#Animating Ugly: The Wonderful Weirdness of ‘Rango’

“#Animating Ugly: The Wonderful Weirdness of ‘Rango’” Home Columns Movies Meg Shields June 26, 2020 Here’s a video essay celebrating the bizarre imagination of ‘Rango’. Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Rango is something of a paradox. On the one hand, Gore Verbinski‘s animated tale…

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#The Strange Innocence of the Himbo

“#The Strange Innocence of the Himbo” Welcome to Elements of Story, a biweekly column about narrative tropes, what they mean, and why they just won’t go away. If you’ve been on Twitter lately, odds are you’ve seen some commentary about “himbos.” Coined by Rita Kemply in a 1988 Washington Post article, a himbo refers to an attractive…

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#The Evolution of Watching Movies at Home

“#The Evolution of Watching Movies at Home” This is part of our series Origin Stories, a biweekly column that uses film history to understand the hot topics of today. In our last installment of Origin Stories, we talked about how Americans watched films outside of movie theaters from the late 1800s to the 1950s. As we…

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#The Real Story Behind ‘Da 5 Bloods’

“#The Real Story Behind ‘Da 5 Bloods’” Home Columns Movies Kieran Fisher June 25, 2020 Let’s talk about the real-life Black soldiers who inspired Spike Lee’s Netflix joint about the Vietnam War. Real Stories is an ongoing column about the stories behind the movies and shows. It’s that simple. The contributions of African-American soldiers to the…

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#A Brief History of ‘Mad Max’ Ripoffs

“#A Brief History of ‘Mad Max’ Ripoffs” Brief History is a column that tells you all you need to know about your favorite — and not so favorite — pop culture topics. When George Miller unleashed Mad Max on audiences back in 1979, he had no idea that the film and its subsequent sequels would…

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#How ‘Breaking Bad’ Delivered an Iconic Heist with “Dead Freight”

“#How ‘Breaking Bad’ Delivered an Iconic Heist with “Dead Freight”” This essay is part of our series Episodes, a bi-weekly column in which senior contributor Valerie Ettenhofer digs into the singular chapters of television that make the medium great. When we think of Breaking Bad with a half-decade of retrospect, certain moments are more likely to be seared…

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