There isn’t really any legitimate reason for Lawless not to be a great movie; but it isn’t. It’s a good movie, and that in and of itself is nothing to sniff at; but not a great one, not like it should be. The pedigree is right: director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave reuniting, seven […]
There have always been and will always be motion pictures about subcultures, but creating a feature about Manhattan bike messengers, with an emphatic message about how riding fixed-gear bicycles without brakes is the finest and noblest of pursuits, now that’s tapping into an insulated community that matters to essentially no-one in the world. Perhaps surprisingly, […]
Every week 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: at the time of this writing, Premium Rush has already spectacularly failed to be a blockbuster or even a […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. OCTOPUSSYDirected by John GlenWritten by George MacDonald Fraser andRichard Maibaum & Michael G. WilsonPremiered 6 June, 1983 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEWhat we have here is nothing less than a perfect little standalone mini-movie that sums up in less than ten minutes the entire raison […]
There’s something undeniably throwbacky about Hit & Run, which I am tempted to call a romantic comedy structured around car chases in lieu of having any better generic framework for it, though what it is a throwback to, I cannot quite say; unlike, for example, the grind house homages of the Quentin Tarantino school, it […]
The charms of The Expendables weren’t just ephemeral and one-note, they were about as obviously one-note as it gets: lots of ’80s action stars, having hit the age where getting money any which way they can sounds just great, are finally all appearing in the same motion picture, and that’s how we got the best […]
It is damned easy for the animation buff to get on a rant about how computer animation came in and destroyed everything, and it seems like we hardly ever get an animated feature done in any either form besides broadly realistic fully-rendered wire-frame CGI, and I know that because I’ve been on that rant. The […]
Every week 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: though it’s technically a remake, what strikes me about Sparkle is its affinity with a much more recent film, […]
Cruising, from 1980, is a rather terrible movie, but we learned from it important things about director William Friedkin, chiefly that he is about as vigorously heterosexual as a man can be,* and that he seemingly possesses a deep, abiding horror of sex. I bring this up because his newest film, Killer Joe, is apparently […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. FOR YOUR EYES ONLYDirected by John GlenWritten by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. WilsonPremiered 24 June, 1981 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEIt is customarily held that Bond opening sequences have precisely fuck-all to do with the plot of the movie they are attached to, but […]
All sniping aside, there’s not actually any reason that the idea behind The Bourne Legacy is inherently bad. In fact we might be much better off if more franchises took the somewhat novel approach of dealing with an actor’s refusal to return to a character by re-conceiving the franchise around that character’s absence, instead of […]
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: the evergreen subject of the dully married couple falling back in love because of wacky misadventure gets its latest […]
