Bitter, scrupulous honesty compels us to admit that Bikini Beach has an alarmingly defective screenplay; by which I do not mean “The script of Bikini Beach compares unfavorably to the script of Network“, or something dumb like that, because fucking duh. I mean, even by the standards of the American International beach party movies, Bikini […]
Everything that is good about Pacific Rim is good largely on the level of “that was cool”. Whereas everything that is bad about it is bad on the levels of character psychology, narrative structure and logic, interest in the world beyond white adolescent North American males, or the general feeling that no serious consideration of […]
Nihilistic violence, caustic misogyny, soullessly ironic humor: The Last Boy Scout should feel indistinguishable from all the other early-’90s action movies on the same post-Die Hard model, yet it is vastly more fascinating than any of them. Not, to be sure, for reasons that are entirely to its credit. At its worst, the film is […]
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: the genealogy of Pacific Rim rather obviously includes the kaiju eiga, Japan’s legendary giant monster movies spanning the last […]
As of this writing, the Wikipedia page for the 1982 giant killer rat picture Deadly Eyes notes only one piece of production trivia: “Dachshunds wearing rat suits were used in the filming of Deadly Eyes to achieve the effect of super-sized rodents”. Dear reader, I would like to assure you with all my heart: you […]
Tinker Bell, the 2008 video debut of the Disney Fairies brand, turned out to be… not exactly good, but a whole hell of a lot better than you’d have any good reason to believe it was going to be. And it was good in ways that argued well for its immediately forthcoming follow-up (you don’t […]
The arrival of Despicable Me 2 so close on the heels of Monsters University is exactly the kind of one-two punch of white-hot competent mediocrity that makes both of the movies seem just a little bit worse than they are individually. Or more disheartening, at least, which might even be worse. They are, both of […]
Days of Thunder shouldn’t be as good as it is, I want to say; but that would imply that it is good, and I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case. It oughtn’t be good, at least. Not with that script. And yet it’s so much better than the combined quality of its elements that […]
Three things: first is that, despite what the aggregate of the reviews tell you, The Lone Ranger is entirely unlikely to give you cancer. It’s not good, but it’s not appreciably worse than plenty of big-budget tentpoles. Two is that $250 million dollars is impossible to justify for any motion picture, because while it’s really […]
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: The Lone Ranger cost a fucking silly amount of money for a genre that hasn’t been popular in generations. […]
Most people who discuss the 1982 horror film Humongous – already a small and self-selecting lot – typically do not have very admiring things to say about it. Frankly, it’s difficult to say why they should; the film is a pretty standard-issue slasher model film, and in fact much of the criticism that arrives at […]
The reason that there are two wildly different versions of the 1990 film Revenge is a great deal more interesting than the movie itself, for from the title on down it is but a meanly typical and pedestrian early-’90s erotic thriller whose chief point of significance is that, 14 years before Man on Fire, director […]
