Since 2012, when most people say “The Avengers” viewers immediately think of comic book heroes and loud explosions. But prior to this decade, outside of the comic book world, “The Avengers” meant something quite different to a great many people. It brought to mind bowler hats, mod hairdos, and plummy accents. The original Avengers weren’t...
I recently went back to my childhood home and rummaged through my old toy collection. Amid the eclectic pile of plastic was a bizarre one-off figure that sparked a whole slew of memories. The figure, proclaimed the “Fire-Power Rambo,” features the titular character in jeans and a white tank top sporting the “Force of Freedom”...
Valkyrie is, in essence, a thriller more than it is a war movie, and it’s a damn good one at that. Charting the real-life events that saw a number of high-ranking Nazi officers attempt to overthrow Hitler, the movie stars Tom Cruise as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, one of the leaders of the daring plot....
Jackie Chan does his own stunts. Jackie Chan has been in 150+ films. If we assume that each film has around 15 stunts and that Chan does each one 1-4 times, and also acknowledge that he is an insane superhuman hell-bent on performing the most death-defying tasks human eyes have ever beheld, it’s safe to...
Written in 1988 by first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri [who later went on to write The Divine Sisters of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and Nashville], Thelma & Louise hit theaters on May 24, 1991 to critical acclaim and widespread criticism– forever etching its place in cinematic history. Produced in an era when female-driven films were...
If you’ve never heard the 8-bit arrangement of Bill Conti’s iconic American Gladiators theme song (yes, that Bill Conti. The same Bill Conti who penned themes for Rocky and the Karate Kid), you’re missing out. The 8-bit version of the theme welcomed players to the American Gladiators Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game released in 1991...
With the still-untitled James Bond 25 scheduled to arrive in theaters in November of 2019, it may seem like the franchise, which has been going for 55 years and counting, was always destined to run forever. In the early 1990s, however, all that was nearly derailed, as behind the scenes issues kept Bond off the...
