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: there has not been one second since the title was announced that I have felt anything but dull rage […]
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: you’d have to have a pretty demented sense of the word “original” to claim that Australian arch-stylist Baz Luhrmann […]
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: Iron Man 3 is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but one of the things I […]
Jurassic Park is a beloved classic of popcorn cinema, still a cultural touchstone two decades on, and as keen a demonstration of Steven Spielberg’s peerless skills at directing clean, effective populist entertainment as anything you could ask for, so I imagine it will be able to survive just fine if a schmuck blogger like myself […]
It’s not exactly the case that Empire of the Sun is Steven Spielberg’s most “divisive” movie, in any useful sense of that word (that’s almost certainly A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It’s something a little bit weirder than that: a movie that nobody really pointedly dislikes, unless they’re already suspicious of the director’s tendency towards sentimental manipulation, […]
dundundundundundundundundun…“FLASH!” *lightning strike*“AH-AH!”“SAAAAAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE!”*Daaaa, daa da daa da!*dundundundundundundundundun… Of course Dino De Laurentiis made a Star Wars knock-off. If there’s a shock there, it’s that he made just one, 1980’s Flash Gordon, a big-budget version of the comic strip and movie serial from the 1930s that at one point, De Laurentiis had in […]
It is right, and a good and joyful thing, that producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Roger Vadim should have collaborated on a film. Their careers were too complementary for there to have been any possibility of them both bopping around Europe at the same time without colliding. Indeed, the fact that 1968’s Barbarella was […]
We are presently living through the second attempt by the Walt Disney Company to make a crypto-sequel to the hugely beloved 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, and it’s proving very much like their first: since the Oz books published by L. Frank Baum in the first two decades of the 20th Century have […]
The Sting is not a great movie because of its ending. Let’s just get that out of the way. It is, undoubtedly a fine ending. It is the exact perfect ending to that movie, in fact, and no movie about con men has ever done such a good job of baking a con against the […]
It doesn’t speak well of this series that I took off two months after only two entries, but going forward, there shouldn’t be any gaps for a while. Please enjoy my continued soul-bearing. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a 1948 vehicle for Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, enjoys a prominence in the private mythology […]
Duck Amuck and What’s Opera, Doc? are the freebies. There’s no point in calling one of those the best Warner Bros. cartoon ever made, because, well, duh. Declaring yourself a fan of American animation and then professing a love for Duck Amuck and What’s Opera, Doc? is like opening a conversation about your tastes in […]
There is a very real possibility that out of the several thousand movies I’ve watched in my life, most of them in the twelve years since I was a wee film school freshman, Baz Luhrmann’s candy-colored, hyperactive post-modern musical Moulin Rouge! has had more of an impact on me than anything else. Partially this is […]
