Almost time to put another year to bed. But not just any year: Alternate Ending will be celebrating its first birthday just a couple weeks into January, so we might as well call this our first full year. Thanks to all of you who followed over from Antagony & Ecstasy that was, or who were listening to Rob and Carrie before they brought on this Tim fella, and thanks as […]
I don’t know when the statute of limitations for spoilers runs out on a movie that makes crazy-ass wackyland fantasy amount of money in its first weekend, but I do know that the internet is full of geeks, and there are are almost surely literally hundreds of reviews of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that say the exact same spoiler-free version of the thing I would say if I had […]
Ordinarily, December is the month for stock-taking with all of the prestige pictures. This year it is, well, not. We might the month that movie, and then a couple dozen things that aren’t that movie. Of course we care about some of them, and we do not care about some others, and everybody will have their own take on which is which – but everybody is thinking about that movie, […]
The “disappointment”, if that’s fair to say, of Looper is that unlike the last collaboration between writer/director Rian Johnson and actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick, it doesn’t do anything to seriously up-end or redefine its genre. What it must settle for, then, is to be an extremely good exemplar of its genre, at which point the word “disappointment” really must be left far behind, because we’re not trying to be assholes […]
We’ve got one more release date in August left, I know, but just for a junky horror movie, so let’s hit fast-forward and take a peek at the year’s wobbly transitional month, when the crap genre films that wouldn’t fit in summer meet and mingle with the crap prestige films that aren’t actually good enough for the real fast and furious part of Awards Season. Okay, that’s not fair, and […]
The right thing is to first begin with the horrible admission, and it is that I was 29 years and 9 months and 7 days old the very first time that I saw John Hughes’s iconic teensploitation picture The Breakfast Club, which happens to have been the day before writing this review. I bring this up because being a breath away from the start of one’s fourth decade on this […]
Some films are just really “naggy” – you see them, and you think you pretty much get what they’re about right off, but then the more you think about them afterwards the more they nag at you, revealing facets you hadn’t even considered at first, like a perfectly formed little gemstone. Kirt Gunn’s directorial debut Lovely by Surprise is very much exactly that kind of movie: you think it’s one […]
Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2005 debut feature Brick was a marvelous genre experiment, inserting the language, plot and mentality of hard-boiled detective fiction almost unchanged into a high school setting. The film was a wholly successful mash-up, with both sides of the equation seeming all the fresher for the wild new context, and the film, it’s hardly controversial to say, is one of the best neo-noirs and high school stories of […]
May, and the official start of Blockbuster Movie Season, is still a week away, but I hope you’ll forgive me for jumping the gun a bit. Incidentally, there are fewer summer movies this year that I’m even vaguely interested than in any other year of my adult life. A sign of worse films, or my growing cynicism? Read on! 5.1.2009The earliest tentpole release ever (it appears that next year will […]
And thus ends the most boring Oscar season in recent memory, along with – if I may be so bold – one of the worst years for movies of the current decade. I shan’t belabor things. 5.12.2008And speaking of boring Oscarbait: Ron Howard’s version of the genuinely good play Frost/Nixon! (Only in its Oscar-qualifying New York and LA run, but still…) I suppose I shouldn’t really hate Howard all that […]
(Delayed – and delayed – and delayed – to wait for the Chicago release of a film that turned out to be rather important to my final list. I’m nothing if not thorough). What a dull year 2006 was! Compared to last year, there were a few more pretty okay films, and infinitely fewer masterpieces. And this year wasn’t good enough to lick 2004’s shoes clean. But wotcher gonna do…stop […]
Whether or not he or she admits to it, deep inside every film buff is the desire to watch a certain number of films in a given year. Perhaps most people don’t do what I do, and set that number as their New Year’s resolution, but most people are not so wankeriffic as I am. Yesterday, I reached a total of 183 distinct films watched in 2006, which is to […]
