Reel Film Chronicles – Page 5

The Gray Man

Look upon our works, and tremble. The Gray Man was not a movie meant for mortal eyes to witness. It is something ethereal, something that defies comprehension and flies in the face of everything we’ve come to understand about maintaining audience attention. A $200 million dollar action movie financed and released by Netflix and touted as the beginning of the Next Great Action Franchise, The Gray Man is a lumbering behemoth of a film, a dragon in search of a slayer to put it out of its misery. The Russo Brothers appear to be intent on quickly burning up any and all good will they garnered with the Captain America and Avengers movies in the MCU, invoking a world of secret agents, CIA conspiracies, and an underground world of assassins that served mainly as an advertisement for the much better franchises from which The Gray Man so clearly took its inspiration. Join your intrepid hosts at the Reel Film Chronicles podcast to discover whether The Gray Man completely missed the mark, or was simply a sleeper agent waiting for its time to…

Dual

In the entirety of human history, there has perhaps been no question more pertinent to our place in the universe than whether you could beat yourself in a fight. Dual, the latest film from Riley Stearns, explores a future where humanity has perfected the science of cloning, which sometimes results in some awkward situations that can only be solved through some good, old-fashioned fights to the death. So, basically, your average Thanksgiving dinner. Touching on themes of death, identity, and legacy, Dual invites audiences into a world of deadpan dialogue, strained relationships, and clone support payments, but provides no easy answers. Perhaps fittingly for a movie predicated on diametrically opposed motivations, your intrepid hosts find themselves at odds, presenting dual viewpoints on what might be one of the best films of the year or a worse cinematic crime than the Transformers movies depending on your point of view. So grab your crossbow, take a nice long drink of water (but only if offered by someone you trust with your life), and tune in to find out if Dual is the sci-fi hidden…

Everything Everywhere All at Once

In a universe of infinite possibilities, you find yourself listening to the Reel Film Chronicles as we discuss Everything Everywhere All At Once. But it didn’t have to be this way. In another life, another universe, you could have been a world-famous movie star on the set of your next blockbuster film. You could have been a martial arts master on a journey to avenge your fallen master with the power of your pinkie finger. You could have been an accomplished chef in a high-end restaurant with the help of your raccoon friend. You could have been a rock, silently waxing philosophical as you watch the sun rise with some of your rock family or friends. Or you could simply accept your life, with all of its myriad joys and tragedies, and find serenity in life’s simple pleasures, like listening to the Reel Film Chronicles discuss a fun, imaginative, thought-provoking movie and being grateful that out of all the possible universes, we live in one where Everything Everywhere All At Once exists. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) directed by Daniel…

The Batman

Every generation has a hero for their time and place. Someone who stands on the side of justice and good and right. And due to franchising rights and a severe aversion to risk on the part of movie studios, that hero will invariably be Batman from now until the heat death of the universe. Fresh on the heels of Ben Affleck’s portrayal in the DCEU movies, Robert Pattinson takes up the mantle of the Caped Crusader in The Batman. Matt Reeves swoops in to keep the DC cinematic universe alive after a continuing string of bizzare choices on the part of Warner Bros. who seem intent on self-sabotaging one of their biggest money makers. But fear not, bat-fans, for Matt Reeves brings the talent he displayed with his Planet of the Apes movies to bear on The Batman, the darkest, grittiest, emo-ist, detective-ist big-screen version of the Dark Knight ever committed to celluloid. You like your Batman dark? How about so dark you have to squint just to be able to make out what’s happening on screen? How about so…

Deadstream

“Did you ever hear the tragedy of Wrath of Shawn? I thought not. It’s not a story the mainstream media would tell you. It’s a YouTube legend. Shawn Ruddy was a Memelord of the Internet, so powerful and so controversial he could use his followers to influence the algorithms to generate views. He had such a knowledge of monetization that he could even keep the ones he cared about from being pranked. The dark side of online influencers is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his sponsors, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he paid a homeless man to fight him and then smuggled himself across the border. Ironic. He could save others from de-platforming, but not himself.” – Shawn Ruddy. In this episode, our dynamic duo explore Deadstream, a modern horror/comedy hybrid written and directed by Joseph and Vanessa Winter. The latest addition to this venerable storytelling tradition, Deadstream tells the tale of a disgraced Internet personality, Shawn Ruddy, who spends a night…

Scream (2022)

I scream, you scream, we all scream for more Scream. Proving that the slasher genre is as difficult to kill as the wide array of masked homicidal maniacs that drive their narratives, the Scream franchise lives on with the fifth installment in the series, titled Scream. Confusing titles aside, Scream (2022) carries on Wes Craven’s legacy with a whole new generation of victims, scream queens, psycho killers, and oh so many misdirects regarding exactly who those psycho killers might actually be. Along for the ride are franchise regulars Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette, giving series-best performances and drawing in long-time audiences and having their characters killed off or being grossly underpaid for their trouble. Listen in to the Reel Film Chronicles as we deconstruct and pay homage to Scream (2022) and the rest of the Scream movies, the horror franchise that’s been deconstructing and paying homage to the entire horror genre for over 25 years, and either discover a new horror series or get really depressed when you realize that you were old enough to see the original…

Robocop (1987)

>Accessing files >List Prime Directives 1. Serve the Public Trust 2. Protect the Innocent 3. Uphold the Law 4. [Classified] Listen and subscribe to the Reel Film Chronicles podcast In this episode that you’d almost certainly buy for a dollar, Brian and Nathan dive into one of the all time greats: Robocop. In Paul Verhoeven’s action masterpiece, audiences are offered a vision of a broken and bankrupted Detroit, a world on the brink of nuclear war, and a society exploited by soulless corporations. Luckily, nothing like our own world. Enter Robocop: a police officer gunned down in the line of duty then resurrected through the use of advanced cybernetic technology, a modern Christ metaphor who walks on water and cleans up the streets by shooting bad guys in the dick. Simultaneously a brilliant satire and a genuinely entertaining action movie in its own right, Robocop has left an indelible, bloody mark on cinema history. So join us as we explore this classic film, but just make sure to come quietly or there will be… trouble. The Reel Film Chronicles: Part man.…

Stephen King’s IT

For nearly half a century, Stephen King has tormented and delighted fans in equal measure by plumbing the very depths of our collective psyches to lay bare the ultimate existential terror that lies at the heart of humankind’s deepest and darkest fears: clowns. King’s seminal work, IT, has been adapted for the screen two (and a half?) times, first manifesting itself in the form of a ’90s mini-series starring the incomparable Tim Curry as the terrifying Pennywise the clown, and then reincarnating nearly three decades later as a duology of blockbuster horror films: IT, the highest grossing horror film of all time, and IT: Chapter 2, which technically qualifies as a movie. In this episode, you get even more bang for your buck as Brian and Nathan discuss not one, not two, but three… well, two movies and a mini-series (for all you Gen Z kids, they were limited series before they got rebranded for streaming services). The point is, first Stephen King writes this cocaine-fuelled nightmare, then Hollywood becomes obsessed with his work, and now, we’re going to have…

The Adam Project

In this episode, The Reel Film Chronicles takes a journey through time alongside Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project, a time travel movie brought to us by the friendly marketing algorithms over at Netflix. A carefully curated mix of action and drama, The Adam Project is the latest in a short line of made-for-streaming movies attempting to bridge the gap between the big and the small screens. The movie asks deep philosophical questions, like what kind of conversations would you have with your past self, whether our destiny is set or the future can be changed, and whether Ryan Reynolds’ ineffable brand of charm can be taught or it’s something one can only be born with. Join us as we take a deep dive into The Adam Project, and see if a time-travelling, martial-arts-trained, definitely-not-lightsaber-wielding, fast-talking, jaded fighter-jet pilot with a heart of gold is truly the hero we need right now. THE ADAM PROJECT | 2022 | directed by Shawn Levy starring Ryan Reynolds | Walker Scobell | Mark Ruffalo | Jennifer Garner | Zoe Saldana | Catherine Keener science-fiction /…

Space Sweepers

In a dark and dystopic future where an evil corporation wields unbridled political, technological, and social power and is willing to sacrifice the masses of socio-economically disadvantaged people it deems unfit to save an elite, wealthy few from a looming environmental apocalypse (Wait, are we sure this isn’t a documentary?), only one thing stands in their way: a rag-tag group of daring space trash collectors. Space Sweepers is the latest Netflix sensation that people will talk about intensely for a week, then likely forget entirely trying to keep up with the next big thing in the streaming deluge, probably Stranger Things. So join us as we delve into Space Sweepers and try to get to the bottom of whether the crew of the spaceship Victory were able to earn the moniker and how a $20 million dollar South Korean sleeper hit somehow looks better than 85% of major blockbusters with ten times the budget. SPACE SWEEPERS | 2021 | directed by Jo Sung-heestarring Song Joong-ki | Kim Tae-ri | Yoo Hae-jin | Jin Sun-kyu | Richard Armitagescience-fiction / drama / fantasy…