Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas quintet of 1913-’14 predicted many of the aspects of future escapist entertainment, but I’m afraid that the last thing it managed to establish is one that we’d have all hoped would have been avoided. The False Magistrate, premiering 364 days after Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine (that is to […]
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: you’d have to have a pretty demented sense of the word “original” to claim that Australian arch-stylist Baz Luhrmann […]
Fantômas vs. Fantômas, the fourth movie in the Fantômas series by Louis Feuillade and the first to premiere in 1914, continues the little trend I have noticed in the series, whereby various facets of modern-day popcorn filmmaking are all seen in some embryonic form (and though we can add glossy escapist movies to the list […]
There’s probably no such thing as a feature-length movie made prior to maybe 1920 or ’21 that can really be suited for modern tastes, I will resentfully concede, but if we can pretend that there is, I’d like to nominate the third of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas films, The Murderous Corpse from November, 1913, as being […]
A chronological index of reviews. Skip to the ranking of all episodes Season 1 (2003-2004) “Pilot” “Top Banana” “Bringing Up Buster” “Key Decisions” “Visiting Ours” “Charity Drive” “My Mother, the Car” “In God We Trust” “Storming the Castle” “Pier Pressure” “Public Relations” “Marta Complex” & “Beef Consommé” “Shock and Aww” “Staff Infection” “Missing Kitty” “Altar […]
In reviewing the first film in Louis Feuillade’s five-part Fantômas series of 1913 and 1914, Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine, I rather snottily compared to Iron Man 3 as being “a critic-proof, and essentially quality-proof opportunity for filmgoers to spend time with a character they already knew they loved”. And of course […]
On 9 May, 1913, the most popular pulp fiction character in France made the jump from page to screen, in Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas – In the Shadow of the Guillotine. So the first thing we should stop to observe is that this film was basically the equivalent of Iron Man 3 a century later: a […]
Written in honor of the legendary stop-motion animator and special effects technician Ray Harryhausen, who passed away on 7 May, 2013, at the age of 92. With all my sincerest gratitude for the menagerie of fantastic and prehistoric animals given life by his hands, and the unimpeachable matinee-movie thrills that even now I get when […]
In fairness to Leroy & Stitch, it’s probably less perverse than I think it is. I have not seen one second of Lilo & Stitch: The Series, which fills the narrative gap between 2003’s Stitch! The Movie, and this feature-length series finale (and ultimately, between this and the 2002 theatrical Lilo & Stitch, but there’s […]
The first thing one notices about the French-language film adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, relative to the English-language ones, is that they are much longer: indeed, the shortest of the important French versions (from 1982) is nearly half an hour longer than the longest of the English versions (the 2012 musical). This has everything […]
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: Iron Man 3 is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but one of the things I […]
Iron Man, I think, is never going to be bettered, even if one day one of its sequels or spin-offs ends up being genuinely better cinema, because Iron Man had a bit of good fortune that none of them ever will: it was unexpected, and you only get to have that happen once. Just like […]
