, terminally ambitious, generally unfortunate Spider-man 3, which I think you’ll agree is not exactly optimal return, even on the admittedly negligible educational investment of one matinee movie ticket over a decade ago.* The rest I kinda gathered peripherally, via osmosis, incomplete spot research, and lingering glances, alternately amused and bemused, at hysterically garish comic book covers and panels, both in store and online. Continue reading “Movie review: “Venom” (2018)”→
“Sorry about the screaming girl. She’s my best friend’s best friend. She doesn’t really get horror.”
Consider for a moment the underappreciated plight of the horror slasher villain. He or she has a finite amount of time in which to make the biggest, bloodiest impression possible. This, despite the fact that movie maniacs are not hydrogen bombs, laying waste indiscriminately, and must generally both pick and pick off their targets with some degree of thought. Though blessed with the improvisational skill necessary to turn almost any found implement into a weapon of destruction, this is still grueling and, one imagines, often tedious work, far less glamorous than it might appear on screen. Continue reading “Movie review: “Hell Fest” (2018)”→
All characters and likenesses referenced herein are subject to copyright by 20th Television/Fox Broadcasting Co.
“Bob’s Burgers – It’s a dead cow on a bun but it’s still really fun! Also, we’re closed.”
“Gene, it’s me.”
“Oh. Hi, Dad!”
“Have you been answering the phone like that?”
“Yep. People love it!”
Tina, Gene, and Louise Belcher are, to my mind, simultaneously among the greatest representative arguments for and against having children that modern television has thus far produced. They are unpredictable, springloaded balls of energy both creative and destructive, winsome and anarchic, with an uncanny ability for commentary – incisive, comedic, deconstructive – that belies their disarming youth. If they just as often lose their trains of thought and go adorably crazy, well…aren’t kids supposed to say the darndest things? They’re exactly the sort of children I’d theoretically want as a parent, though I shudder reflexively at the thought of being their father. Continue reading “The Top Ten (+5): “Bob’s Burgers” Episodes”→
Schottenstein Center, Columbus, OH – August 11, 2018
Toward the end of the Columbus stop of their “Shiny and Oh So Bright” tour, Smashing Pumpkins frontman/fountainhead/dictator (benevolent and/or otherwise) Billy Corgan announced to – or, perhaps, reminded, though it was news to me – the assembled throng that 2018 marked the band’s thirtieth anniversary. As someone with almost as many years invested in the b(r)and as the members themselves – and, often, many more spent consecutively – I found the milestone interesting trivia but not exactly possessed of abundant applicable meaning. To the fans that helped make them arguably the Grunge era’s most artistically resonant musical export, The Smashing Pumpkins have already existed in a sort of non-corporeal form – meaning Corgan, his prodigious, occasionally brilliant (even in latter days) songbook, his demonstrably enormous ego, and what always seemed like a rotating cast of anonymous session players filling out the roster – for an intolerable amount of time. Continue reading “Concert review: The Smashing Pumpkins”→
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