Author: David Mogan

Here’s the deal: Spaghetti westerns kinda saved movies. If you look at the history of film, there is a dark era from the ‘30s to the ‘60s in which the Hays Code hovered over cinema like the blazing sun at high noon. The code made sure that sex, violence, profanity and drug use stayed firmly in check and out of the public’s eyes and minds, protecting everyone from that nagging phenomenon known as reality. But after a few dead presidents and civil rights leaders, things took a bit of a turn. A bevy of new and challenging films started to…

Mad Max: Fury Road is a new action film from the director of Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City starring Tom Hardy, the guy who cosplayed as Captain Picard in a bad Star Trek movie. The original films featured noted racist Mel Gibson in the bland Mad Max, the terrific Road Warrior and the Tina Turner classic Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which was really great until they went beyond Thunderdome. For Fury Road, expect a lot of face paint, spiky things and dirt. It should be pretty cool.

Here’s the deal: With Leonard Nimoy’s passing, there are going to be a lot of articles praising his work in the Star Trek series. And while his portrayal of Mr. Spock is the stuff of geek legend, we shouldn’t overlook his great roles in The Twilight Zone, Mission: Impossible, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Simpsons and Fringe. There’s another fun aspect of his career that only hardcore geeks usually know about, though, but that should change. In the ’60s and ’70s, Leonard Nimoy started recording albums and things got weird. But you don’t have to take my word for…

Here’s the deal: There’s no TV show more formative for me than The Twilight Zone. What Rod Serling was able to achieve in the 1950s/60s television landscape was staggering, but even more impressive is how well the show stands the test of time. From pig-people to bookworms, bomb shelters to cannibals, The Twilight Zone has stayed fixed in our social consciousness, and it’s a show that’s followed me from childhood to adulthood. This is why it’s always been disappointing for me to see how uninspired most other anthology shows are. I’ve watched the entirety of the revival Twilight Zone series,…

Here’s the deal: Anyone interested in art is very familiar with the what-could-have-beens. Take any prominent artist in film, television, music, fiction, etc. and chances are there will be at least one cancelled or half-finished project of theirs that had so much promise. I’ve written about this before concerning the Marx Brothers/Salvador Dali project Giraffes on Horseback Salad, but there are oodles more examples, like how prior to the Michael Keaton/Tim Burton Batman, Bill Murray nearly played the title role in a comedy version, or how Rod Serling wrote a script for an expanded film version of one of the…

Here’s the deal: Unsung heroes are plentiful. Far too often, people know a song, film, short story, etc. without knowing much about the artist’s body of work, or, in some cases, without even knowing who the artist is at all. In these instances, name-brand recognition becomes irrelevant, for the work itself is what grabs people, not its label. Your Rembrandts and Shakespeares certainly have their place, but sometimes it’s the people and work that’s a little more off the beaten path that has that little extra something. Sometimes, sadly, the hipsters are right. Allow me to introduce you to Raymond Scott.…

As a lifelong movie fan, two irrefutable truths I have come to know is that Hollywood will create sequels at every opportunity and that film school snobs think maligning the very idea of sequels makes them poignant, serious artists. These folks believe sequels are too corporate, too cynical, too mass-produced. They see Hollywood as the big, bad Onceler, clear-cutting original ideas and churning out Thneeds, while they’re all Loraxes, speaking for the trees. The problem with this, aside from the obvious arrogance, is that people like sequels and have for thousands of years. Through the span of literature sequels have…

Here’s the deal: The most interesting villains are the ones who are right. Comic books have understood this for years and have given us the X-Men’s Magneto, Batman’s Ra’s al Ghul and Watchmen’s Ozymandias. While Magneto fights for the lives of his people and the very nature of evolution, both Ra’s al Ghul and Ozymandias fight to save the world from itself, willing to trade millions of lives for billions. We can call these characters a lot of things: cold-hearted pragmatists, amoral monsters, Harry S. Truman, but it’s very difficult to call them “wrong.” Even if we disagree with their…

25. Life is a series of random moments strung together by tendrils of futility until you ultimately expire and are forgotten. This list is a moment no greater or worse than the birth of your first child. 24. You are an immigrant attempting to learn about American culture and have given yourself literally no filter. 23. Boss isn’t watching. 22. Jimmy No-Name says that $5,000 is due by Tuesday, so we need these fucking page views. 21. Curiosity killed the cat and your cat-killing quota has been slipping this week. 20. You’re sitting on the toilet – what do you…

I love the Toy Story series because, like you, I am a human being with a soul. In 1995, when the first film came out, I was 13, being young enough to recognize myself in Andy, yet old enough to also have some distance from him. It was probably the perfect age to come to Toy Story, since the series has always walked the line between childhood and adulthood. Though I liked it at the time, my appreciation has only grown over the years, as I think it has for many people. While the film was a huge hit and…