Dream Beam

The common criticism of Adam Mckay 's latest, Don't Look Up , appears to be that its satire is so blunt that it is unfunny. Even if that rings true for some, it doesn't make the film's purpose less effective. The film was not laugh-out-loud funny, because it was downright terrifying. After Jennifer Lawrence 's character, Kate Dibiasky, says as much, "Well, maybe the destruction of the entire planet is not supposed to be fun," on live TV, she is ridiculed for it. It takes Leonardo's Dicaprio 's character, Dr. Randall Mindy, more time to get to his televised outburst : in which he yells that everything doesn't have to, "sound so goddamn clever or charming or likeable all the time." I get that the climate change message is obvious for a lot of aware viewers, but for me Don't Look Up is welcomed catharsis. Mckay, the most prominent film director to be a DSA member , and friend David Sirota , leftist journalist at the The Daily Post...

*** beware: spoilers for  The Matrix films and discussion of suicide ahead *** Early in the The Matrix Resurrections it's established that the contemporary Thomas Anderson ( Keanu Reeves ) is the programmer behind the successful Matrix video game trilogy from decades ago. In a meeting with his boss Smith, the updated  Agent Smith (played by Jonathan Groff ), Warner Brothers , the studio that "owns" the Matrix IP in real life, is called out by name. Smith tells Thom that WB will be making a sequel to the trilogy with or without him. The scene is an obvious recreation of what artists like the Wachowskis  face when met with pop-culture success. WB has been hounding them to return to the franchise for years. I imagine a few years ago, WB was about to make Matrix 4 without them until Lana relented. My guess is that Lily bowed out due to some of WB's conditions. Perhaps the sisters made a calculated move to having only one return, as a protest or excuse for the final...

*** full spoilers ahead *** Among the madness of corporate wranglings for the right to profit off Peter Parker, the creatives behind the new the Spider-Man movie have managed to deliver a blockbuster that coalesces two decades of Spidey-cinema into an emotionally satisfying package. By way of multiverse traversal, it brings in Peters and villains from both Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man trilogy and the following Marc Webb duology into the MCU to join Tom Holland 's Peter Parker. It's an ambitious feat akin to what was done in the animated Into the Spider-verse , but on a grander scale.  Spider-Man: No Way Home  thankfully goes beyond nostalgic cameos. It builds on the arc of the botched original trilogy by showcasing Tobey Maguire 's Peter Parker as the wisest of the three. He's the one who stops MCU Peter from enacting lethal revenge on Green Goblin. Meanwhile, Andrew Garfield 's Peter is the middle-brother full of self-deprecation, with the failure of s...

By my early teens the Matrix films had made their mark in pop culture. But they didn't quite speak to me back then. My young mind was certainly in awe of The Matrix 's most obvious conceit: What if we're inside a simulation? Nowadays I can better appreciate its others ideas: escaping the facade of the status quo and its general angst against mundane corporate life (a coincidentally common narrative in 1999: see Fight Club and Office Space ). It was the aesthetic of sunglasses, kung-fu, and guns that turned me off in the long term. I might have watched the 2003 sequels or at least parts of them. I don't remember much more that the highway action scene. They obviously didn't leave much of an impression. The critical consensus wasn't great either; so the the Wachowski's promptly went into my mental wastebasket soon after 2003. In the years to come the Wachowski's output hardly caught my eyes. Speed Racer is an ADHD nightmare I've yet to complete. I d...