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: call me the most boring man alive, but I couldn’t think of a fitter way to greet the attempted franchise resurrection that is Predators than by hauling out the movie that created said franchise […]
The modern summer movie season started, by some reckonings, with 1989: the year in which Warner Bros. invented the tentpole movie as we now know it with Batman. The tentpole, for those unaware, is a movie, usually produced for a huge sum of money, upon which a studio banks all its hopes for a given season, leading said studio to begin a marketing blitz months in advance to make sure […]
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 hero and driving every viewer over the age of eight into a frenzy of boiling […]
There is a conceit whose origination I have never quite been able to track down: “Mythology is religion that nobody practices any more”. This little quote has quite a lot of utility, for besides being pithy, it provides an aid and comfort to we atheists and agnostics – give it another few centuries, and schoolchildren will read the foundational texts of Christianity and Islam with much the same literary eye […]
By the end of business today, Avatar will have passed Titanic to become the highest-grossing film in the history of the world. Sensible people like you and I can certainly be cynical about that milestone, and point out things like “inflation” and “3-D surcharges”, but you know who doesn’t care? 20th Century Fox. Anyway, to celebrate this massive orgasm of spending, I have prepared a list of films that, like […]
In the early 1990s, action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger found a project that he absolutely had to be a part of: a proposed remake of the 1991 French adventure-comedy La totale! in which a globe-trotting James Bondian super-spy fights terrorists while convincing his wife that he’s nothing but an everyday businessman. It was not like Schwarzenegger to seek a project out like this, but he saw great possibilities for himself in […]
Having completed his meteoric rise to become one of Hollywood’s biggest popcorn-movie filmmakers in just a handful of years, so that only three films into his career his fourth film could be breezily advertised as “from the director of The Terminator and Aliens“, James Cameron set his sights on his most ambitious project yet, an underwater science-fiction epic that allowed him to indulge his years-long fascination with deep-sea exploration while […]
James Cameron’s rise to the top was swift: it was only his third film, and the second that anyone ever gave a damn about, that saw him win the coveted credit, “A James Cameron Film”. Of course, being the director of something as outstanding as The Terminator would do that for a fella’s reputation. Mind you, this was all entirely deserved: because 1986’s Aliens was indeed “A James Cameron Film”, […]
I have two nice things to say, and I will lead with one of them: the visual effects in Surrogates are well done, no two ways about it. One visual effect in particular: for much of the first part of the movie, Bruce Willis – bald, craggy Bruce Willis, in his mid-50s – is covered with a glossy CG sheen that makes him look smooth and young and just about […]
It’s an annual tradition for somebody to declare that the just-completed summer movie season was the worst one in living memory, and this year it’s my turn: the fact that one three-month period gave birth to both Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra feels like the kind of sick joke that only a truly evil God could perpetrate. Anyway, it’s over now. And with […]
The #1 movie in America is about genetically engineered guinea pigs working as secret agents for the U.S. government. And in honor of G-Force, may I present: The Top Ten Movie Concepts So Preposterously Awful They Should Never Have Gotten Out of Development 10. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Jonathan Mostow, 2003)Terrible movie sequels that completely miss the point are nothing new, of course. But there’s something especially wrongheaded […]
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 […]
