poptransmission

Category: Movies

  • Post-Olympics Letdown? Try Rowing and Climbing

    This happens every time. A bittersweet feeling. The Olympics are over. Sixteen days of inspiring, heartwarming, and heartbreaking moments. Once again, no matter the obstacles, the human drama of athletic competition transcended everything else. So, now what? How to keep the inspiration flowing? I have just the thing: rowing and climbing. What, doesn’t sound so…

  • Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Action Movies of All Time

    It’s time for another best-of list, courtesy again of the current Rolling Stone mag (see my earlier post on the RS 50 Best Sitcoms). I’m not a huge action movie fan. My favorite movies tend to be dramas and suspenseful thrillers. I can only handle so many explosions. But action movies are a huge part…

  • Stowaway: Netflix’s Pensive and Unbelievable Mars Movie

    Space movies are entertaining, thought-provoking, and popular. They’re both fantastical science fiction, yet also an enticing look at our future. The next frontier is getting closer all the time as two private enterprises launched missions to space in the last couple of weeks. Since we’ve long accomplished landing on the moon, Mars has become the…

  • Without Remorse: The Latest Tom Clancy Adaptation is Not the Best

    I have never read a Tom Clancy book, but I’ve seen most of the movies based on his novels. From what I can remember, my favorites are the Cold War submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin and the IRA- terrorism intrigue of Patriot Games with Harrison Ford. I…

  • The Top 20 Songs in Movies That Moved, Shocked, and Surprised Us

    As I’ve acknowledged before, us pop culture geeks love our best-of lists. That’s one of the main joys I got from the High Fidelity book and movie (I haven’t watched the Hulu series), for I too can give you my top 5, say Pearl Jam songs, on a moment’s notice. We love it when a…

  • Awake on Netflix: Apocalyptic Films Will Never go to Sleep

    In Bird Box, people wear blindfolds to avoid seeing a mysterious force that makes you kill yourself. In Only, ash from a comet containing a virus kills all the women in the world…well, almost all. In A Quiet Place 2, a flaming object hits earth and brings blind crab-like monsters that kill you if you…

  • Film Noir: Kiss of Death and TCM

    Film noir. French for a black (literal) or dark (common meaning) film. It’s difficult to define in a nutshell, but I think I know it when I see it. Black and white, dark, shadows, urban setting, and an element of crime. Private eyes, femme fatales, and morally-flawed characters are other staples of film noir. But…

  • Shh…A Quiet Place is Back with More Scary Silence

    It’s fitting that A Quiet Place Part II was my first movie in the theaters since The Invisible Man in late February, 2020. I had plans to see its premiere on my birthday weekend of March 20th. We all know why that didn’t happen. So, here it is again 14 months later opening on Memorial…

  • Another Round Movie Review: “All Fired Up and Laid Back at the Same Time”

    Another Round begins with teenagers running around a lake. The race is all about drinking beer rather than fitness. It sets the stage for this film’s examination of the drinking culture, the tightrope act it entails to navigate it, and the role of alcohol in Danish society. It stars Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt, Hannibal TV…

  • My Octopus Teacher: A Beautiful Trip to a Kelp Forest

    My Octopus Teacher won the Best Documentary Feature at the 2021 Academy Awards. It chronicles a remarkable experience of a diver in South Africa visiting a kelp forest, specifically an octopus, every day for a year. It’s a Netflix original film, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. The film was 10 years in the…

  • Oscars 2021: The Show, the Awards, and the Uncertain Future

    All right, what did everybody think about the big show last night? You know, the Oscars. Anybody? I took a poll over the weekend with one question being do you plan to watch the Oscars on Sunday evening? Poll Result: Yes, 3%. The viewing audience has been declining for years (the Golden Globes, Emmys, and…

  • Oscar Predictions 2021 – Will Nomadland Hang onto its Front Runner Status?

    After the film festivals and award shows (Producers, Directors, Screen Actors, Golden Globes, and more) many film categories seem to take on a pre-ordained outcome by the time we get to the Oscars (Best Actor, Chadwick Boseman, for instance). Due to a combination of streaming, VOD, and good old DVDs, I was able to see…