There’ve only been a couple attempts to adapt Philip Roth to the screen, but those attempts all share one characteristic: they don’t result in very good movies. I’m not sure there’s just one reason for that – I haven’t read very much Roth, but what I’m familiar with doesn’t seem inherently anti-cinematic – but there […]
Hey kids, it’s time for Compare ‘N Contrast! In 1975, Roger Corman produced Death Race 2000, a freaked-out exploitation film cum satire, in which the United Provinces of America, circa the year 2000, has turned into a fascist state (and possibly a communist fascist state at that) with a fetish for Roman-style entertainment and neo-Nazism. […]
A more scattershot, multiple-personality comedy than Hamlet 2 you’ll rarely see, and after some thought I think I’ve figured out the chief reason why: it quickly establishes in bold, broad strokes that its main character is an idiotic fuck-up, and then proceeds to tell a whole story that hinges on our hope that he’ll make […]
From Scary Movie to, well, Scary Movie 4, you’d have to look long and hard to find a talented comedienne with a spottier resume than Anna Faris’s. This is a truly horrible shame, since even in the trashiest trash, the actress herself is never less than completely charming and endearing, and in those few cases […]
In 1979, Woody Allen directed a film called Manhattan: half a love story about neurotic, self-obsessed intellectuals, half a gauzy Valentine to all the nooks and crannies of a city the filmmaker adored, filmed in unmentionably gorgeous black-and-white 70mm by the legendary Gordon Willis. And much as Annie Hall has been echoed consciously or subconsciously […]
Confronted with a film that seems to come out of nowhere, and do things that no other film in my experience has done in quite the same way, my brain struggles mightily to come up with some comfortably familiar framework to fit that film, and here’s what I’ve come up with for Johnny Guitar: it’s […]
The last page of notes I took for Halloween H20 (on the back of an envelope, if you care), includes this observation of the film’s closing minutes: “[Michael] looks confused & pathetic. Just like this film.” Somehow, history has come to regard this 1998 reboot of the Halloween franchise as the best of all the […]
Part of the Movies About Movies blog-a-thon hosted at Goatdog The great silent comedian Buster Keaton isn’t typically thought of as a cultural commentator; I think most people would sooner point to Charles Chaplin, whose iconic Little Tramp stood in for all men and women trampled by those with money, power and influence. Certainly, Chaplin’s […]
A small elderly woman walks through a train yard on a scorching hot day, looking for her ride. Eventually she comes to an armored military train, loaded with sweaty, dusty soldiers, who are glad to help the woman up into their dingy hold. As the train pulls out, the men discuss how best to afford […]
As debut features go, writer-director Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River is perfectly serviceable, if not particularly exceptional. Laureled at Sundance, it would be a textbook example of a solid little indie movie that gets quietly dumped in the waning days of summer because the distributor can’t really think of anything else to do with, except for […]
Woody Allen’s projects aren’t films so much as they are changes in the weather: sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying, nothing that anybody says or does can do much to change them, and they occur in a roughly annual cycle. With that in mind (extremely strained metaphor to follow), his latest feature, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is like […]
The lack of cultural memory about some things amazes me. When Halloween H20 was released in 1998, it was treated to a marketing campaign that focused on the triumphant return of the Halloween series – a series that had been dormant only three years. By that point, there had twice been six-year gaps between films […]
