When Godzilla was released in 1954 in Japan, it inspired a huge increase in tokusatsu filmmaking in that country in the year to follow, with Japanese studios investing in science fiction in a big way. And yet very little of that influence seems to have resulted in the most obvious possible Godzilla knock-offs (or so […]
Upon leaving Hercules (the, I don’t know, fifth or tenth movie of that exact title, but I’m talking about the one made in 2014 in America), the friend with whom I saw it and I got to talking about why in the hell so much of recent pop culture has been obsessed with grounding fantastic […]
My first thought is not a very professional one: holy shit, Diane Ladd used to look exactly like her daughter. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can turn to the matter at hand. And the matter at hand is The Wild Angels, a film without which the subsequent history of cinema […]
Big hits spawn copycats; that’s just what happens, in any commercial art form, anywhere in the world, throughout recorded history. So when Toho released Godzilla in 1954 to huge box office returns, it could only ever be a matter of time until the rest of Japan’s film industry was jumping into the monster movie game. […]
To begin with, Guardians of the Galaxy is the best film in the 10-film Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2008’s Iron Man started things off, or at least the most self-contained, and the one that feels the least like an airbrushed factory-made product. More unexpectedly, it’s also the best Star Wars film since 1980. And neither […]
The dominant aesthetic of commercial American filmmaking in the 1960s was that of unbridled size. Enormous action films with star-studded casts, like The Great Escape; sprawling ensemble comedies like The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; grandiose historical epics like Doctor Zhivago. And, of course, the musicals. There’s never been anything quite like a […]
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 most outlandish movie yet made by the Marvel film factory, Guardians of the Galaxy, at least wins points […]
It was released in 1986, and it features a bona-fide psycho serial killer for its titular character, but The Hitcher is not at all the film promised by those details. It could only have come out in the Age of the Slasher film (though by ’86, that age was clearly starting to get tottery and […]
When Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March, 1999, it was some twelve years since the release of his last film, Full Metal Jacket; but all was not lost. He’d been working for some time on a new movie, and just days before his passing, he had screened a cut of it to some executives and […]
There’s no such thing as a universal opinion, of course, and we wouldn’t want there to be. Even so, I don’t think anyone would seriously call my tastes or judgment into question if I propose that Cary Grant was absolutely the suavest motherfucker in the history of cinema. So it is with no little bit […]
To begin with, Lucy is dumb as all hell. It’s quite impossible to lose sight of that fact. It’s easily the dumbest movie of the summer of 2014, and there was a Transformers picture and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in the running for that title, so y’know, it’s not a little achievement. If Lucy is […]
