I Still Believe in Heroes

            We live in an era where remakes and sequels of beloved films are constantly coming out. Every once in a while, a classic or a highly popular film gets remade and it turns out so bad that people claim it “ruined the original”. One such case is Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic, Halloween. The purpose of this article is twofold. As always, I want to encourage readers to watch a classic film. With this article, however, I also want to try and dispel this notion that bad remakes/sequels ruin the original film.              John Carpenter’s original is widely considered to be a masterpiece and one of the founders of the slasher sub-genre. The story is a relatively simple one. It starts off in Haddonfield, Illinois in 1963 on Halloween night where a 6-year-old Michael Myers kills his older sister shortly after she has finished having ...

Before the release of Wonder Woman, director Patty Jenkins spoke to Fandango about her influences for the film. She mentioned the 1942 classic, Casablanca , and said, “I wanted a great love story where both characters have integrity and it might be set in the complexities of war, but it turns into a grand love story.” At first, I wasn’t quite sure how much Casablanca really factored into Wonder Woman . After all, these are two vastly different films. As I re-watched Casablanca, however, I began to notice similarities between the two that I had never considered. So, as I move forward with this article, I will talk about how Casablanca influenced Wonder Woman . More specifically, how it helped Wonder Woman become a great love story in a genre where great love stories are far and few in between. I want to start off by talking about the characters and draw some parallels between the leads in both films. While watching Casablanca , I couldn’t help but compare Humphrey Bogart’s char...

                           To say that slashers were on the decline before the release of Wes Craven’s Scream would be an understatement. By that point in 1996, the slasher genre had gone completely stale and left for dead. Most of what we got were rehashes of things we had already seen. It was sequel after sequel of the main slasher franchises such as Friday the 13 th and Halloween . What was once a thoughtful look at gender and a vehicle for women be heroes (because of the Final Girl trope) had become a soulless excuse to show blood and violence on the screen. Then, Scream arrived and rewrote the whole narrative on slasher films. The genre was once again alive and thriving.               Scream follows Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a young high school girl who is approaching the one-year anniversary of her mother’s grizzly murder. As the date app...

For most kids growing up in the 90s, Home Alone was THE Christmas movie to watch. This is the story of Kevin, an 8-year old kid who gets forgotten at home when the entire family leaves to Paris for the holidays. As a result, he has to fend for himself while also protecting his home from intruders. Macaulay Culkin as Kevin was a representation of what most kids wanted to be, which was totally independent and the smartest guy in the room.              There are certain films that you can watch and no matter how much time has passed, it still feels like a story you could tell today in the exact same way as it was told back then. This is not one of those films. Home Alone very clearly a product of its time. It’s like digging up a time capsule from the 90s and seeing what the world, or just movies in general, were like. The entire premise and the way it all unfolds would probably never work in today’s world. I mean it barely work...