During his 13-year sojourn in Hollywood, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven made six feature films, of which no fewer than four are satires of American culture. Two of them were written by Joe Eszterhas, and they are satires of the prurient/prudish American obsession with making everything about sex except for sex: Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and […]
The Lego Movie has a third-act twist. Part of me wishes very much that it didn’t, but simply introduced the twist right at the start, since the reveal informs the rest of the movie in such a fascinating, pleasurably conceptual way. Part of me is very happy it plays it the way it does since […]
It’s funny – not like, “oh my God, I can’t stop laughing” funny, but little about European art cinema is – it’s funny, I say again, that the first Tarr Béla film that made me bolt upright and think, “YES, THAT’S IT. That is the Tarr I’ve been waiting for” would also be the one […]
I hope you don’t mind if I immediately bog things down in a semantics discussion, because I’m going to do it regardless: The film with which Toho’s classic monster Godzilla made his first appearance of the 1980s, nine years after Terror of Mechagodzilla made so little impression and sent the franchise into mothballs in 1975, […]
The Child’s Play franchise fascinates me: not because it is especially consistent or good (thought it has a great batting average compared to something like Friday the 13th or even A Nightmare on Elm Street), but because it has been able to reinvent itself so many times, with such success. After three increasingly ludicrous paranormal […]
There are two words that rush to the forefront of my mind as I think upon 20 Feet from Stardom. The first of these is “pleasant”, the second is “safe”, and the combination of those two gives, I think, a pretty clear impression of what kind of territory the film looks to occupy. It is […]
From just about any angle you want to approach it, 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla is heavy with Significance for the Godzilla franchise. For one thing, with 28 total Japanese movies and one semi-official American production released in the monster’s first 59 years, this fifteenth film finds us at the numerical halfway point. But that’s for […]
It was with his 1982 television adaptation of Macbeth that Tarr Béla suddenly and without warning turned into Tarr Béla. No learning curve, no gradual shift – all at once, the social realism that had marked his early features simply wasn’t there, replaced with “fuck you, that’s why” approach to formalist storytelling that turns his […]
