Just the Ticket

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. the Ticketmaster. In these List Lookback  posts, I have often opened with a justification for why I chose certain movies to review in certain months, like One Night At McCool's  being a cheesy, twisted romance movie that I reviewed in February, Alien  being my April selection because of alliteration and its disturbing fertility imagery, The Faculty  being September's review because of Back to School season. Most of my choices came down to holiday theming and month-based alliteration or logically elastic punnery. I even reviewed Last Man Standing  in August because it was literally the last movie I hadn't decided on a month for yet. To which you might ask, "So, if The Terminator  has no thematic connection to Christmas and no alliteration or pun connection to December, what's up with that?" Well, random enquirer I just made up for the purposes of forcing exposition, I decided that I wanted The Terminator  to not only be...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Usual Ticketmaster. When choosing movies to review for the List Lookback series and which movie should go in each month, I mostly made sense without stretching logic too much. But when it came to November, I handed logic over to the cuckoo and let it fly off into the sunset. And no - to those of you who didn't pay attention to the title of this post - I'm not doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ...this year. I'm just being random and meta for the sake of having an intro. Instead, I thought which movie would give me the most to talk about, and concocted a threadbare justification to tie it to Thanksgiving: an awkward gathering of weird and uncomfortable characters; and unfortunately, the passage of time has made nothing so weird, uncomfortable, and awkward as the rounding up of The Usual Suspects  by Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey . So as I talk about how good and influential this movie is despite its perverse pedigree, please rem...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. the Ticketmaster, Giving my two cents. Penny for your thoughts, Ticketholders! Believe it or not, there was a time when it was possible to get short-form horror content for a penny. It began in Victorian England (read: over two hundred years ago) with broadsides (essentially small billboards and playbills serving as cautionary tale advertisements) for upcoming executions, and as literacy improved and became more widespread through industrialization, it evolved into crime, thriller, and horror fiction compressed into eight-to-sixteen pages and priced cheaply for mass distribution. Because of the low-cost wood-fiber paper stock they were printed on, these sensationalized publications fell in the category of Pulp Fiction , but for their subject matter and pricing (and more appropriate for this month's List Lookback  selection), they were given the derogatory designation of the Penny Dreadful . My content is usually longer than that, and it's free,...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. the Ticketmaster. This week, it's time to go back to school, Ticketholders! That means pencils, books, teachers' dirty looks , education, thought control, and dark sarcasm in the classroom are back on the table, and that table is shaped to discriminate against left-handed students, covered with dry chewing gum on the bottom, carved with graffiti on top, and bolted to a plastic chair so uncomfortable you'd swear the school system was literally bending you over for hours on end. At least, that's what it was like when I was in school twenty to thirty years ago.... Today, it's a coin-flip as to whether the greater danger is being homeschooled by ignorant extremist parents or being shot at in a progressive public school...and that's just us white people! So if you'd prefer to spend your first week back in school as a student of escapist cynicism, please remember to  Enroll As A Ticketholder  if you haven't already, comment...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. the Ticketmaster With A Name & A Fistful Of No Dollars a.k.a. the Blogging Spaghetti Monster Remember when "spaghetti" used to have semi-positive connotations? I mean, sure, the above-referenced "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is a meme-god that plays on the Cthulhu mythos and the mural from the Sistine Chapel as a symbol of the "light-hearted" perspective on monotheistic religions, but we also have modern slang usages like "creepypasta" (horror-based fan theories and urban legend rumors about various IPs or historical events) and the "Lose Yourself" -inspired usage of [Mom's] spaghetti as slang for an epic, "one shot, one opportunity" fail of comedic proportions. But before that, there was the "Spaghetti western," an endearingly derogatory term for the practices of Sergio Leone (and his Italian filmmaker peers and successors of the time) to make cheap, profitable gunslinger...

 Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Ticketmaster Happy Independence Day , Ticketholders, and welcome to Earth! After a week of being asked to work myself ass-less standing in for the latest summer batch of new-hires who can't handle working in a small-town grocery store deli, it's nice to be one of only two people who got the Fourth Of July off...and keep it. Whether or not you worked yesterday (yes, it's still confusing to write in future tense for something that will be in present tense when it's published because you have to also write the present in past tense, which just makes me tense), I hope you had a happy Fourth Of July, and that you please remember to  Become A Ticketholder  if you haven't already, comment your hidden binary doomsday countdown at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to drive a motorhome through the desert in July, and follow me on  Tumblr ,  Reddit ,  Facebook , and  LinkedIn  ...