So as it turns out, the cultural hegemony angle on The Impossible is a bit of a non-starter. You know the one I’m talking about, if you’ve been paying much attention to the talk around the movie: the first major international film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which tells the story of how hundreds […]
There have been few moments that bonded me as permanently to the friends I shared that moment with as the first time I watched the trailer for Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 in college. An epically bad CGI demon, lots of doom-wracked voiceover, a lisping child reading from the Bible, inexplicable action scenes, and best […]
How right it is to celebrate Apocalypse Day, 21 December 2012, with a movie about the grandpappy of all apocalypses, the one that gave us the very word itself. For “apocalypse” does not come from any source referring to widespread destruction, be it in the form of meteors or tidal waves or carnivorous rabbits; it’s […]
There is much to say about This Is 40, more of it good than ill, but I absolutely couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t start by getting something off my chest: this movie is a damned nightmare of our old nemesis Orange ‘n’ Teal. I swear, every time you think it’s just about died […]
The battled-hardened fan of genre films learns quickly how to sift the good bits and pieces out of otherwise mediocre project; it is unlikely that one would else become a genre fan. And here’s an absolutely perfect example, Reign of Fire from 2002: there are some very fine individual elements, but is mostly bog-standard post-apocalypse […]
I must first confess to a personal bias: ever since the release of Funny Games U.S., the complete body of work, past and future, of director/provocateur Michael Haneke has come to me with a definite “yeah? prove it” disadvantage. What, exactly, I want him to prove, other than the fact that he can stop being […]
“There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.” -Daniel C. Dennett The Day After Tomorrow is, in a certain light, one of the very oddest blockbuster movies of the 2000s. One of the immutable truths of blockbuster filmmaking is that most really expensive Hollywood tentpoles go as far […]
I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to figure out what to make of the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, even before there was a controversy surrounding that exact same subject, and in two weeks, I have gone through so many first paragraphs without ever getting further to the actual content of the […]
It is bizarre to think about nowadays, when Terry Gilliam’s name is practically a byword for stubborn, cultishly adored filmmaking that exists (barely) in defiance of commercial filmmaking norms, but there was a brief moment in the 1990s, when he was still making a movies at less than a once-in-a-generation rate, where it briefly looked […]
My dear readers, who stick with me through all the weird, nasty, stupid places I take this blog, can any of you think of a better way to mark my 31st birthday than with an unnecessarily long Canadian slasher movie that also turned 31 this year? Of course you cannot, because there is NO BETTER […]
Stanley Kramer is a name that doesn’t get thrown around much these days, him being mostly forgotten by all but the dedicated, historically-minded cinephiles who are far likelier to respond to mention of the director-producer with an involuntary dry heave than with any kind of fondness. Yet there was a time, in the lifespan of […]
In Tokyo, there is found one of the most highly-regarded restaurants in the world, Sukiyabashi Jiro. It is a 10-seat sushi bar that is the smallest establishment awarded a perfect three-star rating from the prestigious Michelin Guide, and the first sushi restaurant to win that honor; its proprietor, Ono Jiro, has dedicated an entire lifetime […]
