My Own Little World

I loved the first Guardians of the Galaxy  film. It was so relentlessly original and infectious, and up until the release of Captain America: Civil War  it was my favorite movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I loved the cast, the writing, the soundtrack, and virtually everything else about it (save the villain; Marvel almost never does well there). Naturally, after the success of that first film, Marvel decided to attempt a repeat, bringing back the same cast, the same writer and director, and the same talking tree and raccoon. Marvel's sequels have usually at least in some ways improved on the originals, and sometimes they have struck gold, so I was quite hopeful for Vol. 2 . In some ways, this film does quite well, mostly due to the clever humor. Part of this is because of the writing and how fast and furious the jokes come, but I feel a majority of the humor's success comes from the chemistry of the cast and how everyone has different comedic slants. Every charact...

There's something to be said for old-fashioned filmmaking. Many of my favorite directors use many elements that are considered "outdated" in their films to great success (I'm looking at you, Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg). However, I don't think I've seen a film from the past ten years that is more old-fashioned in its style than The Hateful Eight . That's probably to be expected from a director like Quentin Tarantino. Every single film of his is an homage of some kind to a genre of film that either has gone under the radar or away entirely. He also is a film buff in the most literal sense, going so far as to pay for the installation of one hundred 70mm film projectors worldwide to show a special "Roadshow" version of The Hateful Eight  that adds an overture, intermission, and six more minutes to the already long film. From the opening credits, I noticed two things that made me feel that this film was from a bygone era: the score b...