Joffrey, you don’t deserve Natalie Dormer’s love. Image via IMDB
Moral of the story: Don’t get married in Westeros.
Sunday’s episode of Game of Thrones was a big one, and it is one that every fan has been waiting for since season one. So for now, I will say SPOILER ALERT. If you don’t want SPOILERS for this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, do not read beyond this point. I put SPOILERS in bold/caps lock because you see, I’m trying to make a point.
The college freshman dorm room poster of the future. Image via Business Insider
It’s the beginning of the end as we know it.
Tonight marks the first episode of the seventh season of Mad Men. While this is the last season of Mad Men, it will go on a little longer than expected, given that this season has been split in two halves. Splitting final chapters in two is a popular trend now, and it is the only thing that Breaking Bad, Nymphomaniac, and Divergent have in common.
The sixth season of Mad Men was a bit of a creative letdown that ended with a finale that promised a very important season to come. I am interested to see how these next two seasons will be structured. Either way, each episode will be incredibly important. Now that there is an end in sight, that means that each episode will be building to something bigger. Expect some important decisions, emotional revelations, and internet fan theories that prove to be completely wrong.
You still have a few more hours until the new season of Mad Men premieres. I decided to spend that time thinking about which episodes mattered to me the most. This show’s very best episodes prove that Mad Men is more than just a show about an ad agency in the 1960s.
Maybe it is premature to be choosing the best episodes of Mad Men already, but I like racking up Internet points, people. Here are what I consider to be the five best episodes of Mad Men to date:
A man and a woman as partners? In a movie? Do you think there’ll be sexual tension between them? Image via Business Insider
The differences between Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the latest Captain America installment, shows how much the Marvel Universe has changed and expanded in just three years.
The Winter Solider happens to combine both the worlds of Captain America and The Avengers: half of it is a promotion for a bunch of Marvel stories that I have little interest in, and the other half is a Captain America movie. Leave it to Disney to replace traditional product placement with promotion of their own products.
Because movies were bad in other times, too. Image via EW
Entertainment Weekly is not dead yet, but looks to be slowly marching itself to its own grave.
Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly announced that it would be laying off veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman, who has been around since the magazine’s inception. This comes a year after their other longtime film critic, Lisa Schwarzbaum left, and just weeks after the publication laid off other prominent staff members, and announced a complete remodeling of their website, which would now allow for community posting.
In short, this entails that the site will now be like BuzzFeed, in that anybody can post on it. These community posters will be paid in “prestige,” instead of, you know, money.
All of this news is dangerous for anybody who actually plans to make a living writing about film, television, music, and books. Time to pull out our sharpest hyperbolic knives!
Michael Bluth is threatening me! Image via Apple Trailers
What can I say? I have a soft spot for adults cursing at little kids, and those kids cursing right back at them.
Bad Words is the story of Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman), a 40-year-old loser who uses a loophole to compete in a national spelling bee. Guy Trilby is about as unlikable a person as possible. He has no ambition, curses to no end, and is mean to both women and children alike. But Jason Bateman is such an awesome dude in general that he almost dares you to like Trilby.
Darren Aronfosky: Clearly proud to be from Brooklyn. Image via Zimbio
Ever since I was first urged by a friend to see Pi at the ripe age of 13, Darren Aronofsky has been one of my favorite modern directors.
With each film he makes, Aronofsky explores bodily mutilation, addiction, and obsession in nearly all of his works. While each film is thematically similar, he breaks enough new ground with every film he makes that it feels new each time.
Even when he is not involved in every aspect, Aronofsky still feels like the auteur. Also, you can thank him for allowing us to imagine Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis making out at will now.
I decided to put up his latest effort, Noah (which cleaned up at the box office this weekend), with the rest of his filmography. Here is how I would rank every Darren Aronofsky film (from worst to best):
I thought Noah would be the kind of film that gets a love-it-or-hate-it reaction. Instead, Noah tells us to take back all of our preconceived notions. It is big and insane like any Biblical story is, and boy is it proud of it.
Noah is the sixth film by Darren Aronofsky. If he can turn this into a big hit, then he will be granted virtually all of the creative freedom he wants for a very long time. In a lot of the Noah reviews, I have seen words like “impersonal” pop up. Noah might not be a beautiful character study like The Wrestler, but that does not mean that it is any further away from Aronofsky’s heart. After all, he has been dreaming about making this film since he wrote a poem about it in grade school.
“Hey Kermit! Did you know that there is no God and the Bible is a lie?” Image via YouTube
Like any good Muppets movie should do, Muppets Most Wanted begins by announcing what it is to the world. “We’re a sequel, dammit, so like us or don’t like us!” But it’s the Muppets, and the Muppets are impossible to hate. If you were looking for a Muppet movie that is equal parts charming, funny, and chaotic, then Muppets Most Wanted will give you everything that you are looking for.
Muppets Most Wanted picks up almost directly where the last movie left off, with the Muppets reunited and famous once again, but this time without the help of Jason Segel or Amy Adams. Celebrity cameo numero uno is Ricky Gervais as Dominic Badguy, which is French for “good man,” as their new manager. Celebrity cameos in any given Muppets movie are always exciting. I wait for the cameo like people wait for the scary moments in a horror movie.
“I’m sorry your stepmother is a nympho.”
-Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski
Nymphomaniac, also known as 2001: A Sex Odyssey, is Lars von Trier’s ambitious sex epic. Yes, this film is about sex. And there is a lot of it and it is about as graphic as you could imagine.
Nymphomaniac once pushed well beyond the five hour mark. Then, it was split in half and cut a little more for both time and explicitness. I am not sure if the version I saw is butchered or exactly what Lars von Trier wanted within the limitations of reality.
There has been a lot of debate about how to review this film. Some say that it is okay to review both parts as separate films, while others think that both parts of Nymphomaniac must be reviewed as one. At first, I thought it would be fine to review both parts separately. But then, I watched them both and realized that while they were different in some ways, one half could not function without the other. Sure, Kill Bill could do it. However, the difference between Nymphomaniac and Kill Bill is that the ending of volume one of Nymphomaniac does not feel like a free-standing conclusion; it feels like a story that is approaching a midpoint. This saga can be seen in two parts, but it was probably not made with that possibility in mind.
However, middle ground is my middle name, and I would like to try both approaches of reviewing Nymphomaniac. Brace yourselves for my review of Nymphomaniac, a review written in three parts:
For about as far back as I can remember, I have always been obsessed with movie posters.
The best posters can be works of art. The worst can completely change how you feel about the film it is representing, even if you haven’t seen that film yet.
I decided to spend a part of my recent trip to Europe looking around at whatever movie posters they had hanging in public places. The truth is, no matter what language they are in, the posters on both sides of the pond are fairly similar. The most interesting part is trying to figure out why some titles changed, and what local posters tell you about that culture.
Look below for the highlights of the movie posters I found while exploring London and Paris: