There is a little game I often play with myself, in which I try to determine which classic director of film comedy would have been able to redeem or even make a masterpiece out of whatever unexceptional or bad or completely fucking unwatchable new “comic” film I’ve just stumbled out of.* Sometimes it’s hard and […]
Every Sunday 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: Kevin James gets to pretend he’s Ben Stiller’s character in Night at the Museum in the singularly bleak-looking Zookeeper. […]
I am not speaking for the majority when I suggest that Child’s Play 2 is, despite all reason and rationality, a sort of decent horror movie, particularly in the context of being a slasher sequel from 1990. But I will stand firm in this belief. No such bravery on my part in the case of […]
There is absolutely no reason on God’s green earth that a 1990 slasher sequel released to an original from 1988 should end up being a good movie, even less so given that both of the films in question aren’t just slashers, they’re unwieldy hybrids of slasher, fairy tale, and police procedural (the first one, at […]
It is surely my fault that I held out the hope, however slight, that Bad Teacher would end up being an okay movie. Certainly, nobody that I ever discussed it with – and some of these are people that I would politely describe as having aggressively indiscriminate tastes when it comes to R-rated comedies – […]
Every Sunday 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 grueling Transformers: Dark of the Moon is not original in any meaningful way, and does not claim to […]
Come with me back to 1988. I mean that in a particularly literal way: over the years, one of the things that I’ve come to love about shitty horror pictures from the ’70s and ’80s is the way that they seem to capture the essential Zeitgeist of the moment of their creation in a way […]
Apologies all ’round that it took me this long to post a review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon. You see, I ran right out to see it when it opened three days ago, and it just now ended. At 157 minutes, Dark of the Moon is the longest of the now-three Transformers pictures – […]
The first-person horror movement born in the wake of The Blair Witch Project has resulted in movies as good as Paranormal Activity and as bad as Paranormal Activity 2, but all up and down the chain of quality, one thing has remained constant: virtually all of these movies are interesting primarily because they are shot […]
