Adam Selvidge's Website Blog
This Is the Tom Green Documentary: Directed by Tom Green. With Tom Green, Mary Jane Green, Phil Giroux, Howard Wagman. Comedian Tom Green’s journey takes unexpected turns as he shifts from wild MTV stunts to confronting serious health challenges, ultimately finding peace away from Hollywood on his Canadian farm. Tom Green was ever present while I was in high school, but I never found myself enjoying his efforts, they seemed too intentionally random and felt inauthentic. There’s an entire genre of comedy based around that type of humor that I just don’t go for, but enough people do that it...
Hysteria!: Created by Matthew Scott Kane. With Emjay Anthony, Chiara Aurelia, Kezii Curtis, Nikki Hahn. Follows a struggling high school heavy metal band of outcasts who use the town’s sudden interest in the occult to start a reputation as a Satanic metal band, until a strange series of events triggers a witch hunt that leads back to them. This is the kind of ambiguous horror that I both love and hate, because there’s all sorts of questions about what’s real, what’s really real, and if any of that matters when you’re face to face with the true horrors of an...
Earth Abides: Created by Todd Komarnicki. With Alexander Ludwig, Jessica Frances Dukes, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, Elyse Levesque. After months of isolation, Isherwood “Ish” Williams, learns that most of the world has fallen to a mysterious illness. Yet, despite his instincts to further isolate, Ish leads the charge to develop a new civilization. I’ve seen a ton of post-apocalyptic stories in so many different variations, and not many of them are able to make me feel good about the story by the end of it, feeling hopeful and open to the idea that humanity will do better than it did before. Mind...
The Wild Robot: Directed by Chris Sanders. With Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy. After a shipwreck, an intelligent robot called Roz is stranded on an uninhabited island. To survive the harsh environment, Roz bonds with the island’s animals and cares for an orphaned baby goose. As good as I was expecting, and I was expecting a good movie considering the stupid trailer made me cry stupid tears. They hit all the notes required to pull the strings of the heart and have all the plot elements to make it all a wonderful experience. It’s also pretty good...
Captain America: Brave New World: Directed by Julius Onah. With Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Danny Ramirez, Shira Haas. Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident and must discover the motive behind a nefarious global plan. We’re not necessarily back to the amazing level of story and effort that the original Captain America movie had, but we’re no where near the lows of recent MCU movies. There’s still some unfortunate CGI in the third act and a few scenes that look like they were filmed in both The Volume and a bluescreen at...
Code 8: Part II: Directed by Jeff Chan. With Robbie Amell, Stephen Amell, Alex Mallari Jr., Sirena Gulamgaus. Follows a girl fighting to get justice for her brother who was slain by corrupt police officers. She enlists the help of an ex-con and his former partner to face off against a highly regarded and well-protected police sergeant. While the original movie didn’t blow me away, I was happily surprised by this sequel, it was much less frantic and much more paced. There’s a decent story this time around with tales of family redemption, financial consequences, politics, and bad cops involved...
Blur (stylized as blur) is a 2010 arcade-style racing video game for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was developed by Bizarre Creations and published by Activision. Blur features a racing style that incorporates real world cars and locales with arcade style handling and vehicular combat. The game is a spiritual successor to the Project Gotham Racing series.[2] Blur was the penultimate game developed by Bizarre Creations before they were shut down by Activision on February 18, 2011. A wonderful racing game that I didn’t finish but enjoyed it none the less. It has some aging game mechanics...
Star Trek: Section 31: Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi. With Michelle Yeoh, Omari Hardwick, Sam Richardson, Robert Kazinsky. In Star Trek: Section 31, Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, and must face the sins of her past. I watched this over the weekend and it was exactly what I thought it was going to be: for better or worse, it’s a vehicle to highlight the fact that Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh was under contract to do more Star Trek content and they couldn’t figure out how to use her...
The Crow: Directed by Rupert Sanders. With Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Danny Huston, Josette Simon. Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered. Given a chance to save the love of his life, Eric must sacrifice himself and traverse the worlds of the living and the dead, seeking revenge. The blood soaked title card sequence is pretty cool, and the rest of the film is equally drenched in gallons of blood, there’s not a whole lot that I can point to as innovative or all that interesting. The franchise itself has done a ton of cool stuff, but has driven most...
Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire: With Lelethu Zulu, Khanyiswa Joyi, Lungulethu Menzi, Nomsa Winnie Koro. This action-packed animated sci-fi anthology presents ten futuristic visions from Africa imagining brave new worlds of advanced technology, aliens, spirits, and monsters. I often wonder if I’m going deaf. This show didn’t help that thought at all. First one: not really afrofutuistic, they’re goat herders in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and defeat a cybertooth tiger. I could barely understand anything they said, but the music is good and the action is easy enough to follow along. The second one: I can barely understand what they’re saying, it’s...
