The question I would ask, for a start, is whether Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is chiefly a Harry Potter movie, or chiefly an Alfonso Cuarón movie. This is, of course, dumb as fuck: there are people who have seen and worshiped and idolised Prisoner of Azkaban who probably haven’t even heard the titles of the director’s other six features, and would possibly drop dead of mortification if […]
So, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has opened now, and concluded an eight-film, ten-year, decade-defining franchise, and it does so in exactly the way you would expect it to do if you read the book, saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and/or any of the six books and films preceding them. And it’s pretty gosh-darn likely that, if you are planning on seeing Deathly […]
The decision to cut the seventh and final Harry Potter novel into two parts for its film adaptation was a damn bad choice, made for obvious financial reasons despite the filmmaker’s urgent, repetitive insistence that it was because of that book’s “density”. A transparently stupid claim: the book was already sick with padding, relative to the three books that preceded it, and every one of those was turned into a […]
There’s a common observation that the Alien franchise is something of a director’s showcase: take one lead character, one basic concept, one highly memorable monster design, and give it to someone with some very specific ideas for story and visuals, and you end up with four extraordinarily different movies that don’t even necessarily belong to the same genre. I am coming around to a similar idea for the Harry Potter […]
It’s an odd thing about the Harry Potter franchise: given that the films are based upon a series of books noted for their formulaic structure, and given that they are massively expensive blockbusters, one would suppose, if one knew nothing about them, that each entry would be more or less indistinguishable from the others except in incidentals. And yet, after the tedious first two, guided by the steady hand of […]
For all of their charms, none of the films based on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series have really worked. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone suffered for trying to blaze through too much plot in too little time, and was severely hamstrung by the Prince of Hacks and third-tier Spielberg wannabee Chris Columbus, who managed to direct without ever once communicating a sense of wonder or delight at this magical […]
To all those who assured me that my fears were groundless, and that I would surely enjoy the Harry Potter books, I have one word of thanks: what fucking crack were you smoking when you read them, and can I borrow some? No, too harsh, let me try again On Sunday night, I became the last person in the anglophone world to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and […]
If you have set yourself the task of making a movie prequel to probably Roald Dahl’s best-known children’s book, 1964’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and what you are actually doing is making a prequel to the 1971 film based on that book, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but six of one, half-dozen of the other) – I am not countenancing your decision to do so, but let’s say […]
Happy Monday! This episode, Carrie and Tim catch up on their wild Halloween weekends and distain towards the current youth, big cities and. Tim shares his reviews of Five Nights at Freddy’s and the newly released The Exorcist: Believer. Carrie shares her thoughts on two theatrical experiences she had with her family over the weekend – Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Sweeney Todd! Tune in! ***************************************************************** Love the […]
My hope for The Pope’s Exorcist before I watched it was that Russell Crowe’s instantly-legendary spicy meat-a-ball of an “Italian” accent would remain amusing throughout the film’s 103-minute length. This was akin to hoping, upon starting a trip to Yosemite, that you’d see some large trees: you’d get what you wanted even more than you expected to and also you weren’t asking for nearly enough. This is a singular treasure […]
Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This time, we’re back to titles with colons for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, nominee for seven Razzies, winner of three including Worst Picture, and proof positive that some careers are simply impervious to destruction. The most […]
For those who don’t follow Indian cinema, Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva is kind of a big deal. It’s a film that has been in production for over five years (in the process becoming the most expensive Hindi language film ever produced), part of a promised fantasy-action trilogy that is intended to expand even further into an entire Astraverse. They even whipped up an Astraverse production logo to slap on the […]
