I freely admit that I don’t really know a fucking thing about West Coast punk. But even I know that Darby Crash, legendary frontman for The Germs, deserves a better memorial than the tremendously straightforward What We Do Is Secret, even if it was created with the support of some of Crash’s friends and bandmates. […]
I like to think that I am an easily-satisfied viewer of horror films. A concept that’s creepy enough to make the hairs on your neck prickle a bit, good & moody cinematography, imaginative and well-executed gore effects, some iconic imagery, and ideally have the whole thing scary enough that I catch myself thinking about it […]
It’s an embarrassing thing to say about one of the highest-regarded Soviet art films ever produced, but try though I might, as I watched Sergei Parajanov’s Color of Pomegranates, I could never quite shake the ghost of Monty Python’s parodies of inscrutable art films. You know what I’m talking about, if you’ve seen enough Flying […]
Although Star Wars: The Clone Wars was born to be a whipping boy, I’d like to suggest that it’s not wholly without merit; it has a certain honesty about its intentions to be nothing of any particular importance, and damned if it doesn’t meet that goal. Besides which, it provides a solid argument that a […]
The words “Quentin Tarantino Presents” can only mean one of two things: that the film in question is a drop-dead gorgeous Asian movie that should have been released years earlier, if only Harvey Weinstein weren’t such a jackass; or it is a lousy neo-exploitation film. Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride, as you can probably guess, is […]
It’s not just that Tropic Thunder is the funniest American comedy of the year by a mile. It’s that Tropic Thunder is one of the nastiest American comedies in what feels like decades, taking a well-trod subject – how movies are made – and attacking with a savage gusto that calls to mind Sunset Blvd. […]
A talking-heads documentary whose ending is preordained simply from the fact that it exists at all has no business working as a nerve-wracking thriller, but here we have Man on Wire anyway, existing in defiance of all logic, which looks at the film’s components and concludes that only a crazy person could find this to […]
Isn’t it romantic, Music in the night, a dream that can be heard? The first “talkie” – the first sync sound motion picture with spoken dialogue – was also the first musical, Warner’s The Jazz Singer from 1927. And in the first years that followed the release of that landmark, the history of sound cinema […]
Back we go to 1989! That magical year, when each of the four major slasher franchises released the entry that basically killed the series (okay, so Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III came out in early 1990: it was targeted for 1989, before censorship issues bogged down its premiere). The most notorious example is of […]
Theoretically, the big challenge facing the pleasing, drowsy indie comedy Bottle Shock is that anybody who cares remotely enough about wine to seek the film out and view it already knows exactly how it ends. So the tiny army of screenwriters (including director Randall Miller) do something smart, the only thing they could plausibly do: […]
Depending on the kind of person you are, Pineapple Express is either the latest Apatow Productions feature to explore the process whereby a goofy man-child learns to be a grown-up, and a good deal prettier than such films tend to be; or it is the fifth film directed by the invaluable David Gordon Green, making […]
And once again, we learn that nothing good comes out of Sundance. The problem with American Teen in a nutshell: as the end credits rolled, I scoured them for whatever hint would give the game away, that this was actually a fictional story filmed to look exactly like a documentary about high school seniors in […]
