All Things Kevyn

So, with the long-awaited (but not so well welcomed) release of The New Mutants, three years after it was made, an end of an era comes about. Beginning in 2000, with the release of Bryan Singer's X-Men, the twenty year era of Fox Marvel movies has come to a close. With The Fantastic Four and Uncanny X-Men finally back home at Marvel, after having been sold to Fox in the nineties in order to stave off  what appeared to be inevitable bankruptcy, and in development to join The Avengers, Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain Marvel on the upcoming MCU slate on the big screen (or small, depending on the  ever evolving winds of pandemic fever), the universe originally created by the likes of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others, is finally home where it belongs. Another thing this fortuitous event marks is the ability for me to do an all-encompassing look at all thirteen of the X-Men movies that have been made between the aforementioned 2000 X-Men film and the a...

So, with the pandemic and and all the closings that came along with it (I'm guessing you've heard about the pandemic) the 2020-21 movie awards season has been extended. Since movie theatres were closed (for the most part) for many months, and are only partially opened even now, the Academy decided to extend the eligibility deadline from the normal December 31st to a much later February 28th. To go along with this extension, the Academy has also postponed the Oscar night ceremonies from the typical end of February / beginning of March to April 25th. So as to not leave the Oscars feeling lonely, the Screen Actors Guild and Independent Spirit Awards have both done the same. And so, that means I should do the same, right? Hells no! I ain't no follower!! The Golden Glibes didn't postpone til April. They're still doing there awards at the end of February. Granted, that's still a month later than normal, but not nearly as dramatic a move as others. The Kevy Awards are ...

Okay, so here we are five posts into the new and improved edition of the "All Things Kevyn" blog, and I haven't even introduced (or re-introduced, as the case may be with some of you loyal fans out there in the world wide web) myself to you. So, for better or worse, here goes. First off, yeah I know, a blog - in 2020!? That is so 2011 of me. But hey, I'm old school. Just be glad I'm not Xeroxing this thing off in a zine format and shoving it through your collective mail slots. A blog it is, so deal with it. Now to be fair, this blog is nothing new. I set up my first website of sorts waaay back in 2005. It was a film review site and it was hosted by Geocities. If you don't know what Geocities was, then you're probably to young to be reading this anyway. Let's just say that Geocities is to Wordpress or Squarespace what My Space is to Facebook. We're talking the days of chat rooms and that godawful dial-up buzzing noise. But I digress. That site (not ...

Yes, Ryan Murphy's The Prom is cheesy, but like much of the auteur's small screen output ( Glee, Scream Queens, Pose ), it's a fun kind of cheesy. Now don't get me wrong, as fun as The Prom is, and it is fun (more on the reasons in a bit), it's not necessarily a great film. A fun film yes. It's not the kind of musical that gets to sing and dance on the level of those great classic Hollywood musicals from which it takes it's "let's put on a show" chutzpah, nor is it in the same playing field as a lot of the better examples of modern musical theatre such as Kinky Boots or Hamilton or The Book of Mormon , the latter of which Murphy borrows both a Tony Award nominated star and the frenetic energy of The Prom 's best musical number. It's not on any of these levels, but it sure is fun once all the musical numbers begin kicking in. And isn't that all that matters here in the depressive throes of 2020? In fact, it is these musical numbe...

A few months back, as I (along with many others, I am sure) contemplated what exactly to do with myself in the middle of a pandemic, I came up with the idea of going back to my comic book loving childhood, and take a stab at reading (or re-reading, as the case may be) all of The Avengers comics from the very beginning (which would be 1963 btw) to the latest release. It was going to be a big challenge but hey, what else did I have to do at the time? Movie theatres, my homes away from home, were all shuddered for the time being, so what the hell. I mean, it would only be about 500 or so comics til I was done. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. But then I started thinking, which is never a good thing. If I was going to read the Avengers, then I would need to read all the Avengers spinoffs as well. That would mean adding titles to my pandemic reading list like West Coast Avengers, Mighty Avengers, New Avengers, Secret Avengers, Avengers Academy, A-Force, Uncanny Avengers, and so on and so on. Then...

Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made. Yes, this is a bold statement, but it has been quite the irrefutable one for decades now - at least among the cinephiles and cineastes of the world. Upon it's release in 1941, it was a mild sized success at the box office, even earning itself nine Academy Award nominations and winning the Oscar for Best Screenplay, a point of contention that will become the basis for the film we are reviewing here today - but more on that in a bit. The film's initial release also sparked  quite the controversy, as it was a not very subtle (not even close) attack on the life of newspaper magnate and one of the most powerful men in America at the time, William Randolph Hearst, with the larger than life Orson Welles as the equally larger than life Charles Foster Kane standing in for the (again) equally larger than life actual figure of the tycoon Hearst. Director, producer, and star Welles, along with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, the latter of whom ...

The best thing one can say about this film is that thanks to last year's Dark Phoenix , it isn't the worst X-Men film to come down the pike lo these past twenty years. I know, and begrudgingly accept, that, over the course of thirteen X-Men films in those aforementioned twenty years, Fox has changed a lot when adapting from the little page to the big screen. Their changes to Rogue, and especially Mystique, have been horrendous at times (I truly hate Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique - the furthest thing from the comic character one could ever imagine) but even that is nothing compared to what is done to The New Mutants in this fiasco. I'll give them dropping comic original member Karma for the enigmatic Magik. After all, when Magik joined the team, she quickly became a fan favourite, and to this day has become one of the best and most kickassing members of both The New Mutants and The X-Men proper. But all the other changes? No, I'm not giving them those. Let's even...