From among the Video Nasties You tell me how I was supposed to pass this one up: 1982’s Visiting Hours is one of just two wholly Canadian-made films to make the British Department of Public Prosecution’s legendary Video Nasties list,* and the only one of those starring Canada’s favorite son, William Shatner. It’s catnip to […]
When John Lasseter was appointed Chief Creative Officer for all animated productions released by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he inherited a pair of movies that were reasonably far along in their development that he found to be so completely unacceptable in all ways that he could enumerate, he demanded they be essentially scrapped […]
NB: At this point in this retrospective, I should be turning to the 1986 film Top Gun, but I have already reviewed it, and have nothing substantial to add to what I said at that time. The 1980s were a sequel-mad decade nearly on par with the present day, so it is no surprise at […]
The first thing to admit is that World War Z is better than I assumed it would have any reason to be, if only because the very phrase “PG-13 zombie movie” is enough to make any True Genre Fan start dry-heaving. On the other hand, World War Z also fails to be as good as […]
It’s an open question whether Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing really deserves to exist at all. Made during post-production on the writer-director’s mammoth effects extravaganza The Avengers, and specifically intended to clear his head and wash the taste of green screens and Disney/Marvel’s omnipresence out of his mouth, the film is populated with a […]
The operating theory behind this year’s Summer of Blood is there’s a certain something that Canadian horror films have that their southerly neighbors just can’t match: that pound for pound, the idiotic, disposable junk made by Canucks is just better than the idiotic, disposable junk made by Yanks – more mature, more psychologically astute. Every […]
Monsters University is both cute and charming, and I at least found it to be not in the least ways unenjoyable while I was watching it. This is, apparently, where we are now, with Pixar Animation Studios. And note that I’m of the mind that Brave is a pretty solid movie that got a completely […]
Sofia Coppola’s biggest liability as a filmmaker is typically identified as her immensely cloistered upbringing as an untouchable scion of Hollywood royalty, someone for whom moneyed Southern California celebrity life is so utterly normalised and unexceptional that she’s literally incapable of imagining what it might be like to live like the enormous majority of human […]
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: Pixar Animation Studios’ love affair with franchising continues with their first-ever prequel, Monsters University. In keeping with my quest […]
For the first beat of his first theatrical feature, Tony Scott made no little choices. When the little brother of Blade Runner and Alien mastermind Ridley Scott made the leap from television commercials to cinema with 1983’s The Hunger, he opened that film with one of the most in-your-face gestures of uncut style to be […]
-“How do you like this title: The Behavior Pattern of the Young Adult, and its Relation to Primitive Tribes.”-“I’ve got a shorter title: Teenage Sex“. There is nothing quite like the bloodlust of a savvy movie producer, and there was never a pair of movie producers quite as savvy in such a specialised way as […]
In August of 2008, almost nineteen years after the original The Little Mermaid, Walt Disney Pictures released The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning on DVD. And just like that, the DisneyToon direct-to-video sequel line came to its end, courtesy of Disney’s new Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter having behaved like any animation fan given virtually authoritarian […]
