By Reuben Baron

John Carter

I still don’t understand the glee with which the media greeted the premature burial of John Carter. The New York Times declared it the new Ishtar after one weekend. Entertainment Weekly gave it a D, a grade they rarely give out except in cases such as Battlefield Earth and Norbit, and has continued to rag on the film since. Most confusingly, Disney announced the film as a $200 million write-off after only two weeks in theaters. How many studios will declare their own film a bomb while still in theaters? John Carter’s a punchline now. Polling and the popularity of Facebook campaigns for a sequel seems to indicate a lot of the people who saw it liked it, but with all the premature negative press, word of mouth success was never a hope for this film. How can you convince people to see something when all the advanced negative press has created a self-fulfilling prophesy? People at Disney are getting fired over it. Fair enough, at least for whoever’s idea was it to give the movie such a bland title (why didn’t they call it John Carter and the Princess of Mars, to give it context and romance and a sense of Harry Potter/Indiana Jones-style excitement?). I just pray this film doesn’t end up killing the career of the director who managed to make the honestly good movie at the center of the business fiasco: Andrew Stanton.
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By Adam Shalvey

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey – 2011 – dir. Constance Marks

The first movie I cried during was The Patriot. I was in high school and my girlfriend and I were on a movie date and there’s a glorified patriotic moment late in the movie, where Mel Gibson’s character, his son recently killed in the Revolutionary War that Mel actively opposed, poetically takes up an American flag in a charge on the British. The writing is dopey in the whole movie and the scene is written as if Mel single-handedly reverses the outcome of the battle, but right there, when Mel was in his most ponytailed patriotic moment, as fearless as “La Liberté guidant le peuple,” facing an onslaught of muskets and bayoneted rifles, a tear ran down my cheek.
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By Adam Shalvey

Killer of Sheep – 1979 – dir. Charles Burnett

Of all the master storytelling, truthfulness, and beauty packed into Charles Burnett’s 1979 Killer of Sheep, my favorite scene is the trip to buy a car motor.

From the beginning of the scene, as Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and Bracy (Charles Bracy) park their rusted-out pickup truck in front of the house where the sellers are, the venture seems doomed to fail. Maybe I hear something in the ice cream truck music that accompanies their approach, or see something in the pitch of the hill where they park, or maybe I’m disappointed in the way they quickly talk about how to handle the negotiating by splitting up the money; however you slice it, the scene exudes a certain notion—albeit a calm one—that the plan just isn’t going to work out for Stan and Bracy.
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By Allison Racicot

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World — 2010 — dir. Edgar Wright

Many films set out to teach viewers about different aspects of life, whether it’s facts they don’t know, people they’ve never seen, or situations they haven’t been exposed to. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World instills viewers with life lessons they never thought they’d need to know, and asks important questions such as, “Do you know this one girl with hair like this?” Another handy tip the film offers is something everyone can relate to—how to go about defeating the seven evil exes of the girl you love.

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By: Victoria Large

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – 2010 – dir. Edgar Wright

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, co-writer and director Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Brian Lee O’Malley’s celebrated comic book series, is an engagingly oddball affair and an almost-instant cult hit: it perhaps was not the massive mainstream success that the studio had hoped for upon its initial theatrical release, but it has a cadre of dedicated fans who embrace its rapid fire pop culture references and cheeky sense of style. One of Wright’s first major projects was Spaced, a sharp-witted British sitcom that slides in and out of pop pastiches without warning (For example: in one minute Spaced’s twentysomething lead is playing Playstation’s quintessential fighting game, Tekken; in the next he is arguing with his roommate while the fight announcer from Tekken comments on the action.), and Scott Pilgrim gives Wright a chance to further demonstrate his mastery of a distinctive kind of pop-saturated, slipstream comedy.

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