The point of art being to get a rise out of people, Lars von Trier is anyway a great artist,* as attested by the fact that he’s probably better than anyone else in cinema at tricking critics (both pro- and anti-) into writing down their opinions and reactions rather than analytically judge his movies. My […]
The film that closed out John Hughes’s directorial career, Curly Sue, has a certain reputation for awfulness that it does not deserve. Which is not remotely the same as claiming that it’s really very good at all, for that is plainly not true – the film has a desperately cutesy-pie charm that drips with flop […]
The subtitle of Werner Herzog’s new documentary Into the Abyss declares itself to be “A tale of death, a tale of life”, which is accurate-ish: it is about both of those things, but skewed rather heavily to the former for virtually the whole of its running time. Not in bad way – not in a […]
Sort of like Cinderella at midnight, John Hughes just sort of… stopped, at the end of the 1980s – the broken but interesting Uncle Buck and the utterly appealing trifle Christmas Vacation in 1989, and then he immediately started in with the alternately treacly and cruel Home Alone in 1990, and a sharp skid through […]
There are two ways we can think of Immortals. The more satisfying is to compare it to its two most obvious antecedents, 300 and Clash of the Titans, and think to oneself, “Holy balls! That was made by a filmmaker who doesn’t fumble about like a goddamn rodeo clown! GENIUS!” The other way is to […]
The 1991 Hughes Entertainment production Only the Lonely was not directed by, nor written by, producer John Hughes, which on the face of it makes it a poor candidate for a John Hughes retrospective, but I had my reasons. For one, it was the last time that Hughes worked in any capacity with actor John […]
The first warning sign was that Like Crazy won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, though despite how much I like to argue the contrary, it’s not actually true that nothing good ever comes from Sundance. Heck, just this year we got Take Shelter. However, in this case bigotry wins out: Like Crazy is awful, […]
It is said to be the case that following the huge success of Home Alone at the end of 1990, John Hughes was asked by Universal to hurry up and get his next project out as soon as humanly possible, please, so that they could capitalise on the earlier film’s golden glow. This strikes me […]
It’s sad when passion projects are as flimsy in execution as is The Rum Diary; and it’s downright heartbreaking when passion projects that took as much personal effort and sacrifice as The Rum Diary demanded of writer-director Bruce Robinson and star-producer Johnny Depp turn out to be as half-assed and noncommital as The Rum Diary. […]
Lovers of John Hughes frequently point to their childhood memories of seeing the writer-director-producer’s classics as a huge part of their adult response to the same films; people from the commenters on this very blog to latter-day Neohughesian filmmakers like Judd Apatow. I have not thus far expressed much in the way of having such […]
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas doesn’t take very long to let us know its intentions: within the first five minutes, we have encountered a scene in which a heavily bearded and altogether worn-out Kumar Patel (Kal Penn) and a mall Santa Claus (Patton Oswalt, the first of many immaculately-placed cameos in the movie) […]
In the sequel-mad ’80s, the shock is not that a second follow-up to National Lampoon’s Vacation should exist; the shock is instead that it took four years from the release of National Lampoon’s European Vacation in 1985 for that second sequel to materialise. The years 1985-1988 were awfully busy ones for screenwriter John Hughes, it […]
