Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the notion of trying to appeal to both the menfolk and the wimminfolk by combining romantic comedy and action-adventure […]
From among the Video Nasties Thus far into the great Summer of Blood ’10 Video Nasties Extravaganza, you could be forgiven for assuming that the Video Nasties list was pretty much a bunch of hot air, trumped-up charges of obscene violence levied against movies that were mostly innocuous and badly-made, guilty perhaps of extreme bad […]
If Neil Jordan’s Ondine were a regular sort of movie, it probably would have opened with a sequence establishing what sort of person its hero was, showing him interacting with his ex-wife and his sickly daughter, chatting with the locals in the small Irish town where he lives, giving us a good sense of the […]
The idea of a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books predates the existence of Studio Ghibli itself, as well of three of the (so far) six novels in the series. In the early 1980s, long before he’d gained any fame whatsoever in the West, the relatively green anime director Miyazaki Hayao […]
I have a bit of a push-pull feeling towards Winter’s Bone, the most grandly-fêted movie to come out of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. On the one hand, it’s the rare American indie that genuinely delivers on the musty old promise that there are other ways of doing things than the Hollywood playbook: a thriller […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: one of the biggest hits of the ten features to have preceded Toy Story 3 in the extraordinary run […]
From among the Video Nasties “But at least it wasn’t directed by Joe D’Amato.” With those words I ended my most recent Video Nasties review, of the heinous Nazisploitation picture SS Hell Camp AKA The Beast in Heat AKA La bestia in calore. I did not do this accidentally, for even then did I know […]
Ho-hum. Another summer, another Pixar feature, another masterpiece. This time, though, the stakes were higher for the studio than they ever have been: for not only was there the pressure of continuing the run of magnificent CGI cartoons that have left Pixar arguably the most consistently excellent filmmaking body in history, there was also the […]
First principles: two hours and twenty minutes is a fucking unreasonable running time for a kids’ martial arts film. But that is exactly the running time of the new remake of The Karate Kid, which finds Will and Jada Pinkett Smith winning the Best Parents of the Year award, having bought their son Jaden his […]
Four years ago, director Michel Hazanavicius and co-writer Jean-François Halin pulled out of mothballs the French pulp icon OSS 117 AKA Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath – a super-spy on the model of Britain’s James Bond, though Jean Bruce’s OSS novels predate Ian Fleming’s 007 novels by four years – and gave him a brand […]
Studio Ghibli, as a rule, doesn’t do sequels; this is a core value stated outright by company leader Miyazaki Hayao, who has categorically refused to follow-up on any of his own stories, and the rest of the company’s artists has seemed content to follow suit (one must wonder what Miyazaki’s buddy John Lasseter thinks about […]
Early in the breathtakingly unnecessary The A-Team, remade from the iconic & not especially good ’80s television series, Col. John “Hannibal” Smith (Liam Neeson) hears the name of a hated rival with CIA ties, and derides the man’s lack of subtlety when it comes to matters of espionage: “He’s a caricature.” At this moment, a […]
