Category: 2024

  • Origin stories: The Apprentice and Saturday Night

    It’s not only comic book heroes and fairy tale characters who get origin stories. Cultural icons deserve them, too – or at least get them, deserving or not. It is hard to dispute, however, that the American pop culture landscape hasn’t been deeply influenced by two icons closely associated with New York: Donald Trump and Saturday…

  • Trap (2024)

    If movies won Oscars for their marketing campaigns, M. Night Shyamalan would be sitting pretty. The trailers for his films are invariably intriguing. The writer-director whose works range from the sublime The Sixth Sense to the opposite-of-sublime The Happening has an indisputable gift for high concepts perfect for elevator pitches. And since Shyamalan has been…