The humor in this and the other medleys often comes from the contrast between the original songs’ sense of cool, danger, and/or emotional earnestness and the uncool, frantic pace of a polka (not to mention the yodeling). From his nickname on down, “Weird Al” Yankovic has made a virt...
4.Where 2018’sInto the Spider-Verseintroduced Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and several spider-themed heroes from parallel dimensions, the follow-upSpider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse(dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers) raises the stakes by introducing an organization ...
The forest animals, played by people in mascot costumes, each have their idiosyncrasies and wiles, and a big part of the film consists of Kayak learning to play them off each other, getting traps to work and setting up Rube Goldberg-like chain reactions. (Hundreds of Beaversis quietly one ...
During the Golden Age of Hollywood, Lon Chaney, Jr. was one of our finest players of big galoots. His meaty, jowly features made him a natural for louts, pugnacious but loyal best friends, or the occasional tragic figure like the Wolf Man. Chaney was, by all accounts, not very pleasan...
(While we don’t usually think of Yankovic as a subtle humorist, his original songs written in the style of other artists can be seen as the mirror image of the polka medleys, in which he puts his own stylistic stamp on a broad range of music.) The delivery of a new medley every ...
Revenge of the Ninjanuary:New York Ninja In 2019 I celebrated “Ninjanuary” with several posts about the ninja in popular culture, particularly in films and books from the 1980s. I’m bringing it back this year with a few more ninja-themed reviews; past entries can be found by clicking...