Those of you who’ve been around for a while have undoubtedly picked up on my certain disdain for movies that play the “we know we’re making a bad movie, so it’s actually funny that our movie is bad” card. And oh my Lord, does the 1997 direct-to-video Jack Frost lean on that conceit as unrelentingly […]
Can a Song Save Your Life?, as a question, is dimwitted hipster drivel to which the only sane answer is “no, fuck off”. Whereas Can a Song Save Your Life?, as as movie title, is at any rate way the hell better than the viciously routine Begin Again, as it was renamed following its 2013 […]
Snowpiercer is the absolute best thing. Okay, so Snowpiercer isn’t literally the absolute best, obviously, but it’s the kind of film which exists on a plain of such energy and madness that it inspires such an all-in response even if it’s stupid. Incidentally, the last movie I saw that made me feel the same “that’s […]
Melodramas, neo-Westerns, proto-indies, social commentary and all are fun, but I couldn’t leave the 1950s behind without touching on that decade’s single most lasting contribution, not just to movies but to Western civilisation generally. The ’50s, you see, were the decade when Teen Culture truly came into existence, not just in the sense of teenagers […]
Good sequels are rare; good sequels to prequels are rare enough that I can’t remember the last one prior to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which isn’t merely good, it’s in some ways outright terrific. In fact, not only is it a more than worthy successor to 2011’s surprisingly good Rise of the […]
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: in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, we find a world in which humans have become the endangered […]
1982’s The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the ’70s for […]
That are certain expectations that immediately present themselves in connection with a film made at MGM in 1958, starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and directed by Vincente Minnelli, and not the least merit of Some Came Running is that it completely defies them. It’s not a musical, for one thing, though that’s a superficial […]
In 2005 and 2006, a pair of movies were released, both broadly based on the same real-life story of Annaliese Michel, who died in 1976 at the age of 23, after an exorcism gone wrong. The latter film was Requiem, a German production that raised more questions than it answered, allowing for the possibility that […]
It’s so easy to compare Earth to Echo to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial that it would feel disingenuous not to. Both are about children from suburban subdivisions encountering an extra-terrestrial being; both are metaphors for the experience of being a child in a subdivision, though here things start to break: E.T. is about childhood isolation and […]
The Hollywood Century project has been primarily concerned with charting the history of the major Hollywood studios, but it has also been an attempt to track the evolution of American filmmaking over a one-hundred year period, and as we make our way through the ’50s, we have come across one of the truly seismic events […]
Motion pictures had been taking their cues from stage plays since the earliest days of narrative filmmaking, but something specific shifted in the 1950s. Part of that shift happened in theater itself: the evolution of the musical play in the years following Oklahoma! in 1943 introduced new psychological acuity and narrative complexity to what had […]
