Every Sunday this summer – and between the Year of Blood and a nightmarish stretch of shaky internet, I wasn’t able to get this in on Sunday, but let’s make believe – we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor […]
Mothers, those wonderful ladies who ruin so many children with their demented ways! Let us take a moment to thank them all for their domineering religiosity, their incestuous lust, their Puritanical hatred of sex, their whoring about with a cavalcade of strange men, or just their all-around emotional inaccessibility – all the wonderful things that […]
It is lazy to complain that the films of producer Judd Apatow are longer than they need to be; this is something that has passed from criticism to mere characteristic that everybody knows. Arthur Freed’s movies were in eyeball-searing Technicolor and often ended with a pseudo-ballet; Val Lewton’s blurred the edge between paranormal and psychological […]
This review has been updated, at the bottom A Blockbuster History special review, in honor of the kind of mind-blowing box office take that makes the word “Blockbuster” seem woefully insufficient. We all have seen the joke, I am sure, that The Avengers is not the first film in recent memory with that title, but […]
Disclosure: I have some personal history – I wouldn’t say we were “friends”, but we were more than casual acquaintances – with one of this film’s executive producers. That is to say: we were in film school together, and I production designed a short he directed. I do not think this colors my opinion, for […]
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 is held that The Avengers represents some kind of unprecedented achievement, which is entirely true, from a branding […]
Nine years is not, geologically or even in the context of a human life, a terribly long time; but it has still been a very long nine years since the Ang Lee-directed Hulk came along and was the first really noteworthy disappointment of the contemporary superhero boom. That said, it felt even in 2003 that […]
In its funny little way, Safe might end up being 2012’s most important meta-commentary on both the possibilities and the limitations of movie stardom, and particularly the concept of the star persona, though I am very close to 100% certain that this was not the intent. The key thing about the film, of course, is […]
As you may know, the Academy Awards nominees for Best Foreign Language film get chosen by two groups: the old conservative group that enjoys simple morality plays, crusty grandpas, and dew-eyed children, and the edgy, smart group that was introduced in the 2000s specifically to make sure that at least some of the nominees are […]
There is perhaps no non-romantic reason for being excited about The Pirates! Band of Misfits just because it is a stop-motion movie, the first made by Aardman Animation since 2005; but this space has always been dedicated to the romanticisation of old-school filmmaking and traditional cartooning techniques, and I find no reason to feel guilty […]
The distress call “mayday” is derived from the French “m’aider”, meaning “help me”, and has nothing at all to do with 1 May, also called May Day. But I still thought it was a fun bit of trivia to share with all of you. No, May Day is more about honoring the change of seasons, […]
The first thing worth noting is that Bond parodies and rip-offs were always more successful in Europe than in the United States – not for nothing is there an entire Eurospy subgenre far more robust and long-lived than anything that America or the United Kingdom was able to claim. And thus it was the case […]
