Link time! Death to Super-Serious Superheros!

Here's a good blog write up on the death of the superhero movie by Ali Arikan over at Cerebral Mastication, a great film blog. Check it out. As someone who knows little to nothing about comic books, I enjoyed it thoroughly. My two cents about the death of the genre after the jump...I agree about the "seriousness" of comic book movies these days kind of tarnishing the genre. Of course, I was a fan of the The Dark Knight, but not for the same reasons that the emo thirteen year-olds were. I would...

Read More

2 comments

Halloween Week 2008: Stage Fright

My final Halloween pick comes in the form of one of the best Italian horror films I've ever seen. Michele Soavi combined the best elements of the American slasher film with the Italian giallo; creating a unique, eerie film called Stage Fright, or Deliria as it was known in Italy. It was called Aquarius....and Bloody Bird. Alternate titles aside, this one of the most original hack and slash type films that is heavy on atmosphere, low on acting, and through the roof on innovative deaths. Oh, and there...

Read More

0 comments

Halloween Week 2008: The Fly

Be Afraid.Be Very Afraid.This famous tag line for David Cronenberg's remake of the 1950 horror camp classic The Fly is one of the all time great tag lines. What's so great about it is that it leads the viewer to believe that something horrifying and quite scary is waiting for them when they sit down to watch the film; there is horror in this film, just not in the conventional sense. This is not your typical horror or sci-fi scare fest, in fact there are not even that many scary moments in the film....

Read More

0 comments

Halloween Week 2008: The Burning/Hatchet

Already behind a day....so in an attempt to cram as many recommendations as I can I will have two posts with four suggestions today. The final review coming tomorrow, Halloween morning. Enjoy.The Burning is nothing special. How's that for a reason to rent it? Okay, it does have one thing going for it: gore. Here is a typical American slasher film, with typical results, and yes, despite the infamous "raft scene", it has typical gore. I only say that because other 80's slasher films were just as gory,...

Read More

0 comments

Halloween Week 2008: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3

When Wes Craven was lured back to write this third installment in the Nightmare franchise, he was reluctant to do so since he never intended for his original film to spawn a string of (mediocre) sequels. He agreed to write the script as long as he could approach a taboo topic that intrigued him: suicide. Much like the original Nightmare Craven got his idea for the third film through reading articles about teenagers being so scared in their sleep that they would commit suicide in a state where...

Read More

1 comment

Halloween Week 2008: I Walked With a Zombie

While watching Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie I couldn't help but think of a different a film, a completely different film in both genre and context. The film that kept popping up in my head was the Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful. The film stars Kurt Douglas as a ruthless producer in the vein of David O. Selznick; however there is one scene where Douglas' character reminds me more of producer Val Lewton, producer of I Walked With a Zombie. The scene I am speaking of...

Read More

1 comment

Halloween Week 2008 is upon us...

That's right...I will attempt to do a write-up every day about some random horror film that I deem worthy of your time. My aim is to showcase some unconventional choices, as well as some horror movies that just don't get the proper notoriety. Please feel free to add your own recommendations and reviews of horror films in the comments section and I will be sure to link to them. For now I leave you with the haunting images from the famous ending to a famous movie that I just watched for the first time this morning...Click here to view video...

Read More

0 comments

Die Hard 4: Die Hardererer

So I just watched Live Free or Die Hard and I have to say I was pretty impressed. I had my reservations about it being PG-13 and how old Bruce Willis looks, but he pulled it off well; after all it was the role that made him into a star, so it's not like the performance was going to be awful. Timothy Olyphant as the smarmy computer hacker villain was awesome. Seriously though he is two decades too late; had he been around in the 80's he could have made a whole career playing the too-smart foil...

Read More

2 comments

The Art of the Character Actor

So I'm watching Broken Arrow on one of many great HD channels that Dish Network provides (hey, it's my last week of vacation still...cut me some slack) and I was glad to see two of my favorite character actors sharing some dialogue with each other. Who might those actors be? No, it's not Howie Long and Delroy Lindo. It's Kurtwood Smith and Daniel von Bargen. Now you may be asking yourselves who these people are. You probably know both of them from their television work -- Smith as the dad on...

Read More

1 comment

"There is no film. There is nothing, nowhere."

This is part of the Movies About Movies Blog-a-thon hosted by goatdogblog. You can read the rest of the entries here. There's some really good stuff there, check it out.The words in the header are uttered by Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), the director of a movie in a movie by Federico Fellini, and they set the audience up for the films main theme: that through the darkness and uncertainty of not knowing what's to come, we can look to our memories and it is this nostalgia that can lift us up and...

Read More

0 comments

Pineapple Express

David Gordon Green is one of the best filmmakers working today who some have even compared to the visual poet and master Terrence Malick. Would you have ever guessed that him and his friends that met at North Carolina Film School (his DP Tim Orr and the actor Danny McBride) wold collaborate with the Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen on a pot comedy? Yeah, it's a little surreal, but when I saw the red-band trailer for this movie months ago, I knew that these two camps couldn't miss if they were to collaborate....

Read More

1 comment

In Bruges

Man I love being surprised by movies.  Sometimes a movie just looks terrible, but then enough people start discussing how good the film is, and well, it's only a matter of time before you break down and watch the movie.  This is the case with In Bruges, a film that was marketed horribly with its awful trailers making the film look like just another Pulp Fiction wannabe (is that even possible 10+ years later?) -- Things to in Denver When You're Dead and 2 Days in the Valley sprang to mind...

Read More

3 comments

Kevin's Favorite 25 Movies, #1: 8 1/2

click here to watch video1) 8 1/21963dir. by Federico FelliniimdbIn the interest of keeping this somewhat short and not overly analytical, I am going to use the bullet format to showcase some of the famous imagery and moments that make this my favorite film of all time: the masterful, beautiful, poignant, elegiac, sexy, and highly influential and innovative 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini. Fellini said that when he made 8 1/2 he wanted to create a film that showed the three levels upon which our minds...

Read More

0 comments

Kevin's Favorite 25 Movies, #2: Pulp Fiction

Click here to watch video2) Pulp Fiction1994dir. by Quentin TarantinoimdbYeah I know. Pulp Fiction. Obvious, huh? I mean what 26 year-old film buff doesn't love this movie? But I don't really care if this is a somewhat predictable choice. Quentin Tarantino's masterful interpolated tale of seedy gangsters, their wives, sadomasochists, boxers, and inane drug dealers is still one of the freshest films I have ever seen. The film has been somewhat watered down due to all of the parodies and aped...

Read More

0 comments