What was then longest gap in between Hughes Entertainment productions – from June, 1988, to August, 1989 – ended with Uncle Buck, a movie that does not necessarily benefit from having been so long in the hopper, nor from what we can presumably refer to as John Hughes’s creative exhaustion at the close of the […]
Let us, just for the moment, set aside the gross intellectual dishonesty underpinning every single story beat of Roland Emmerich’s Elizabethan political thriller Anonymous – a herculean task, I will admit. But simply because Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff and a whole bunch of classically-trained British actors who, in a happier world, would all know […]
Three John Hughes productions were being put together roughly at the same time – though, of course, he didn’t direct all three, that would have been insane – and were released in a scant eight month period, from November, 1987, through June, 1988. The first of these was Planes, Trains & Automobiles, a sweet-and-sarcastic travel […]
My gut tells me that a great pun would be to call Martha Marcy May Marlene by the alternate name Martha Marcy Meh Marlene, but there are a number of objections to that, among them being that it’s not quite as bad as being “meh”, another that your eye tends to glide over the words […]
As if it wasn’t enough of a drag that Cars 2 sucked: DreamWorks Animation has now followed Pixar (big surprise)) with a movie that takes the heavily, one might say offensively stereotypical comic sidekick of one of their previous hits and places him in an adventure all his own. But unlike Mater Goes Bananas, they […]
The last of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Roger Corman directed for American International Pictures – though by no means the last one that AIP cranked out – The Tomb of Ligeia is the most polished and classy film of the entire cycle, and it is not uncommon to find people arguing, on those grounds, […]
I imagine that it’s become fairly clear over the course of this retrospective that I don’t necessarily have a great deal of affection for the films of John Hughes; certainly nothing like the “ZOMG he defined my adolescence!” love that his name tends to kick off in a lot of people. Which is certainly not […]
Ever since its premiere at Cannes, The Skin I Live In has attracted the customary divisive reviews that attend to Pedro Almodóvar movies and become a talking point among cinephiles here, there, and everywhere. And in all this, not once have I heard of anybody pointing out the extremely important detail that this is basically […]
The seventh of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for AIP, The Masque of the Red Death, opened four years and two days after the first, House of Usher, and that is a whole lot of Poe in not very much time no matter how you slice it (and let us pause to observe that […]
