1968 is a symbolically freighted year in the history of American filmmaking, for it was in 1968 that the Motion Picture Association of America, two years into the nearly four-decade tenure of president Jack Valenti, abolished the Production Code that had been zealously enforced (though increasingly less so) ever since 1934. In place of the […]
Nobody with a brain would blindly trust the internet, or at least that part of the internet that speaks English, on the subject of release dates of Asian-produced movies from a half-century ago. But what the internet tells me is that Daiei Film released both Gamera vs. Barugon and Daimajin ion 17 April, 1966. This […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal 1841 detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a locked room mystery in which hobbyist detective C. August Dupin realises that an enraged orangutan jumped into an open window and, in a frenzy, slaughtered the women it found there. The first sound feature to adapt a Poe work, 1932’s […]
It’s probably possible to overstate the importance of Bonnie and Clyde to the subsequent development of American cinema, but you’d have to indulge in some pretty outrageous hyperbole to do it. It almost single-handedly dragged Hollywood into the aggressive stylistic modernism that Europe had been enjoying for most of the 1960s; there had been scattered […]
There’s no sane reason for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to be as bad as it is. Other than that producer Michael Bay, bless him, is a stylist with a good eye, if nothing else; and director Jonathan Liebseman is not. And when a man with neither style nor talent attempts to slavishly copy from the […]
1966’s Gamera vs. Barugon is particularly noteworthy in the Gamera series for three reasons. Firstly is that this first sequel to the previous year’s Gamera was in color, where its predecessor was not; it’s frankly not clear to me why the original was in black-and-white, at that point in time, but it left that film […]
It’s fun, kind of, to finally catch up with a major talking point movie after it’s been out awhile, and to have seen its reception shift around a bit. With >Boyhood, we’ve seen the initial near-religious rapture of its Sundance reviews give way, bit by bit, to a backlash, and now we’re far enough along […]
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: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived to become teenagers, and are trained […]
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: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived to become teenagers, and are trained […]
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: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived to become teenagers, and are trained […]
You know how in slasher movies, sexually active teenagers are killed? Congratulations, you have all the information you need in order to have written Student Bodies, a slasher movie parody from 1981, the earliest year in which “slasher parody” is something we could even conceivably talk about (added bonus points for being released by Paramount, […]
Camp is one of the hardest things in pop cultural discourse: hard to quite grasp which of a dozen almost identical, but in some crucial way contradictory definitions, cuts to the heart of what it is; hard to explain it once you’ve seen it, and demonstrate how and why it works the way it does; […]
