The question of authorship of 1982’s Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe […]
I wonder if 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is without precedent in how massive a shift it makes in tone from anything that precedes it? The closest thing I can come up with is Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, which brought a considerable degree of sharp-edged grimness to a property that most people still associated […]
The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. Masterpieces can be found – masterpieces can be found in any era, of course – but the […]
Once upon a time, like, four days ago, I brightly and innocently declared that I knew what I was getting into with Gamera: Super Monster. I was incorrect. Based on the only things I knew about it, it seemed easy enough to figure out why people hated it: the 1980 one-off resuscitation of the franchise […]
The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol’ popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and ’77, and made all the studios go “Whoa! We don’t want to keep making little movies about the lives of […]
It’s not the fault of Love Is Strange that at no point while I was watching it, was I able to banish 1937’s Make Way for Tomorrow from my mind. And it’s even less the film’s fault that it can’t compete with Make Way for Tomorrow: if we were to throw out every film that […]
Well, we got there: 2014 was able to produce a sci-fi/thriller YA adaptation that’s uglier than Divergent from back in March. Which isn’t something I’d have necessarily predicted as a possibility, let alone a likelihood, and it doesn’t strike me as being a sensible place to sink all that much time and energy. But the […]
Gamera vs. Zigra didn’t single-handedly drive Daiei Film to bankruptcy; but as one of the last handful of movies that company released before it did temporarily wink out of existence in December, 1971, it’s a rather clear example of what was going on at the studio that forced such a drastic step. It’s a dreadful […]
Star Wars made an enormous shit-ton of money in 1977. We’ve clarified that already, but it’s worth bringing it up over and over again, because it was the definitive truth in American filmmaking in the latter half of the 1970s, basically until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial finally proved that a movie could make an even more […]
Grease is a movie with a very specific, idiosyncratic, and telling pedigree: it was the highest-grossing film of the year immediately following Star Wars. And in that year, it spent 15 non-consecutive weekends as the #1 film at the U.S. domestic box office. Which was, for what it’s worth, five weekends more than Star Wars […]
If I were going to give the full benefit of the doubt to Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt? – and I shall give it that benefit, for am I not a generous man? – I would immediately suggest that, compared to the two prior Atlas Shruggeds of 2011 and 2012, this one comes […]
To begin with, it would take very little effort to best Gamera vs. Guiron, and certainly, Gamera vs. Jiger goes at least that far. No farther: it does not bring us back to the halcyon days of “so bad it’s good” Gamera films. It’s just so bad. But not bad in such a claustrophobically pointless […]
