Year in, year out, from hot war to cold, you can always count on a good submarine thriller. Something about the combination of cramped spaces, hollow reverberating sounds,* and being stuck in a metal tube beneath thousands of cubic meters of water just lends itself to high-stakes tension and pressure-cooker drama. That’s even true for […]
The third leg of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Hope, isn’t nearly as severe and bleak as Love and Faith, nor is at unmitigated in its cruelty as I, for one, fully expected it to be, given the setting of a “fat camp” for overweight teenagers to be humiliated, overworked, and deprived into slimming down […]
Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited!… I’m sorry, I can’t even, with that title. Every single Almodóvar film sounds better with its original right name (is not Carne trémula a thousand times sexier-sounding than Live Flesh? Does not Hable con ella flow off the tongue more beautifully than Talk to Her?) but even by those standards, […]
The first project completed by director Tarr Béla, and the second released, the 1977/’79 film Family Nest is a great deal more conventional than the student short Hotel Magnezit, though mostly for that reason, it’s also a great deal more successful and satisfying. Opening with a title card ironically claiming that this isn’t a true […]
For anyone who doesn’t speak Hungarian – and you, reader of this English-language film blog written by an American, will be shocked, I am certain, to learn that I do not speak Hungarian – the work of director Tarr Béla (or Béla Tarr, if you’re too good to use Hungarian name order) is typically held […]
Bluntly, I don’t want to review Lone Survivor. I watched it on a screener DVD back before Christmas, and at that time concluded that my intense philosophical disagreements weren’t going to be at all productive as the spine of a review – anyone who agrees with me would just end up depressed by what I’d […]
After having been quite horrified by the outlandish weirdness (even by the standards of Japanese pop culture!) of 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah, series producer Tanaka Tomoyuki had one demand, and that was for the next year’s movie to be a sane and normal Godzilla movie like all the other Godzilla movies. And by God, but […]
Spinoff my balls: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones belongs firmly in the mainline continuity of a franchise that now reaches its fifth entry in the most pandering and condescending way I can imagine. Latinos are a reliable audience for this franchise? Then throw some Latinos at it. Incomprehensibly-written demons don’t care what skin color you […]
V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn’t even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who’ll be more formally set-up in the very […]
Paradise: Faith proves me right about one thing, anyway: Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy would have been better suited to being the Paradise anthology film. The first part, Paradise: Love, is a fine two hour movie that would have lost nothing and maybe gained some focus as a 40-minute sequence; Faith, meanwhile, is a two-hour movie […]
We can pussyfoot around, or we can be frank: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, from 1971, is the god-damn weirdest of all Godzilla films, and it puts in a superlative argument for being the god-damn weirdest giant monster movie that Toho ever put its name to. This is a truth largely unrelated to judgments of good and […]
Some titles are just destined to be used ironically, and Paradise: Love is their king. Particularly being from Austria, a country with a fetish for cinematic misery. And particularly, I understand, from the mind of director Ulrich Seidl, who I gather (I have not previously seen his work) is kind of like a version of […]
