Insanity

T HE MAN STOOD in the shadow of the trees facing the small tan house. He was tall and had the close-cropped military haircut of the Marine he’d been until deserting his post a few weeks earlier. A black mask covered his face, he wore a one-piece camouflage suit, and carried a .300-caliber blackout rifle and a .22-caliber handgun. The surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains of Hardy, Virginia, flower with dogwoods in the spring; in the summer, the hills bloom so lushly they look covered in neon velvet. It was Nov.…

Image via Sony Animation Hollywood is still struggling through the ongoing writers’ strike, with major productions from all studios affected, but it appears there’s an interesting loophole when it comes to animated features. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently tearing up the box office and has made over $120 million domestically, which means it has it the third-best opening for any animated film ever, and the biggest release to date for Sony Pictures Animation. However, writer Christopher Miller…

via Paramount Tom Cruise is widely known as one of the few actors in Hollywood who goes to insane lengths when doing his own stunts. While it is impressive, a clip shared on Twitter shows just how far he will go while also hilariously demonstrating the seemingly pointless VFX used in the scene. The shared clip comes from the fifth film in the Mission: Impossible franchise: Rogue Nation. It shows Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, clinging onto the side of an airplane as it takes off from a runway. While most would…

In his father’s underground western Greaser’s Palace, a seven-year-old Robert Downey Jr plays, in his own words, “a boy who got his neck slit by God”. This, perhaps, explains a lot. Downey Jr grew up on Robert Downey Sr’s film sets in the 70s and 80s, amid what he calls “a cacophony of creativity”, at the heart of the counterculture cinema scene fuelled by “cigarettes and weed and booze”. He slept in a cot wedged against an editing desk, got taken to see X-rated films such as La Grande Bouffe at an absurdly young age, and…

via Lionsgate One of the greatest travesties of modern action cinema is that the demented adventures of Jason Statham’s Chev Chelios drew to a close in 2009’s Crank: High Voltage, despite occasional sequel chatter cropping up in the 13 years since the wondrously unhinged second installment emerged to flip the bird at convention. Even though the giddily bizarre and utterly off-the-wall duology combined to earn $77 million at the box office on total production costs of only $32 million, before generating upwards…

via 20th Century Fox Based on the fact both installments became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all-time, it’s utterly insane to think that 20th Century Fox spent a decade trying their hardest to ensure that Deadpool never made it out of development hell. Having been forced to stand idly by and watch the character get butchered beyond recognition in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a role he admitted he only took so that nobody else played it, Ryan Reynolds seized the fourth wall-breaking bull by its self-aware…

via Warner Bros. Sometimes, movies that can’t reasonably be called halfway great (or even good, for that matter) can endure as perennial favorites in spite of bad reviews for one or two reasons in particular. In the case of 2009’s Ninja Assassin, the martial arts flop has lived on as an unabashed cult favorite because it’s absolutely out of its f*cking mind. Yes, the film takes itself roughly ten times too seriously for something that inherently comes drenched in a thick layer of silliness, and the action…

Samsung made one of the most significant changes to its smartwatch lineup last year. The Galaxy Watch 4 ditched Samsung’s Tizen OS in favor of the Android-powered Wear OS. This meant users could finally get Android apps and ultimately even use Google Assistant on their smartwatches. The company usually releases two new models of its smartwatch. It has a different strokes for different folks approach for the lineup. Nowhere is that more evident than the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. Though it has the same technical specs as the…

via Paramount Everyone knows that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, but nobody involved in the Terminator franchise appeared to get the memo, with Dark Fate going down as the third failed reboot in the space of 10 years. Salvation arrived on the scene surrounded by hype, promising to give fans the future war they’d always wanted to see, with Christian Bale’s debut as John Connor pegged as the start of a trilogy. Alan Taylor’s Genisys…