The biggest surprise by far to be found in Robert Zemeckis’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is that it isn’t absolutely dreadful. Perfectly pointless, maybe, but not dreadful. At this point, there have been so many film adaptations of the 1843 novella that it’s nearly impossible to imagine what conceivable purpose another one could serve other than to provide this studio or that with some easy money […]

Ordinarily, I’d say we should all be mortally offended by The Day the Earth Stood Still, director Scott Derrickson’s remake of Robert Wise’s 1951 masterpiece, one of the very finest of all 1950s American films. We’re not supposed to stand for shit like that, or something along those lines. But after wave upon wave of needless remakes spilling over each other before fading into quick obscurity or occasionally – sadly […]

Back we go to 1989! That magical year, when each of the four major slasher franchises released the entry that basically killed the series (okay, so Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III came out in early 1990: it was targeted for 1989, before censorship issues bogged down its premiere). The most notorious example is of course the lavishly-budged failure Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, a film so […]

Today, the occupation-war in Iraq is five years old. During this war, there have been 3990 US military fatalities, 308 military fatalities among the other coalition armies, and a yet-uncalculated number of Iraqi civilian causalities: as few as 80,000, as many as 10 times that. These figures have all been taken from the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count and Iraq Body Count. For perspective, here is a list of the US […]

In the mid-1950’s, Orson Welles – once the Brightest Young Thing in Hollywood – found himself begging for scraps among the film producers of Europe. This is all well-known, and not worth repeating. What matters is that there came a time when Welles began shopping around an idea for a story about a shadowy man of mystery, a plot gathered together from some dead-ends explored on Welles’ weekly radio show […]