Sydney Pollack: Three Days of the Condor

Note #1: Throughout this retrospective I’ve referenced this interview with Pollack. I couldn’t find a place to reference it in this piece, so I figured I would put it up at the beginning.  Note #2: Many, many thanks to Odie, whose fresh look at this piece helped trim a lot of the fat. This was one of the first pieces I actually started working on when I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack, and I was dreading the due date because I knew I was nowhere close to finishing it since I found...

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Summer of Slash: Evilspeak

Like The Bogeyman and Superstition, Evilspeak was another example of the popular tendency around the early ‘80s to mix slasher elements with supernatural horror – thanks in part to the financial success of films like The Exorcist and Carrie as well as the advent of the commercially successful slasher template created by Halloween and taken to new heights by Friday the 13th. This was an interesting time to be a horror fan because you would get odd little hybrid movies like Evilspeak; yeah,...

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Summer of Slash: Communion (AKA Alice, Sweet Alice)

More like a Hitchcock film or the British exploitation film Frightmare, Communion is nothing like what I’m sure those coming to the film late – with the idea in their head about what a slasher movie is supposed to be – think it is. In fact, the best way to describe Alfred Sole’s horror film (which is very good, by the way) is that it’s probably the closest thing America ever got to an honest-to-goodness giallo. The reason it feels more like giallo – which were essentially Italian slasher...

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Sydney Pollack: The Yakuza

Before I get started with The Yakuza, I should point out that two things have been very clear in the three films – They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Way We Were – I’ve covered in this retrospective so far: one is that more than anything else, Sydney Pollack is a director that makes no bones about the fact that he is more interested in the performance of the actor than the art of the director; the second thing is that no matter what kind of story he is telling – be...

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Summer of Slash: Further Thoughts on Friday the 13th Series

I'm taking the week off from Summer of Slash after too much Jason Voorhees. So, in lieu of my own horror content on the blog this week, I will gladly point you towards the gracious Michael Grover of the blog Filmiliarity who has taken it upon himself to finish the Friday the 13th series with more in-depth reviews. His first entry, A New Beginning, is up and can be found here. Enjoy. The Slash will continue next week....

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th Wrap-up

Frequent commenter Michael Grover has graciously offered to write up more in-depth reviews at his blog Filmiliarity, so click on that link and check for updates on his blog if you’re interested in more than the pithy way I blitzed through these final six entries in the series. In my last edition of this series on the Friday films, I mentioned that after The Final Chapter was released in 1984 the series took on a different gimmick with each subsequent film. The series would never be...

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Sydney Pollack: The Way We Were

The Way We Were is everything its title song suggests: capital “d” dramatic and capital “r” romantic. In other words, it’s not subtle at all. It’s not even close to my favorite of Pollack’s films (Pollack himself didn’t seem to care all that much for the film, stating that his biggest accomplishment was merely, “getting the thing made”), but there’s something classically deliberate and endearing about the tone of the first half of the film: an hour that knows exactly the kind of film it is and...

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

1984 was probably the year most agree that the slasher died. It had an amazingly productive and successful (financially more than artistically) run for studios as they pumped out slasher after slasher with little to no budget. Despite these miniscule budgets, the films still made a good amount of money for the studios. As we’ve talked about already, Friday the 13th was the first film to really kick of the idea of the must-have sequel, and what followed was a torrent of films that adhered...

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 3

By 1983, “the template” – that which the original Friday the 13th helped create and, more importantly, make profitable – had pretty much been sucked dry. We knew the score: psycho killer seeks revenge, group of sex-hungry teens meets somewhere remote for the weekend, and psycho killer finds group of sex-hungry teens and quickly dispatches of them in ways that in 1983 were beginning to feel rather ordinary. And that’s the thing with the third entry in the Friday series: it (being the producers)...

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Sydney Pollack: Jeremiah Johnson

“I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist.” That quote is from Sydney Pollack, referenced in Roger Ebert’s obituary for the director, and it’s an apt description of the director's style that he would more or less stick to throughout his career. We’re a ways from the end-point in this retrospective, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself; however, I couldn’t help but think of that quote as I watched Jeremiah Johnson, a film that so badly wants to be an epic...

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 2

A few things right out of the gate: Friday the 13th, Part 2 is not only better than any other films in the series – including the much beloved but horribly dull original – but it’s one of the best slashers to come during the subgenre's peak period (1981-1984); the reason for that is because Steve Miner is a better director than Sean Cunningham, the villain is a lot more effective (duh, we’re introduced to Jason), and the film contains one of the very best Final Girl sequence I’ve seen in...

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Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th (1980)

Since we have a Friday the 13th coming up next week, I thought I would, gulp, look at the series for the Summer of Slash series. Here we go... I don’t really want to be that guy, so let me just get this out of the way: Friday the 13th took everything from other, better, movies. Setting, kills, style, everything. It’s only as famous as it is because it was the first American film to make a shit-ton of money using such a low-budget, exploitation-y premise; it’s not famous because it’s a good...

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