That there are two animated films in the summer of 2013 which both feature a creature that just wants to race, doggone it, no matter what institutional bias he faces from the powers-that-be because he belongs to the wrong species, and when he eventually manages to make it into the big show, he ends up […]
The word “problematic” connotes different things to different people in different contexts, to the point where it’s best used precisely to avoid committing oneself to anything specific and meaningful. Yet there are occasions where it’s absolutely the perfect word: and if there was ever a platonic idea of a “problematic” motion picture, surely it would […]
On an artificial structure miles above the planet’s surface lives a population of idle, comfortable elites, enjoying the very finest technology and living in what you might as well call paradise. On the planet lives a miserable, ground-down population of working class grunts who slave to keep the elites’ world funtioning, without ever getting the […]
The fourth “true” film of American International’s beach series, Beach Blanket Bingo, is also all but universally regarded as the best, not by any little margin, either; and after a fashion, it is the last one before the wheels fell off entirely, for it was the last time that Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello were […]
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: Planes is about planes. Talking planes with faces, no less. And while I can name no other movie about […]
I didn’t build my Canadian Summer of Blood schedule along regional lines – an oversight that I now regret – so any evidence I have is strictly anecdotal, but it’s beginning to seem to me that, despite the rich history of Canadian horror cinema, those French-Canadians didn’t really get into it very much. Indeed, following […]
The IMDb trivia section is not inherently trustworthy, it being a user-submitted (but, unlike Wikipedia, not user-edited) collection of data, but this one nugget about Spy Game seemed entirely worth sharing on the grounds that, accurate or not, it was still illustrative: When the film was previewed in the summer of 2001, Brad Pitt said […]
Fruitvale Station is a debut feature, and you don’t ever lose sight of that fact. The good news is that it is an especially promising debut feature, and whatever it is that writer-director Ryan Coogler has in mind for his next project, it’s something we should all be very excited about, particularly if it occupies […]
The acerbic buddy cop action movie being one of the most formulaic of all stock genres, it would seem like there’d be no real chance of a movie seriously fucking it up. But damn it all if the genre’s latest entry, 2 Guns, didn’t go out and found a way. Historically, there’s only one thing […]
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: there is nothing – NOTHING – original about the notion of 2 Guns, which pairs two prickly law enforcement […]
It is a matter of debate amongst people whose priorities are severely misplaced whether 1964’s Pajama Party is, properly speaking, a part of American International Pictures’ beach party franchise or not. It ports over nearly the entire core cast of those films, but nearly all of them are playing different characters. It incorporates Southern California […]
Indisputably, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is more batshit insane than Prom Night, though whether this inevitably means that it is “better” than Prom Night, or even more fun to watch than Prom Night, is a matter for the learnéd to discuss (for the record, though it is way more fun to watch). That […]
