The Color Purple has the distinction of being the most-nominated film not to win an Oscar. The 1985 adaptation of the Alice Walker novel earned an impressive 11 nominations, but failed to win a single Academy Award, tying the record held by mostly-forgotten 1977 ballet drama The Turning Point.
Watching The Color Purple for the first time, it was easy for me to see why it earned such critical acclaim. It tackled topics that would have filled most Academy voters’ bingo cards: rape, incest, pervasive abuse, more rape, forbidden sexuality, a hard-but-brief detour into racism, and female empowerment.
Yet, the film suffers from the same structural challenges that plague many other movies based on books, whether Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago. Namely, there is simultaneously too much and too little: we get a story in the form of snapshots, jumping from era to era at an almost-breakneck pace, but without some of the detail that surely fleshed-out the novel (which, unsurprisingly, I haven’t read).
There are two vital pieces of insight I’ve learned about 

And, so, the first (and, presumably, only) season of WandaVision came to a conclusion with Episode 9, “The Series Finale.” Before I get into the spoiler-y bits, let me recap the key finale expectations I had after
Over the last month, WandaVision seemingly
Over the past three weeks, WandaVision has gone from “show I watch every week when I get a chance” to “a 
I received a new reassessment of my land’s value some months ago. Despite not having any structures on this land (or even a road that leads to it), the company the county employed to reassess the land determined that said plot was wildly undervalued.



Untimely Movie Review: Lethal Weapon
Hindsight blurs that line, as retrospective eyes make elements that were still fresh in 1987 seem like hopeless clichés. As with any historical work or figure, I judge it in the context of the times in which it existed. As such, Lethal Weapon holds up better than one might reasonably expect.
Mel Gibson’s suicidal, manic, disheveled, chain-smoking-and-junk-food-eating Riggs has undeniable comic chemistry with Danny Glover’s by-the-book, old-school Murtaugh. We’re in Gibson’s “still clearly Australian” period, here. This is also one of those movie scenarios where Gibson is playing younger than his actual age, and Glover is playing “too-old-for-this-shit” (in reality, they’re only 10 years apart). See also Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
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