To later generations, John Hughes is all but indistinguishable from the genre of teen angst comedies that he helped to create in the 1980s, but it was not ever thus. Hughes began his career as a joke writer for stand-up comedians, and an advertising copywriter, and eventually a staffer on the National Lampoon magazine during […]
Following the 1971 release of Duck, You Sucker, Sergio Leone became fixated on the idea of adapting Harry Grey’s mobster novel The Hoods into an epic movie about organised crime in the United States, a dream that finally emerged after 13 long years as Once Upon a Time in America. The challenges of getting that […]
Once Upon a Time in America was the most hard-fought film of Sergio Leone’s career. He turned his attention towards adapting Harry Grey’s partially autobiographical mobster novel The Hoods at the very beginning of the 1970s, but a combination of rights issues, financing, and the sheer damn scope of the thing meant that 13 years […]
Following the 1971 release of Duck, You Sucker, Sergio Leone became fixated on the idea of adapting Harry Grey’s mobster novel The Hoods into an epic movie about organised crime in the United States, a dream that finally emerged after 13 long years as
The best one could hope from a movie titled Shark Night 3D is that it be gleefully crass, with a plethora of sharks lashing out at the camera. Indeed, in my boundless innocence and optimism, I would go so far as to say that there is no other possible reason to give a movie the […]
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: it would appear, from the evidence, that there are two ways you can treat the Apollo moon missions in […]
It’s quite obvious that a lot of love went into making Apollo 18, so it’s a real shame that Apollo 18 is the result. That is to say: the movie is so utterly broken at a conceptual level that a truly good film was completely out of the question, and yet director Gonzalo López-Gallego flung […]
Beginning with Once Upon a Time in the West, in 1968, it becomes difficult to separate the facts in the case of Sergio Leone from the complex layers of myth that he eagerly gathered around himself once it became clear that he was an Important Director. That means that one cannot trust all the details […]
The 1982 film Basket Case is a mystifying, paradoxical little bugger. It is undeniably cheap and amateurish and held together more by hope and prayer than anything; for writer-director-editor Frank Henenlotter, in the making of his debut film, was obliged to settle for a budget almost comically low for the scope of his imagination. The […]
Sometimes, one looks at a new release and says, “hell no, I am not paying money to see that”, and goes on about one’s business, and then the movie goes to #1 for the weekend. And since one has promised that he shall review every #1 movie, he reluctantly prepares to see it. Ah, but […]
Once Upon a Time in the West opens with a sequence of about 14 minutes or a touch under, that functions very much like a short film prequel to the movie proper, and it is as such the best film of director Sergio Leone’s career. I would very much like to call it the best […]
There are certain movies that can only be rightfully called “gentle”. Our Idiot Brother is one of those movies. There are also certain movies that are so gentle that it doesn’t seem that they’d crack if you breathed on them too heavily. Our Idiot Brother is one of those movies, as well. The conceit is […]
