A Film Blog that Probably will Die on the Vine

 Some Times Life Just isn't Fair The New Mutants, an X-Men spin off comic book, first launched with Marvel Graphic Novel #4: The New Mutants, 8 days before my first birthday. It's a very good book for it's time, and it introduced several deeply fascinating characters. In 2017, cameras started rolling to bring several of those characters to the big screen. And then... Shit happened. Delays, scheduling quirks, massive corporate mergers or take overs or whatever the correct term is, a global pandemic... Not until August of 2020, nearly two and a half years after it's original release date, and just about the time movie theaters and Hollywood were toying with getting back to business. New Mutants bombed.  Which is a shame, because it's not bad. It's not in the upper echelon of Fox's rather scattered X-Men scene, but well above the depths as well. The movie was hounded, fairly, for issues with one character's skin color, misspelling co-creator Bob Mcleod'...

 WrestleMania Week and Jean-Luc Godard I really chose a terrible week to launch this blog. This is WrestleMania week, and I'm not likely to watch a movie again until probably Monday. I did watch Pierrot Le Fou Wednesday night, but I have a rather limited understanding of what the fuck even happened in that movie, and no idea what I would write about it beyond "oooh pretty colors, wait, what?" It's the fourth Godard I've seen, after the excellent Breathless, the life-alteringly charming Bande Á Part, and the completely anarchistic Weekend. LPF fits in after the first two and before Weekend (with many films missing in between all this) and that does feel right. Each got a bit less structured, a bit wilder, a bit harder to follow.  Weekend was actually the first I saw (note: this is a bad introduction to Godard, and the French New Wave) and that movie was... Something. But LPF is not quite so explicitly political, and it's far closer to having a conventional narr...

 "You Didn't Tell Me It's A Christian Camp!" Our protagonist, Will, has this excuse early in the Netflix original, A Week Away. I, however, did not, because Brennan Kline clearly told me. This is a Christian musical set at a Summer camp. Let's bury the lede no further; this is a gloriously terrible movie.  I came to Christian culture later than many people. Middle of high school, a depressed, lost, borderline suicidal teenager found love and stability in a church. I also left said culture relatively quickly. It was a gradual leaving process, but Katrina was pretty much the final nail for my faith. Around 25. So roughly a decade in my life, about 15 years removed from the final frayed end. So why are so many of the songs ones in this movie ones that I know from those days? Many of them were already bordering on classic status then. Awesome God by Rich Mullins was a song he wrote while on a tour, but he finished it on the way to or at Rock Lake Christian Assembly, w...

 Let's be honest: this probably won't last, but I'm trying for now. I am not a trained film critic. I never went to film school. I think I can personally tell the difference between good and bad direction, editing, etc, but I'm not versed in all the language and terms to explain why it's good or bad. If I get something completely wrong, tell me.  As a fair warning upfront: I have no intention of making this an overly political blog, but I am an atheist socialist, and that will likely inform my writing. At times, it might even become my writing. I'm calling this a film blog, but I reserve the right to talk about TV, comics, books, pro wrestling, and whatever else I've watched. Beyond that, I watch some new films, some old, some classics, some dirt awful slasher films, and a fair amount of European art films. I have no schedule and what I watch is usually decided seconds before I hit play. This is probably not going to be the place for long form, deeply intell...