Every Sunday 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: a whip-smart fractured fairy tale that did the ironic fantasy thing long before Shrek Forever After was even a […]
Every Sunday 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: not the first nor the last movie to beat Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood to the punch, but almost certainly […]
Like it or not, along comes another cinematic adaptation of the oft-told tale of Robin Hood: the weary middle-aged archer who returns from the doomed Third Crusade looking only to lie his way into anonymity with some gold he stole from the bier carrying the crown of dead king Richard I, but finds himself instead […]
There is one respect in which the 2010 edition of Clash of the Titans absolutely lords over its 1981 predecessor: no Bubo. Have you not seen the 1981 film? Then you have been spared the sight of master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen wasting his talents on a little mechanical owl that flies about helping the […]
Of all the signs and portents that we are drawing near to the end of human civilisation (floods! earthquakes! economic strife! global unrest!) none has scared me more than this: at last, DreamWorks Animation has made a great animated film; a Pixar-quality film, if I dare say it, despite fear of my blasphemy bringing down […]
The pair of surreal children’s fantasies written by Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have been adapted for cinema and television as often as any other work of English literature I can name outside of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Yet, despite a tradition of adaptation stretching back […]
On July 24, 1985, Walt Disney Productions released its 25th animated feature film, The Black Cauldron. The film grossed somewhat more than $21 million in its domestic theatrical release, on a production budget that has still never been officially announced, though it assuredly was much more than $21 million: as much as $45-$50 million according […]
The core concept, “aliens versus vikings” promises all kinds of extravagantly cheesy fun. Unfortunately, Outlander isn’t all that much fun, largely because it isn’t cheesy. It is, in fact, a motion picture in which the idea of a humanoid alien crash-landing on earth in Norway in 799 A.D. to fight the giant lizard-like beastie that […]
OH MY GOD, THE FACES. Or, I think this is as good a time as any to ask a question that clearly hasn’t been asked recently: just because we have all of these wonderful toys in modern filmmaking, that doesn’t mean we have to use all of them. Take for instance motion capture CGI. Is […]
I am not even a little bit interested in following the lead of the whole rest of the internets, and discussing how the film version of Frank Miller’s 300 does or does not endorse the cult of violent masculinity represented by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives. That would be giving the film entirely too […]
They tell me that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was specifically designed to be a wuxia film for a Western audience. Mission accomplished. Because while I’ve seen a fair number of films from that genre at this point, not one of them has come close to equalling CTHD in my esteem. Part of the problem, I […]
Back in the day, movies used to be bad. I mean, really fucking terrible. But these days (since the mid-90’s), everything has become so studio-hacked to death, with test audiences and market research and such, that just as the heights of the best films has dropped, so has the bottom of the worst films risen […]
