Magellans at the Movies

When you’ve just lost a war, the last thing you need is a giant radioactive dinosaur with fire breath taking a self-guided tour of your remaining cities. Unfortunately, such is the plight of the people of Japan who, as we all know from high school history class, have been under siege from kaijus of all shapes and sizes since the end of World War II. The most famous of these immense invaders, of co...

For as long as there has been television, there has been The Simpsons. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much, since The Simpsons aired a full two years before the Soviet Union was dissolved. This legend of prime-time TV took the world by storm when everyone was first introduced to its titular family of corn-colored stereotypes, and while the painful collapse in its quality since then is a...

Love. It, ah . . . it’s all warm and fuzzy? Look, we’ve done like four movies about love now, I’m fresh out of ways to say that love is a multi-faceted, complicated aspect of the human experience. Hollywood, however, is emphatically not out of things to say about love, or at least they think there’s still new ground to be broken on the subject. That’s why one hundred and thirty-four years after th...

Well, folks, we’ve made it. Magellans at the Movies has hit the big one-oh-oh. Over the course of the last two years we’ve told you about our tastes in directors and TV shows, we’ve established hilarious jokes and classic catchphrases like “Would you listen to it casually?” and “Life is hard and full of disappointments”, but the bulk of our time spent in cyberspace has been dedicated to reviewing...

Why can’t we all just get along? It’s a question that’s hounded human civilization since the moment a guy eating pizza crust-first, a guy eating pizza from the edge inwards, and a third guy starting at the point of the slice and working his way north all shared a meal with each other and realized that the term “civilization” is subject to audience interpretation. The obvious answer, of course, is...

I have no breezy, jokey description for this one. Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List is a devastating film about overwhelming darkness and a single bruised, weary speck of light in the midst of the seemingly endless shadows. Please watch it if you haven’t. Contact us/Requests/Questions: MagellansMovies@gmail.com

Ladies and gentlemen, there are moments in life when it comes time to face the music. Old wrongs that must eventually be answered for, debts that must be repaid, orangutans that must be returned to their home rain forests after a brief but disastrous stint as your exotic pet. What I’m saying is that we all make bad choices and eventually the bill for those errors comes due, but we can be thankful...

Love is a choice. Love is a feeling. Love is an idea. These are just some of the theories on that most vexing of jazz topics and its effect on the men and women who experience it. Questions on love abound, but answers have remained elusive throughout the course of human history, and if you are one such bemused soul then I’m afraid you won’t find what you're looking for in In the Mood for Love , a...

Say you’ve just woken up in the late 18th century. Lucky for you, you find yourself the rich scion of a notable family, which, in said time period, means you’ve got it made. The only thing you’ll be lacking is something to occupy your time with. The military being too scary, the theater being too derivative, and the video games being too nonexistent, there’s every chance you’ll find yourself quick...

Pandas. If you’re somehow not aware of them (which, like, how, they’re basically the poster-animal for endangered species), they’re not exactly what you’d call limber. While the great felines of the world regularly perform feats of stunning acrobatics and athleticism, those of the ursine persuasion, especially panda bears, are stuck lumbering around with all the speed and agility of a wheelchair m...

Peace and quiet. The two go together so well they’re often mentioned in concert, as demonstrated by the preceding sentence. Quiet is often conflated with peace and vice versa, however the relationship between the two may not be as close as people are willing to admit. Few would characterize the bone chilling silence immediately following a bombed joke at a comedy club as “peaceful”, and sometimes...

The dream of time travel is an old one, with modern storytellers and ancient legend weavers alike casting their imaginations far into the future or deep into the past to see what might be happening or may have happened then. Wouldn’t you like to get burned for being a witch at Salem? Wouldn’t you like to be sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli in the Aztec Empire? Don’t you want to see what fun implement...

As you settle in with your coffee and gummy worms to enjoy another episode of the smash hit podcast Magellans at the Movies, you’re probably thinking about how charismatic and trustworthy your favorite hosts are. You're probably thinking to yourself, "Gee willy those Magellans are cool, I'd do anything they asked me to!" Ah, my naive, innocent reader; although we're flattered, we must caution you...

The Oscars represent the culmination of the film year, much like New Year’s celebrations mark the termination of a calendar year. It’s a time to cast our gaze back over the movies that were, the jokes that made us laugh, the spectacles that made us gasp, and the romances that made us swoon. Or at least the jokes, spectacles, and romances as seen in the movies blessed by the opaque selection proces...

I won’t lie to you, folks, things are looking grim in our world these days. War, polarization, prejudice, and inequality seem to be the order of the day at Cafe de Earth, and just cracking open a newspaper can be a death sentence for that good day you thought you were having. Still, like a well-meaning friend attempting to console his companion after a botched performance of some kind, we can alwa...

The connotations of the word "bomb" are often dictated by the context in which it is set. If I were to inform you that a movie bombed, you would likely bow your head in mourning for a noble film cut down by poor box office returns. If I were to tell you that a movie is the bomb, you would probably smile and nod in approval for a film that has achieved some impressive feat of cinematic greatness. I...

If you’re a child of the Brazilian slums in the 1960s, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’ve been dealt a pretty lousy hand. Growing up you can look forward to such unpleasantness as abject poverty, filth, social immobility, filth, endemic violence, police brutality, filth, and uncleanliness. If, however, you’re of a mind to transcend the lowly status into which you were thrust, your bes...

Food is what makes the world go round. In a very literal sense it keeps you alive, but it also strengthens economies, buttresses cultures, and, if you have the stomach for it (tee hee), it can be a medium for artistic expression. I make this terrible joke because the world of fine dining can be a demanding one. Facing pressure from critics and customers to continuously push boundaries and innovate...

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done, each and every one of us humans live lives filled with “what if”s. What if I’d pursued that dream, what if I’d asked that girl to the prom, what if I’d listened to the old man in the Arabian bazaar and thrown that cursed onyx necklace into the sea? Peering down roads not traveled may bring comfort or doubt, and the older you get the more of those...

The Pope, or, the Big Kahuna, if you’re speaking official church Latin. When it comes to the Catholic Church, the biggest single religious denomination on the planet, the buck stops at the man in the white zucchetto. Traditionally considered God’s chief deputy on Earth, the Pope is basically the king priest of the Catholics, and pontiffs throughout history have wielded immense power in both religi...

Crime doesn’t pay, according to people who have never successfully committed one, but those sanctimonious moralizers have clearly never enjoyed the splendor of a Corleone family wedding. There you will find nice cars, expensive clothes, fine dining, and a vibrant collage of personality disorders, and all bought and paid for by an illicit empire of robbery, extortion, gambling, and murder. Those of...

Ah, to be young and in love. The butterflies, the sense of the future’s great possibilities, the need to traverse a city besieged by a towering monster in order to rescue your heart’s flame from her destroyed apartment building . . . wait, I’m mixing up Hallmark movies with the 2008 found-footage horror monster movie Cloverfield , directed by Matthew Reeves. Oh well, as long as we’re talking about...

2023 was quite a year for movies, between strikes and Barbies there was nary a dull moment for those of us in the cinema reaction business. But now we have reached the end of this storied year, and the brothers in charge of Iowa's greatest film review podcast are turning their gaze backwards to bring you their full thoughts on the past 365 days. They will be recounting their favorite and least fav...

Life can be difficult for old people, what with their failing health, increasing estrangement from an evolving cultural zeitgeist, and now-obsolete wardrobe of bell bottom pants and lederhosen or whatever people used to wear. It’s no wonder that some of them can be a bit grouchy in the face of all this, and to embody this enduring spirit of prickly cantankerousness, who else can they turn to but t...

Space. The final frontier, and the thing you always seem to be short on whenever you’re in the company of a sick kindergartener. You may want to flee from little Johnny’s sudden and insatiable need to hug you, but even if you go to the exact other side of the planet the amount of space between you is but a miniscule, virtually nonexistent fraction of the total spacial area of the universe. To atte...