Nick Johnston

1 week ago | vanyaland.com | Nick Johnston

Kudos to Danny and Michael Phillipou, the YouTubers-turned-horror-hitmakers (hereby referred to by their channel name, RackaRacka, for brevity’s sake): despite what must have been immense pressure, they resisted the calls from producers and studio heads and didn’t jump ship to a mainstream franchise. They didn’t even shift their focus towards a specifically American story (even though they could have with those Aussie tax credits baked in). Why should they?

1 week ago | vanyaland.com | Nick Johnston

If there’s one thing Pete Davidson has above all else, it’s youthful, quirked-up white boy rizz. The only problem is that one day, that charisma’s gonna curdle — like all of us, he’s gonna get old, and then what? That’s the dilemma Davidson’s confronted with in James DeMonaco’s The Home, where Davidson stumbles across a private ward in a nursing home stocked to the gills with the scariest old folks you’ve seen on screen since you saw them dicks-out in an Ari Aster movie.

1 week ago | vanyaland.com | Nick Johnston

It feels like Aziz Ansari has been absent from popular culture much longer than he actually has. Before 2018, it felt like the dude was inescapable — big-budget movies, stints on iconic TV shows (animated or not), and a surprising bestseller — until the bottom fell out, and the title Modern Romance became all-too-ironic. Now, we see the assortment of rakes laid out in front of us, and we’re not going to step in any of them or, perhaps more precisely, we’re not going to step in any more of them.

1 week ago | vanyaland.com | Nick Johnston

It’s so wild that, within twenty or so years of the modern romantic comedy’s high-water mark (this will be controversial, but 2005 was an exceptionally profitable year for the genre), it’s generally disappeared from the multiplex. Like every genre, it goes through waxes and wains in popularity depending on the moment, but it felt like such a stable bet that it’d never quite disappear from screens altogether.

2 weeks ago | vanyaland.com | Nick Johnston

I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe Christopher McQuarrie’s tenure as Mission: Impossible franchise-runner than “Flanderization.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it comes from the occasionally too-clever fan wiki TV Tropes and originated from an observation made about The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders and how, over the show’s decades-long run, he slowly morphed from a do-gooder neighbor foil to Homer’s boorishness into a caricature of American evangelicals.