Michael Shawn

Michael Shawn Patron

Favorite films

  • A Flintstone Christmas
  • Christmas in Connecticut
  • Remember the Night
  • Scrooged

Recent activity

All
  • The Woman King

    ★★★½

  • Three Thousand Years of Longing

    ★★★★★

  • Vampir Cuadecuc

    ★★★★½

  • The Signalman

    ★★★½

Pinned reviews

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  • Sharknado 5: Global Swarming

    Sharknado 5: Global Swarming

    I GAVE THIS MOVIE ITS TITLE! Sort of...
    Well, no... fuck "sort of." HELL YEAH, I DID.

    I've actually never seen the movie, but I just wanted to toot my own horn a little for attention.

    See, after the first movie was such a surprise hit, SyFy immediately ordered a followup. So they announced a contest to title the second movie. All you had to do was go on Twitter and enter. So, I came up with this title, clever…

  • The Haunting

    The Haunting

    ★★★★★

    In "Best Of" horror lists, this movie consistently ranks somewhere around number 25. But I don't care what anyone says, it will always be my #1 favorite horror film. I first encountered it around 23 years ago when I worked at a mom-and-pop video store in Manhattan. I was in the midst of getting my film education from the dusty shelves full of VHS tapes. I had always been fascinated by ghost stories and had already had one of my…

Recent reviews

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  • The Woman King

    The Woman King

    ★★★½

    I cannot deny the power of this film. It's beautifully shot and fiercely acted and it tells a story that anyone would want to get behind. But the story is its problem because it is such a Hollywood fantasy of revisionist wish fulfillment. I understand wanting to spin such a strong narrative for an Afro-centric film, but it flies in the face of historical accuracy and possibly even good taste since it turns out that the Dahomey people who are…

  • Three Thousand Years of Longing

    Three Thousand Years of Longing

    ★★★★★

    A sweepingly, swooningly romantic masterpiece deconstructing the process and mindset of wishmaking, the film Disney's Wish wishes it were right now. Tilda Swinton plays a literary scholar who inadvertently releases Idris Elba's djinn from a bottle and goes on to find love and companionship with him as he recounts his three-thousand-year history of entrapment, wish fulfillment and love affairs. The brilliantly portrayed stories are colorful and lavishly adorned and are presented as cautionary tales of getting more than you wish…

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  • Things Heard & Seen

    Things Heard & Seen

    ★★★★

    Let me just say this up front: If you are a heterosexual male, you will probably hate this movie. I hate to generalize, but I've already read some bad reviews by men and I just know this is not a guy kind of movie. It's chick-flick horror. And to be fair, yes, the film does lean pretty heavily on the female spirituality thing, especially in its rather disappointing and overblown denouement. But up until that, I was loving every second…

  • Saratoga

    Saratoga

    ★★★★

    Well... I didn't know going in that this was the film Jean Harlow died while filming, and aside from a few shots of the back of her (actually her double's) head, I really didn't notice anything. Of course, it probably helped that I was never a big Harlow fan anyway, but ironically enough, I enjoyed her more here than in almost any other film I've seen of hers. I don't think they did a bad job of covering if I…