By no means is it an accident that the 1971 dystopia thriller and blackhearted social satire A Clockwork Orange opens – after the disorienting title cards, blocky white text on screaming primary color backgrounds with droning electronic music in the background – with a shot of its protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) staring directly into the […]
MGM was the stylish studio. If you know nothing else about Hollywood in the 1930s, that is the thing to know: when it came to the most glamorous stars wearing the most opulent clothes on the most richly detailed sets, acting out the most robustly dramatic scenarios while the most emphatic strings wept on the […]
New rule: Bryan Singer should only direct X-Men movies, and X-Men movies should only be directed by Bryan Singer. For here we are with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is almost indisputably, I’d say, both Singer’s and the franchise’s best picture since X2 back in the long-ago of 2003 (from which early perch it […]
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: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody’s favorite hackneyed genre trick, time […]
If there was ever a time when the notorious genre of the slasher film wasn’t in its rotten, decadent phase, that time was at any rate not 1988. By this point, all the good ideas had been used up, all the mediocre knock-off ideas had been used up, the audience was all used up, and […]
There’s nothing easier than losing favor with Hollywood: no matter how successful a director’s high peaks might be, all it takes is one project that ends up costing far too much and makes far too little back at the box office to tarnish even the brightest shining star. This truism takes us to one Frank […]
I have on three different occasions now described Only Lovers Left Alive as Vampires Who Write for Pitchfork: The Movie, and I still don’t have the damnedest idea if I mean that in a disparaging or highly complimentary way. It’s that kind of movie, where the singular weirdness of it more than trumps judgments that […]
The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for […]
2001: A Space Odyssey is the sort of movie that frequently gets called “difficult”. Which is, ultimately, never true of a film that costs that much money laid out by a major studio (MGM, in this case), though I’ll concede that if by “difficult” one means “the ending is a deliberately obscurantist explosion of borderline […]
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 fourth distinct film titled simply Godzilla continues the grand tradition of movies in which the uncertain march of […]
The story goes that the extraordinary popularity of musicals in the 1930s in America was a direct result of the Great Depression: the fantasy and spectacle and charm of the genre was an easy way to stay distracted for an hour or two of joy in the face of widespread economic suffering. Another story goes […]
Of all possible outcomes for the new American-made Godzilla, one that I wasn’t prepared for at all was that, at the macro level, it would have exactly the same structural problems that the last Godzilla film, 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars did. To wit: in a movie just a smidigen north of two hours, the best […]
