John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog‘ (1980) was, of course, one of seminal horror pictures of the 80′s. ‘The Fog’ was Carpenter’s third feature film to be followed by ‘Escape from New York’ in 1981 and his remake of ‘The Thing’ in 1982. Shot for $1 million 1980 dollars (300% the value of 2008 dollars) it would have made $63,000,000 if released today. [Read more →]
‘Shutter‘(2008) is touted as a product of ‘the Executive Producers of ‘The Ring’ and ‘The Grudge’, but is the American audience’s memory so brief as to forget that only one of these American remakes was any good?
‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. [Read more →]
aka ‘Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull’
Was this worth my $10?
Is it really necessary to summarize the plot of an Indiana Jones movie? Apparently it is, at least that’s the impression I walked away from ‘Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull’ with: the story turned in David Koepp (script), George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson (story) hits just enough notes to remind you that you’re at an Indiana Jones movie but it hits enough of them sour to make it impossible to miss the fact that this isn’t a movie for movie’s sake but a franchise reboot and a launching platform for the next generation.
Set more than 15 years after ‘Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade’, this film opens as all of these kind films do, in the middle of some adventure.
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First of all, credit is due to to the website where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘ (1981), the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog devoted to the exploration of the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the explosion of the home video market in 1979.
A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or a summer vacation in the US. [Read more →]
Did anyone see any advertising for the directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank last year? “Scott who?,” you say — and that’s where the problems begin…
The other sadness is that Mr. Frank, the award-winning writer of ‘Minority Report‘ (2002), ‘Out of Sight’ (1998) and ‘Dead Again’ (1991) got next to no promotional support for his debut feature. It was budgeted at $16M, took in $4M and slipped quietly beneath the waves 5 weeks later.
Problem is, Mr. Frank’s feature shared it’s opening weekend with last year’s Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature ‘Grindhouse’ (2007) and it was released by the post-Weinstein Miramax and Spyglass Entertainment. [Read more →]
With the recent Eliot Spitzer bust and talk of the NSA’s ‘Total Information Awareness’ program back in the wind, I was compelled to take another look at Steven Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report‘.
I’d seen the movie and written another review of the movie back in 2002 and wasn’t so impressed with it — I felt that Spielberg had taken the Philip K. Dick material and slicked it up just a bit too much. When Ridley Scott adapted ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep‘ (cf. Blade Runner’ (1982)) [Read more →]
Filmed back in 2004, but left on the shelf for 3 years, ‘Ripley Under Ground‘ a/k/a ‘White On White‘ has been released on DVD in Europe.
Barry Pepper plays Ripley as a rock-star – long hair, a close shave and charisma to burn – and the tone of the thing is far lighter than any of the previous incarnations – ‘Purple Noon‘ ,’The American Friend‘, ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley‘, ‘Ripley’s Game‘, etc.
Some early reviewers have referred to it as a ‘comedy’, but it’s not, really. Unfortunately, the lighter tone actually hurts the film a bit, because this outing paints Mr. Ripley as less of a predator and sociopath than any of the Ripley films that have preceeded it. [Read more →]
This film was an entirely happy surprise! ‘Man From Earth‘ came out as an extremely limited release at a few festivals and a sneak preview in San Francisco. It is a science fiction film by its premise, but unlike every science-fiction film of the past 70 years, there are no action sequences and no special effects.
For those that don’t know, Jerome Bixby’s claim to fame are the teleplays he wrote for the original Star Trek back in the ’60′s and a couple that he wrote for Rod Serling’s original iteration of The Twilight Zone and a little story he wrote called “It’s a Good Life”. [Read more →]
‘Children of Men‘ premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past September, with a subsequent roll-out in much of Western Europe. Children, as Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film (Y Tu Mama Tambien,2001; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004), has been billed as science-fiction, but it’s really not. Partially based on a cynical futurist novel by P.D. James, ‘The Children of Men’, is set in the 2nd quarter of the 21st c., after mankind has suddenly and unexpectedly become infertile. In the book, men all over the world have started shooting blanks, but in the movie, the blame is somehow shifted to women.
Clive Owen stars in this film, set in destabilized Britain, that’s been transformed into the Belfast of yore, due to the worldwide terrorist escalations — due to worldwide infertility, the U.K. has become one of the few States left in Europe and has sealed it’s borders much as they did during WWII. [Read more →]
O.k., it’s been on for 2 months and I was initially non-plussed when I saw a preview back at the end of August.
As ‘Unbreakable:The Series’, I was sure it would be cancelled before October, but it’s managed to hold on, and gain my attention, in part owing to my brother retuning from Europe and taking an immediate interest.
Personally, I’m not invested in the drug-addicted (cliché) artist, though his dealer is a hottie. And the A.D.A.-turned-politician (played by Adrian Pasdar) is as much a non-entity as is his brother, the lover of the art-dealing hottie. OTOH, what’s drawn me into the show are a number of tertiary characters — specifically Charlie, the Odessa TX waitress that Hiro time-travels 6 months into the past to try to save from Sylar the Hero killer. And Claire the cheerleader daughter of the would-be bad guy with the horn-rimmed glasses calling the shots for all of the mind-controlling hero-types. [Read more →]
