Is Edgar Wright Running in the Right Direction? The Running Man (2025) Review
I might be biased because I saw The Running Man in a packed theater on a really dark day for me, but it was a really magical theatrical experience. I say that about every theatrical experience, but I love movies and movie theaters. Sue me, and it is so crystal clear that Edgar Wright and…
Theories and Predictions for The Boys Season Five
The end of a fucking diabolical era. The Boys showrunner and executive producer Eric Kripke announced CCXP Brazil the official air date of the first two episodes of his show’s fifth and final season. The Boys season five will premiere its first two episodes April 8, 2026 with a new episode dropping weekly until the…
Ranking My Younger Self’s Fictional TV and Movie Crushes
Based on if I still find them attractive today as a 21 year old with a more developed frontal lobe. I would like to preface this by saying young Samantha Tocke had some very questionable taste. This is not to say that current Samantha Tocke doesn’t as well, but she is older, wiser, and can…
The Royal Kingdom
Auteur theory is the belief that a director has such an impression and grasp on their vision of their films that they become the “author” of their features, creating a creative palate of themes, techniques, and troupes that are reoccurring in their filmography. There are three components of the auteur theory: technical competence, distinguishable personality,…
The Art of Killing
The Act of Killing uses the documentary genre to exploit and horrors of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, centering the narrative around the killers responsible for the deaths of 1.2 million accused (not convicted) communists. Filmmaker, Joshua Oppenheimer, gives the resources to the celebrated killers to realize and actualize their crimes through their perspectives.…
Doing the Right Thing 35 Years Later
Funny how a film that is rooted in late 80s culture and societal issues still has relevance to this day. It’s almost as if Spike Lee was trying to say something about the racial tensions and inequality in America… Do the Right Thing follows the stories of the residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood on the…
Just Cause You Eat Boys Does Not Make You a Feminist, Jennifer
With films like Carrie to pave the way for the troupe of girlhood being portrayed as monstrous in cinema, Jennifer’s Body is no different, but the film offers a playful twist on the troupe as well as some much needed commentary on teenage girls and rape culture. When the audience realizes what has happened to…
Taxi Goes Beep Beep (:
The art of postmodernism emerged from the idea of breaking the standard of creation in film (and any other form of consumable media). Postmodern film is soaked in dissatisfaction in the current mainstream or status quo in society as well as upsetting the bourgeois hegemony that is infused in American and western civilization. Taxi Driver…
The Real Villain is April’s Ugly Ass Bangs
While being a film of the 21st century, Pieces of April follows a very standard three act structure with seven plot points and has a very standard, simple classical film narrative. The film follows eccentric, black sheep of the family, April, as her uptight, suburbanite family comes to visit for Thanksgiving. As mentioned before, Pieces…
The Spectacular, Spectacular of Moulin Rouge
Synopsis: When a starry-eyed writer, Christian (Ewan McGregor), is swept into the sex and songs of the Moulin Rouge, he falls in love with the show’s starlet, Satine (Nicole Kidman), but when her hand is promised to The Duke of Monroth (Richard Roxburgh) in order to keep the Moulin Rouge funded, Christian and Satine must…
The Most Uncomfortable Part of this film was Woody Harrelson with Hair
Natural Born Killers follow the infamous serial killing lovers, Mickey and Mallory, as they go down Route 666, claiming new victims every week. The film is really another Bonnie and Clyde story but with way more gore critique the media’s romanticization and glorification of serial killers. During the sitcom scene, the audience is introduced to…
Is it really a Darren Aronofsky film if you’re not a little bit concerned for his mental wellbeing?
Oh to be in Darren Aronofsky’s sick and twisted, little mind. The purpose of Aronofsky “hip-hop” style of editing in Requiem for a Dream is to consume and forcibly invite the audience into addictive personalities of the four central protagonists. The editing in the beginning is equally paced and distributes shots nicely, but by the…
Guys, there’s been a mistake… Moonlight, you won Best Picture
A24’s and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight follows the three stage of Chiron’s life, growing up as a young black man struggling with his sexual identity as well as his home life in Miami. Chiron, unfortunately, has a harsh home life, absent of love for the majority of his life. In this scene, Chiron is coming home…
Murder…God Forbid Women have Hobbies
Heathers is satirical, black comedy that critiques the social hierarchies in high school and the insecurities and horrors that are a product of cliques and niche “friend” groups. When dealing with insecurities, it’s best to start with the examination of Heather Duke and her color scheme/transformation. Each Heather (and Veronica) is assigned a color that…
Fruity Krueger
Reading Analysis: Benshoff starts his thesis by recognizing the otherness of homosexuality under the rule of a patriarchal society; therefore, homosexuality is often viewed as a threat to the natural, straight order or as a barrier/sin to straight “purity.” It is all subjective depending on the perspective of the person interpreting, but through a queer…
A Modern Day Masterpiece…and Candyman
Reading Analysis: Coleman not only describes the role of blacks in horror films, but she also acknowledges the role that race, specifically African Americans, in film as a whole. She dives into the horror genre specifically, saying that horror is meant to disrupt the natural order of a hegemonic rational, evoke fear, upset the validity…
Talk About Daddy Issues
Reading Analysis: Tony Williams in his article argues with Carol Clover and Robin Wood that horror movies are not just horror movies but also have an underlying message or meaning that they try to promote through its subtext. Williams acknowledges the horrors that Clover depicts in her analysis of the “final girl” and the punishment…
The Massacre of the Nuclear Family
Reading Analysis: With the decline of institutional and religious practices being mainstream introduced the sense of living during the “last of days” or the apocalypse. Movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were intended to exemplify a particular apocalyptic vision moving from disclosing family contradictions toward self-indulgent nihilism. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a postmodern…
Is she a bad mother or does society put an insane amount of pressure on mothers to be perfect?
Reading Analysis: In both of Sarah Arnold’s articles, “Introduction” and “The Bad Mother,” she describes the tropes of the “bad” or abject mother in horror films. In the “Introduction,” Arnold talks about the Freudian psychoanalysis of the mother and child relationship. Freud depicts that the way a child behaves is dependent on how the mother…
The Horror of the Female Emotions
Reading Analysis: In Shelly Stamp’s “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty,” she describes the depiction of the abomination of womanhood and the wickedness that tags along with it. Stamp recognizes the way that femininity and womanhood have been maliciously depicted in cinema, specifically in horror films, like Carrie. She critiques Carrie that while all be…
Exorcise Your Demons
Reading Analysis: Barbara Creed’s short yet informative article describes of the horror and the monstrous-feminine. Creed goes to the origins of modern horror, Greek mythology, where the majority of monsters with gender were depicted as female or female presenting, with the most common beast of them all being Medusa. Creed illustrates the idea of the…
Billy and Stu Need to Get a Room
Reading Analysis: As Alexandra West describes in “‘Not in my Movie’: The 90sSlasher Cycle and Grrrl Power,” with 90s slashers and beyond, 90s final girls had a feminist quality infused into their persona and characteristic in their film, displaying stronger female characters; however, Carol Clover takes this a step further in her “Her Body, Himself”…
Slashers & Sluts
Reading Analysis: As Carol Clover describes in “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” the basic premise of every slasher films depends on the antagonist psychotically mutilating and murdering a series of (mostly) young women before his eminent demise from the final girl who has survived his killing craze. Clover dives into the sexual…
Video, Vixens, & Voyeurism
Reading Analysis: It is often difficult for women to see themselves in horror films because more often than not horror films only have female characters to have them act as toys to portray the filmmaker’s own demented sexual fantasies. Laura Mulvey and Linda Williams put it best in their respective articles, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative…