Some brief thoughts on the state of Marvel:

• In 2009, Disney paid four billion dollars for Marvel. It turns out this was a tremendous deal. Check it out…
• The first Avengers had a production budget of $220 million and worldwide total lifetime gross of $1.5 billion.
• The last Iron Man (released last summer) had a production budget of $200 million a worldwide total gross of $1.2 billion.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (released this year) had a production budget of $170 million and, so far, a worldwide total lifetime grow of $752 million.
• You can check out the rest of the portfolio’s…

Amazon Fire TV has the baseline triumvirate needed for one of these boxes to work for me:

1. responsive, fast internals (loads high-bitrate 1080p content in a snap)
2. an RF remote
3. an actually-growing, competitive “app channel” marketplace (still missing favorites like Acorn TV and Warner Archive Instant, but they’ll arrive)

Most importantly, it doesn’t stop working after an update (Apple), or suddenly decide it hates Hulu (Apple and Roku), or block content marketplaces that compete with them (like Apple does through “curation”).

If, like me, you’ve become a little disillusioned with…

Sometimes, Netflix drops in big, giant, rock-sized diamonds for us movie maniacs to gobble up the second they come out. Such is the case when Netflix announced they were dropping The Hunger Games: Catching Fire towards the end of October in anticipation of the next movie, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, coming out in November. I’m excited to sit down and watch this with my wife, who was also anticipating this movie.

Catching Fire is the second installment in the The Hunger Games book trilogy by Suzanne Collins that was adapted into the second film directed by Francis Lawrence and…

As ever, the ScreenJunkies Honest trailers are amazing! They knocked this one out of the park.

Honestly, Trans4mers was so bad, I don’t know how Michael Bay or anyone else invovled with the film lives with themselves. But whatever. Sure makes for a great Honest Trailer for us.

I have seen relatively few things that David Fincher has done, but what I have seen I have enjoyed immensely. This video explores some of the reasons why Fincher is such a good director. I do think it’s interesting that in a time when directors and filmmakers are running away from tried and true techniques and story telling craft to be more novel, bring more “gritty realism” to their cinematography, and generally throwing away the rules, Fincher is honing the craft in a tried and true way and people are loving it. Look at House of Cards. Whatever you think of the material or the story, it is…

And perhaps part of the problem is that such a thing as “Christian art” exists. There is no such thing as Christian art. It’s a convenient label with disastrous consequences. There are Christian artists, in the sense that there are Christians called to the arts, but the art that they make should not be constrained by some external, superficial idea of what “Christian art” should sound or look like.

Michael Minkoff is one of the hosts on the (sporadic… please don’t complain to me, I’d love for them to do more podcasts and have told them so) podcast, Movieology. I know I’ve been talking…

What’s a bad thing is that Hollywood producers now know that American Christians feel that way about their faith—that Christians so desperately want to participate in the mainstream, that they’re tired of having sanctioned music that’s like other music and movies like other movies and politicians like other politicians but always still being on the outside, that Christians just want to feel identified without having to carve out little alcoves or niche markets that exist alongside the Big Boys. And, now that they know it—that is, now that they know they can make back 5x their initial…

The rapture is new to the Christian scene. It arose in the late 1800’s, when Margaret MacDonald, a fifteen-year-old Scottish girl, claimed to have it revealed to her in a vision. Her vision was then picked up and popularized by the famous British preacher J.N. Darby, during his extensive travels in America.

All love to the high school prom queen and traveling street preacher, but this is a suspiciously short track record for nearly 2000 years of Christian theology.

You must go read all of this right now. And please, whatever you do, do not give money to this monstrosity of a film known by…

I may be pre-disposed to like this because of my general loathing and hatred for the selfie culture, but I do like this. It’s short and it makes a point. If I ever had the opportunity to talkt o Kirsten Dunst, I honestly have no idea what it would be about, but it sure wouldn’t be to ask her tag me. Maybe I’d chat with her about her role in Spider-Man, or what it was like to do Jumanji with Robin Williams.

This short film, unfortunately, may hit a little bit close to home. Check it out