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On Friday, NHL legend Gordie Howe (aka “Mr. Hockey”) died in his son’s home in Ohio. He was 88. His death came just one day before the classic, 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was set to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Many noticed the timing was strange, as Howe features prominently in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He’s not in the film, per se, but Cameron Frye, Ferris’s best friend in the movie, wears a No. 9 Howe Red Wings jersey for almost the entire film. The coincidence was unfortunate, but it piqued interest in one of the film’s lasting mysteries: Why the hell is Cameron a Red Wings fan, anyway? Cameron’s Red Wings sweater would seem a minor detail were the film not set in Chicago, a famously sports-obsessed city that doesn’t take kindly to opposing fans. Cameron is from the Chicago suburbs, so logic would dictate that he be a fan of the hometown Blackhawks. Instead he supports the Detroit Red Wings, the Blackhawks’ arch rival. It’s impossible that the filmmakers did this by mi...

So the internet would have me believe that there are people in this world that are not excited about Independence Day: Resurgence. That sort of makes sense. If you want to spend your life watching only good movies, it’s not a bad rule of thumb to avoid the ones with exploding world capitals or opening weekend holidays right there in the title. The original Independence Day is a landmark movie for many reasons, but its ability to be understated is not one of them. Personally, though, I think those people are crazy. I might even go so far as to say that Independence Day: Resurgence is my most-anticipated big budget movie of the year. It all starts with director Roland Emmerich. While disaster movies may barter in audience cynicism, the films of Roland Emmerich have always aimed for a more sincere sensationalism. Sure, flying saucers destroy world landmarks, monsters rampage their way through metropolitan areas, and ecological disasters wipe out entire cities. Humanity endures. Think of t...

It’s been five years since the releases of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, and it’s hard to believe so much time has passed. Sometimes it can be hard to believe it wasn’t yesterday. Other times, when it’s really late, and the stars have grown dim and the moon is just a stack of studio memos with the subject line “Making Ashton Kutcher Happen (FINAL VERSION),” it can be hard to believe anything at all. But it’s been five years — of this I’m certain. The friends: They fucked. And now we are left to pick up the pieces. The front lines of the No Strings vs. Friends With War were truly for the savage at heart: families upended; homes broken; relationships strained if not torn. Innocent tweets were drafted daily. Takes were heated just to feel something. People you thought you knew copped to That ’70s Show completism. Darren Aronofsky was relevant or worse. It was wartime, pure and simple, and lawlessness reigned. Two movies about platonic sex dropped in the span of six months...

Mad Max: Fury Road was the weirdest, wildest movie nominated for Best Picture in the past several years, as well as possibly the most-deserving. I wrote a piece a month ago highlighting some of my favorite films from the past year — some categories I agreed with the direction the Academy nominations pointed, and others I didn’t really know what was going on. I do not want to underscore the achievements of any of the winners or losers in the category, and I can’t say that any of the winners in the past few years didn’t “deserve” the win… except (probably) Argo. Many or most of these movies absolutely deserve to be recognized among the best of the year — but it has never made sense to me, especially in a category as wide as ten nominees, that nearly all of them end up being the same types of films over and over. They are dramas, many of them period pieces and “based on true events,” and they feature some of the most recognizable actors and actresses in the business, working for the most...

Sunday night is Oscar Sunday, or the Superbowl for people who hate sports and love complaining about golden statues that don’t mean anything. There, eight films (eight? don’t ask me, Oscar rules make no sense) will compete for the grand prize of Best Picture, dooming them to a lifetime of thinkpieces about how they were overrated and how they snubbed x-movie. So for the purpose of making sure you have at least some knowledge of what you’re talking about when you inevitably start ranting on Twitter Sunday night (and so I can shamelessly rip off the format of my last post), here’s some basic info on The Oscars’ nominees for Best Picture. The Big Short The one that you thought was really cool and important, but you still don’t understand it This was directed by the same guy who did Anchorman 2. Good conversation starter. Yeah, banks are so evil. They really screwed us over, huh. You know, with the trading, and the lending, and the lack of regulation, and the, uh… Ok, no matter how many Ma...

While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself, it is also fraught with controversy. Twenty years ago today, the world lost one of Hollywood’s greatest entertainers, dancers, choreographers, innovators, cinematographers, and genuine movie stars. What follows is a brief tribute to Gene Kelly including an explanation of his death and the industry’s response(s) thereafter. In July 1994, Gene Kelly suffered the first of two strokes. Although doctors at UCLA’s Medical Center labeled it “mild,” the stroke kept him in the hospital for nearly seven weeks. Kelly suffered another, much smaller stroke in Feburary 1995. “He was neurologically stable, aware, and conversational,” the Associated Press reported the following day. But sadly, Gene would never fully recover from this one. At age 84, he died in his sleep on Friday, February 2, 1996. No Friends, Food, Tears, or Embraces While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself — in that such an energetic man/body was overtaken by such a debilitating condition ...