So as it turns out, the cultural hegemony angle on The Impossible is a bit of a non-starter. You know the one I’m talking about, if you’ve been paying much attention to the talk around the movie: the first major international film about the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which tells the story of how hundreds […]

“There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.” -Daniel C. Dennett The Day After Tomorrow is, in a certain light, one of the very oddest blockbuster movies of the 2000s. One of the immutable truths of blockbuster filmmaking is that most really expensive Hollywood tentpoles go as far […]

Being the first in a retrospective series celebrating the work of legendary Italian genre film director Sergio Leone The name of politician and author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is but poorly remembered now, though he was once one of the most popular English-language novelists in the world in his heyday, back in the first half of […]

On December 15, 1939, a film premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled Gone with the Wind, and a more extraordinary example of all the vast lushness that Hollywood can buy had never been seen and never will again. That is the genius of the notorious producer-showman David O. Selznick, a man who made no […]

When I last saw James Cameron’s massively successful, Oscar-dominating epic Titanic, it had been in theaters for just a few days, the hype was deafening, and I was a newly-minted 16-year-old boy, and thus I was duty-bound to hate it. Oh, and hate it I did – a hate that slowly drifted into sheer unadulterated […]

Here are the facts: Peter Schneider, the President of Feature Animation at Walt Disney Pictures since 1985, and therefore the man who oversaw and to some extent engineered the successful execution of the one-film-per-year plan, was promoted to being president of the whole film division of the Walt Disney Company in 1999. At that time, […]

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster epic 2012 is absolutely a bad film, and it would be a disservice for me to argue otherwise. At the same time, it’s so deliciously trashy in its badness that it’s actually a bit of fun if you go in ready to laugh; whether with the film or at it, I’d […]

Here’s a hypothetical for you: suppose that there is a director who is – fully justifying a much-abused noun – a “visionary”. Does that director have the ability to save a film from itself? Not, unfortunately, in the case of Alex Proyas’s Knowing, although in this particular case, there are some caveats. This isn’t simply […]

First, a small thought piece: why art? One of the main reasons that we have narrative – certainly not the only one, but a big one – is to create an environment where we as a society can confront our anxieties. You see this in the common idea that all art reflects the culture in […]

Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to dogpile on the summer’s first outright flop, Evan Almighty, any more than has already been done. I don’t know what I could add, anyway: every single review has already mentioned that the film sucks because Evan Baxter (Steve Carell) has been twisted from the smug asshole […]

A mini-commentary on remake mentality: If you spend enough time around people who don’t know all that much about the film industry, one of the complaints you hear a lot is the question, “why do they always have to remake movies? Don’t they have any new ideas?” To the second of these, I can only […]