I was looking forward to seeing Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, the movie that opened Friday about the guy who created Wonder Woman and his unusual family life. Then a few things happened. The movie did not do at all well. According to Tom Flinn, it “crashed and burned, averaging just $600 per screen in 1,229 theaters.” That only adds up to about $737,000. Perhaps it should have had a more indie-movie-style rollout instead of going to over a […]

Fox, determined to continue exploiting the X-Men property in visual media, has not only launched a new TV series about running from the government when your kids turn out to be mutants (The Gifted), but the studio is preparing a movie for April, The New Mutants. And the trailer just became available. You’ll notice immediately that this does not look like your usual mutant superhero movie. No obvious powers, no costumes, no happy kids in class. These youngsters instead are […]

I’ve been thinking lately about the concept of “clean” media. As I understand it, it’s shorthand for work with “acceptable” levels (i.e., not much) sex, violence (although in America, this is less of a worry), and bad language. I’ve already hit on one problem with this concept: who defines what’s acceptable? But let’s proceed by assuming that we can generally agree on what makes something “family friendly”. (Although that’s obviously not true. Whether or not, for example, a sympathetic or […]

The House With a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs may be the scariest thing I read as a kid. First published in 1973, it’s the story of Lewis Barnevelt, an orphan sent to live with his uncle in a creepy old house. Lewis hears ticking in the house’s walls and eventually discovers that his uncle practices magic. The hidden clock was created to destroy the world, which Lewis and his uncle and their neighbor Florence (also a witch) […]

I don’t really blame Elizabeth Marston — when you sum up the premise of Wonder Woman like that, as people have done throughout the years, it does sound a little crazy. In this clip from Professor Marston & the Wonder Women, in theaters on October 13, Dr. William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) explains his idea for a new comic to his wife (Rebecca Hall) and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), who are skeptical. The film, written and directed by Angela Robinson, […]

Box office this summer wasn’t good. Compared to last year, movie studios made 15% less, a 20-year low. (That’s still 3.8 billion dollars, so let’s keep this in perspective.) What’s the problem, say studio heads? According to this NY Times article, Rotten Tomatoes, the website that makes it easy for potential customers to see what critics think of a film. Some studio executives privately concede that a few recent movies — just a few — were simply bad. Flawed marketing […]

This year’s Studio Ghibli Fest, a program running six anime classics in theaters, once a month, is apparently doing quite well. We’re just about halfway through, with Castle in the Sky, the third, airing this coming weekend, and Fathom Events has announced that, “due to the overwhelming success of My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service“, they will add a third night to each showing. Previously, the plan was for Sunday shows of the dubbed version, shown at 12:55 PM […]

Hans and Margret Rey created Curious George, that standby of children’s books, in the late 1930s, but their lives were interesting beyond that, as I’ve learned from the trailer for Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators. This documentary, directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki and narrated by Sam Waterston, tells of how this couple of German Jews (and their manuscript!) living in Paris narrowly escaped the Nazis to bring their charming little monkey to children all over the world. […]