November 2015 | Online Movie Mania

Game OverThinker: "DUMBER ALIVE"

Whose Side Are You On?

And here we go...What's impressive to me immediately is how much the in-trailer narrative here feels designed to alleviate concerns that this is more AVENGERS 2.5 than CAPTAIN AMERICA 3. Obviously, the ancillary marketing and pop-cultural "presence" will be leaning harder into "Hey guys! Here's The Avengers again - many with slightly-redesigned outfits so you have to re-buy some figures!," but as an introduction-trailer this drives home the idea that this is a natural continuation of the Steve/Bucky storyline with everyone else onhand because, hey, this is their social-circle.

In Bob We Trust: WHO'S THE BEST MARVEL VILLAIN?

Really That Good: SPIDER-MAN 1 & 2

Well. This took forever (over an hour long this time - wow!) and Sony immediately issued a YouTube copyright claim on it. Said claim is now in dispute, so watch this while you can! :)

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 8: "Many Heads, One Tale"

Well... that was pretty unexpected.A weird thing about how AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has evolved as a series is that the more both the series and the audience seem to have accepted its position as the redheaded stepchild of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the more cavalier it's gotten in playing around with the worldbuilding. Throughout most of Season 1, when the audience was still assuming/hoping that the series was going to be a mythology-packed weekly geek-out setting up dominoes for the movies to knock down, it operated strictly on the fringes of its own universe until it was more-or-les

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 7: "Chaos Theory"

Apologies, once again, for the delay. It won't repeat for tomorrow's show.So! Once again, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D puts a big chunk of it's internal mysteries on the table and drops in a bunch of new ones. Clever storytelling? Side-effect of only having a general sense of where your story is "allowed" to go week to week? Who can tell, at this point...SPOILERS FOLLOW!We knew Andrew Gardner was Lash as of last episode, and now as of this one we know how he got that way (Jaiying rigged some of her personal-effects with Terrigen booby-traps, leading Andrew to be exposed and discover that he ha

UPDATES 11/16/15

Just a quick update: This last week (and counting) has been murder on my schedule, which is why a recap for S.H.I.E.L.D from the previous week didn't end up running. It will run sometime later this evening, and the regularly-scheduled one for tomorrow should run on time. Apologies for the delay.

In Bob We Trust: "WILL WARCRAFT BE ANY GOOD?"

WARCRAFT Trailer Finally Drops

This looks suuuuuuper goofy. So I'm totally onboard.I really only have a passing familiarity with the "lore" of WARCRAFT (Paula Patton is a human/orc hybrid, I take it?) so my interest in this has been less about what it get's "right" than about what it does to justify its own existence in a tonal/aesthetic sense. For me, the main thing that's been kneecapping video-game movie thus far is that even densely-plotted stuff like WARCRAFT tends to be a melange of genre tropes where the originality comes either from unique design/character work or from the built-in strangeness that comes from inte

Review: THE PEANUTS MOVIE (2015)

NOTE: This review is possible in part through donations to The onlinemoviesmaniahd Patreon.First things first: Relax.They didn't botch it. They didn't break it. They didn't screw it up. The Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus etc you'll be seeing up onscreen and/or introducing the next generation to are largely the same ones you grew up with; and they've arrived in a perfectly agreeable, modest, sweet little movie that should re-establish them as touchstones for another several decades to come. So if those were worries you'd been nursing about THE PEANUTS MOVIE, you can exhale: It's fine.THE PEANUT

Review: BURNT (2015)

NOTE: Publication of this review is possible in part through contributions to The onlinemoviesmaniahd Patreon.Yeesh. What a bucket of suck this thing is.I'm sorry. I try as best I'm able to save the more colorful witticisms for the video reviews, but some bad movies are exactly bad enough in such a particular way that it feels unjust to approach them with more civilized verbiage. BURNT, featuring one of current Hollywood's most overexposed performers inhabiting the apotheosis of his own most tiresome stock-persona in one of the most annoying recurring narratives of the last de

Review: SPOTLIGHT (2015)

NOTE: Publication of this review is possible in part through contributions to The onlinemoviesmaniahd Patreon.I'd like to say that being from Boston, growing up Catholic, serving as an Altar Boy in my early teens and having met the (now) infamous Cardinal Bernard Law in person on several occasions, I'd have some kind of special insight on SPOTLIGHT; which relates the true of the team of Boston Globe journalists who broke the damning story of the Catholic Church conspiring to cover up decades of sexual abuse by priests... but I don't.Maybe I would if SPOTLIGHT were a different sort of a movie

Review: SPECTRE (2015)

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 6: "Among Us Hide..."

Hey! Turns out this was Episode 50! For those of you playing at home, that means AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D now has approximately 30-50 more episodes to go before it hits "syndication ready" numbers and Disney/Marvel even considers taking it off the schedule - ratings or no ratings.Also: Called it.SPOILERS FOLLOW:So! Andrew Gardner - Agent May's ex-husband, top S.H.I.E.L.D advisor and counselor of newly-turned Inhumans - is also Lash, the musclebound monster whose been hunting and killing Inhumans since the start of the season. That's a good, well-managed "gotcha" on the series' part. Yeah, I fig

Review: STEVE JOBS (2015)

Alright! Alright! Enough with the damn Steve Jobs Movies! I get it, you�re all broken up that the guy who paid people to design your trendy PHONE died! You have my sympathies but - Christ Almighty - this is the third one of these goddamn things I�ve had to watch in about 2 � years � if they make one more I�m pretty sure he gets to join THE AVENGERS! I�m sorry but for all this hyperbolic elevation you�d think the guy had fucking cured ca�Um. Eh� Okay, so, probably should�ve picked a different reference there.ANYWAY! This one isn�t so bad.So, here�s the thing kiddos: I am consistently at

Review: TRUTH (2015)

NOTE: Publication of this piece was possible in part due to the generosity of contributors to The onlinemoviesmaniahd Patreon.Reviewing TRUTH is an exercise in asking whether or not it your supposed to weigh a film against its own intentions. That's not necessarily an unusual place for a critic to be in, but it's usually in a much more extreme context, i.e. whether you should recommend a film for the laughs when it wasn't mean to be a comedy but rather a drama staged so ineptly that it becomes hilarious. TRUTH is askew in a more subtle fashion: What's up onscreen is a top-tier example of an

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