Annie Potts Archives - Silver Screen Riot

There are times as a film critic that I wonder why I allocate my spare time to the watching and writing about movies. This is one such occasion. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is a profoundly bad film, one that seems to be actively sucking the very lifeblood out of the movie industry with its lazy indifference, indifferent storytelling, and filmmaking incompetence. In a way, it’s actually more interesting as a cultural microcosm of the horrors of modern franchise filmmaking writ large. It exists in a world of franchise as mandated IP flexing. Strictly a means to an end. Ostensibly the opposite of a write-off but with the same underlying purpose. Done because it must be done to preserve intellectual property ownership, not because there is any purpose, vision, or passion involved. Read More

At the height of Pixar’s creative boon, Toy Story 3 threatened the impossible: a sequel would be the animation studio’s best movie to date. This on the heels of the triple-threat punch of Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up, to this day the finest consecutive output Pixar would manage. Toy Story, to this point in the studio’s history, was Pixar’s only ongoing franchise – Cars 2 would come along and bust their Fresh streak just one year later – but its sequels managed to keep pace with their starkly original one-off creations by diving deeper into the pathos of its collection of anthropomorphic toys and achieving an even greater sense of world-building. Woody, Buzz and the gang discovered things about themselves by exploring larger sandboxes and, accompanying them, we too saw the world with eyes renewed. Read More