Retro Reviews & More

Welcome to another edition of "Into the Fray". Being that there has only been the one post ( the special 50th one ) in between this and the last,  I will be brief in explaining what "Into the Fray" is. Four contenders are chosen based on criteria, scored based on another somewhat overlapping set, and a winner is determined from those scores. Today's is meant to be a companion to the last one on opening scenes , and a better idea can be obtained by additionally reading the ones on sequels , (unplanned) trilogies , and Batman (actors). Into the Fray: Ending Scene What does one want from a movie's ending scene? Using the same comparisons as with "Into the Fray: Opening Scene", it is much like the last chapter or epilogue of a book or the final portion or coda of a song. The audience should know it has ended (so a song performed live to avoid the simple fade-out of some), and it should feel like the natural conclusion to all that has preceded it. It ...

Welcome to the 50th post of Retro Reviews & More!  Last week , I promised something special. When I launched the blog over two-and-a-half years ago, I did so with five posts on the Terminator film series, first, a four-parter on timeline theories,  1  The Terminator  | T2 , 2  T3 | Salvation , 3  Genisys , and  4  Dark Fate , and then finally, " +/- Reviews of the Threequels ". In that fifth post, I mentioned potentially revisiting the other "threequel", the television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles , and for both theory and review purposes, which I always intended as a promise, as well. But before we get to that, I wanted to mention two things I have worked on to prepare for this 50th post. First, I recreated the original four timelines and updated those posts with the new images (it always bothered me that the screenshots had the markup for spelling and grammar "errors"). It was recreated faithfully, aside from a few b...