Let us rewind: all the way back to 1984. The year of Amadeus, The Killing Fields, Ronald Reagan’s re-election, which somehow did not trigger the neo-fascist technocracy that George Orwell expected right about now, the first mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery, and Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Moving in a little bit, it was in April’s […]
License to Wed is the story of a religious sociopath who forces his way into the personal lives of a young couple in the month before their wedding, demanding that they perform arbitrary tricks for his psychotic amusement and keeping them under constant electronic surveillance to ensure that they never drift too far from his […]
The world needs more and better scary movies. This is a long-standing and well-known position of mine. This is why I was initially prepared to cut 1408 all the slack it needed, even though it stars John Cusack; generally speaking, the world also needs fewer John Cusack vehicles, which is an equally long-standing although perhaps […]
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him, it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images; but it never worked. He wrote me, ‘One day, I’ll have to […]
On the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, a small planet covered in water orbited a typical class G star just as it had for billions of years, just as it would for billions of years yet to come. Nothing much of any importance had changed since it started its pattern. At this time, […]
Like many people on what is semi-accurately referred to as The Left, I have a deeply torn relationship with the films of Michael Moore. He’s a fiery rhetorician and no mistake; but he preaches to the choir, don’t you think? He has a knack for taking outrages that only wonks know about and making them […]
When last we saw noted auteur Michael Bay, he had just shat upon the world The Island, a film so insipid you could use it to scour paint off your walls. Still, it apparently impressed none other than Steven Spielberg so very much that he donned his Executive Producer hat to work with Bay on […]
What I’m about to say will be a whole lot more meaningful if you know me well: after thinking about it for a few days, I think – think, mind you – that Ratatouille might just be my new favorite Pixar film. That’s a fairly enormous statement to make, but rather than getting into a […]
A quick recap: the year 1989 managed to pretty much kill the slasher subgenre, and Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan in particular was such a vicious black eye upon the studio that produced it that they sold the franchise lock, stock and barrel to those saucy upstarts at New Line, still a […]
