Speaking personally, I had absolutely no use for DreamWorks Animation’s 2005 pop-culture-spewing talking animals adventure comedy Madagascar, and only a hair more for 2008’s Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, so perhaps my opinion doesn’t count; but I found Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted to be comfortably better than either of its predecessors, enough to make it […]
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial premiered in North America on 11 June, 1982, and was initially meant to be a smallish personal project (for a big-budget sci-fi picture) that would give director Steven Spielberg a chance to recuperate from the hectic production of the previous year’s Raiders of the Last Ark. It ended up devouring the Zeitgeist […]
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: after this many entries in their surprisingly durable franchise, the zoo animals of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted are […]
Prometheus is a film abnormally resistant to definitive statements, and movie reviewing is a form that lives and breathes definitive statements, and this brings us to a pretty pass. I will, anyway, begin with what might well be the only absolute judgment on the film that I’m willing to pass, and it is this: the […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Guy Hamilton Written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn Premiered 17 September, 1964 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE British secret agent 007 James Bond (Sean Connery) swims to a drug lab and blows it all to hell, and returns to the woman he has been sexing in […]
So we come to the second of 2012’s modernised takes on the famous European folk tale of Snow White, this one being Snow White and the Huntsman. I don’t imagine anybody needs to have it pointed out at this point that getting one Snow White picture is already a bit unexpected, and getting two is […]
Longtime readers know that I am far more concerned than anyone should be with typography and punctuation in movie titles, and will thus not be surprised that I’m obsessed with whether or not there’s supposed to be a colon in the title of the 1997 feature Alien Resurrection – the credit block on the poster […]
The obvious thing is to talk about Blade Runner as though it were nothing but an exercise in style for style’s sake on the part of director Ridley Scott; and while we prefer to do what is not obvious here, even when it means making the sort of contortions of logic and expression that really […]
Star Wars is typically held to have ruined American movies, by turning Hollywood’s eye away from the narratively and structurally complex, character-driven films that dominated the 1970s, in favor of big, loud, effects-driven epics that all start to look a whole lot like one another once you’ve seen enough of them. And when you put […]
The controversy surrounding Basic Instinct when it was new was big enough that even I, as a ten-year-old, had some sense of it: gay activists protesting, Sharon Stone declaiming the film’s director as having photographed her genitalia without permission, Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter, receiving an unfathomable payday – and that last bit, I think, is […]
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: there are many ways that musty old folklore can be dusted off and freshened up for a modern audience, […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVEDirected by Terence YoungWritten by Richard Maibaum and Johanna HarwoodPremiered 10 October, 1963 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEWe see our beloved Agent 007 (Sean Connery) sneaking around the grounds of a house. Is he hunting, or being hunted by the shadowy man […]
