Rudyard Kipling Really Hated Monkeys: MONKEY MAN (2024) and the Legacy of British Imperialism

“The pity of the Monkey People!” Baloo snorted. “The stillness of the mountain stream! The cool of the summer sun!”  Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894) Dev Patel is a fan-favorite choice to play the next James Bond. Why would anyone want to impose such a burden on the man? The British actor has long …

Death, Nostalgia and the Threat of AI Art in TEEN TITANS GO!’s “The Night Begins to Shine 2”

You and I are old;Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;Death closes all: but something ere the end,Some work of noble note, may yet be done,Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. “Ulysses,” Alfred Lord Tennyson I turned 40 in January. These days my knees ache going upstairs, I wake up sore, and …

“Quiet Quitting” in The SANDMAN and BARBIE (2023)

You probably don't think of Neil Gaiman's seminal comic book series The Sandman that was published between 1989 and 1996 when you watch director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023). Well, maybe diehard Sandman fans do. What both artistic achievements have in common is they portray the practice of "quiet quitting." While Sandman was certainly …

Animal Totems, Marriage and Slavery in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) and THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING (2022)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is just a few months away. I can't help but think about the new movie's predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and the only movie writer/director George Miller made in-between, Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). Both Fury Road and Longing have a lot to say about how men …

Water as Motif in the Daniel Craig James Bond Films

Water can symbolize many things: Birth and cycles of rebirth, femininity, sexual desire, freedom, transformation, memory and the unconscious mind, purity and baptism (along with many other Biblical allusions). For Lady Macbeth, water can never cleanse her sins. For Huck Finn, drifting down the Mississippi River is his meandering life and freedom itself, as he …

“Am I Alive?”: Reality, Identity and the “Shadow Self” in PERFECT BLUE (1997) and GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023)

Caveat: I am a 39-year-year-old, white, American man. I approach these Japanese pop culture artifacts purposefully as an outsider to explore their universal truths, both as individual stories and in contrast to one another. My recent comparison of Defending Your Life (1991) and Wish (2023) analyzed how each movie approaches a person's purpose in life. …

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991) vs. WISH (2023)

HAMLETA man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUSWhat dost you mean by this? HAMLETNothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 3 Is it …

A Gentle Response to Sarah Welch-Larson’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter Is Alien 3 With Dracula (But in a Good Way)”

A lot has been made about the influence of Alien (1979) on The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). The writer who came up with the long-in-development project, Bragi Schut Jr., explained his original inspiration in a 2022 interview with Bloody Flicks: I’m a huge fan of ALIEN and ALIENS and I wanted to try …

SPLIT SECOND (1992) — Mental Health Models for the Modern World

Sometimes I wonder if the world has already ended. Climate Change. Trump. COVID. UFO whistleblowers. Wildfires in Maui. Why am I expected to go to work and pay bills when the world is eating itself? Most pop culture treats the apocalypse as spectacle. Scavengers draped in spiked leather, roaming radioactive landscapes, feuding over the last …

Race is Invisible in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — Except When It’s Not

The Mission: Impossible movies are not overly concerned with race. Not to say that this franchise only stars white people. Ving Rhames' Luther Stickell is there from the start, Mission: Impossible (1996). Thandiwe Newton is Ethan Hunt's love interest, the professional thief Nyah Nordoff-Hall, in Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). Maggie Q, of Vietnamese descent, is …