Films
Eric San Juan
March 14, 2018
You may have seen the name “Annihilation” in passing. Natalie Portman, a shimmering force field, monsters? That’s the one. It’s in theaters in the U.S., Canada, and China right now, where it’s getting stomped by Black Panther and others, and is on Netflix everywhere else. Watch the trailers and it looks like a movie we’ve seen before. A concerned lover (Portman) takes on a dangerous task to rescue their loved one (husband) from a strange place (inside a huge force field, or “shimmer”), but there are monsters there, so it becomes a fight for survival. This is the picture every trailer and commercial paints of the movie. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The trailers are absolute garbage and do a TERRIBLE job of…
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Eric San Juan
November 16, 2017
I’m not keen on attacking other writers, and indeed, this should not be construed as an attach. Still, I can’t help but vent a little frustration at this piece from the Guardian, Has Blade Runner 2049’s failure killed off the smart sci-fi blockbuster? The writer (who I’m sure is a terrific guy) has great praise for Denis Villeneuve’s unexpectedly astonishing sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction cult classic, Blade Runner. I agree with him wholeheartedly about that. This was a visually stunning, thematically rich modern masterpiece of the genre, one that had me talking about it and chewing it on for days after, exactly as great speculative fiction/science fiction should. I expected nothing from it, in fact openly said they shouldn’t even make it when it…
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Eric San Juan
October 16, 2017
Contributed Post Arnold Schwarzenegger is most famous for his role in the original two Terminator movies. While the Hollywood star had a couple of films to his name at the time, it was his role as in that franchise that made him millions of dollars. The man was in the best shape of his life by the time he reached the second film, and many people wonder how he managed to achieve that level of physical perfection. This article will take a look at how the Austrian Mr. Universe worked on his body to ensure it stunned audiences around the world. Maybe you could try the same technique if you want to achieve a six-pack that could crush skulls. Image The bodybuilder diet Arnold spent…
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Eric San Juan
August 15, 2017
WARNING: The following contains minor, unspecific spoilers. About the worst crime an Alien film can commit is to be boring. So lock ‘em up and throw away the key, boys. This one is caught, tried and convicted. Covenant is an attempt to right the franchise after the mixed reception received by Prometheus, returning it to its roots and making it squarely about the xenomorph and bloody scares. The problem with this approach is that Prometheus’s issue was never that it strayed too far from the Alien mythos or that it didn’t adhere to the Alien formula, it’s that so much of it was poorly written and that the characters were dumber than a pail of shit left out in the sun after a Kid Rock…
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Eric San Juan
April 12, 2017
The last movies I ever expected to love were those ridiculous The Fast & the Furious flicks. Meathead street racer nonsense starring silly actors doing silly things in silly suped up cars as annoying as the ones that buzz around at 1am being far louder than a little lime green import has any right to be? Ugh. No. Several friends kept insisting the series was secretly amazing, though, a bunch of movies that were more like comic books come to life than, say, the latest Batman or Superman movie or Caligula. Okay, okay, fine. Facing some empty late nights and some bags of chips that needed eating, I figured I’d marathon the movies. Figured they’d at least give me something to do when trying to shut down…
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