Friday, September 1, 2023
Suspiria / **** (1977)
Labels:
****,
1977,
DARIO ARGENTO,
ESSENTIAL CINEMA,
FAIRY TALE,
GHOST STORY,
GIALLO,
HORROR,
ITALY,
REVIEWS,
SIGNATURE SERIES
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
An American Werewolf in London / ***1/2 (1981)
Labels:
***1/2,
1981,
ESSENTIAL CINEMA,
HORROR,
MONSTER MOVIES,
REVIEWS,
SCIENCE FICTION,
SIGNATURE SERIES
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Lessons from Criterion:
"Night of the Living Dead" by George A. Romero
Saturday, August 19, 2023
Talk to Me / *** (2023)
Monday, August 14, 2023
Halloween / ***1/2 (1978)
Saturday, August 5, 2023
X / ***1/2 (2022)
Friday, August 4, 2023
THE TALKATIVE KID, THE THOUGHTFUL ADULT – 25 Years as an Online Film Writer
25 years ago today, a young inexperienced journalist with a passion for gabbing about film took to the Internet on a journey to add his voice to the growing throng of web-based personalities, and yet another new amateur movie blogger was born. Eventually branding himself a “Cinemaphile” – that is, someone who prefers the experience of watching films in theaters instead of at home – he became tirelessly motivated by the panache of more experienced critics while he was formulating his own distinct voice, one that sought to add a little flair and wit to the mix while mirroring the values of an eccentric juvenile. Sometimes that aroused anger in readers, other times surprise and dismay. But it was all part of being in a fun and exciting new frontier, back when cyberspace was mostly in the grasp of computer nerds and the clap-backs came from genuine, hardcore film buffs. They didn’t just argue or dismiss a review, either. Some of them added enlightening contexts that were previously lacking, or at least had the patience to educate their target instead of just cutting him or her down to size. Those exchanges reflected the unspoken importance of criticism in a time when the validity of it was coming into doubt, just as the online world was allowing an entire generation of spectators to plug in and add their voice to a crowd of millions.
Saturday, July 29, 2023
When a Stranger Calls / *** (1979)
Friday, July 21, 2023
Death Proof / *** (2007)
Saturday, July 15, 2023
The Outwaters / * (2022)
Somewhere in the vacant expanse that is the Mojave desert, four friends with unfledged verbal skills will partake in a sad, confusing ambush in the dark that culminates with lots of screaming and blood splatters, all to be barely spied by a camera lens that is always shooting at unflattering angles while a small flashlight ray attempts to zero in on thoroughly uninteresting findings. That is the central engine behind “The Outwaters,” yet another found footage yarn that comes to us with an even loftier promise: all that is about to happen will defy the very basic notions of this subgenre’s primary formula. Defy it does, but to what end? To confuse and sadden the audience? To get them thinking beyond ordinary horror movie trappings? I would have only welcomed that change. Alas, director Robbie Banfitch, obviously new to the fold of this form of storytelling, finds nothing in the dark other than our collective anger at having been left adrift in a confusing and listless story that ends with few certainties and even fewer solutions. There is nothing to think about on screen, no image to anchor curiosity or theme to create a sense of investment. All that might have been eased by the existence of characters who knew how to discuss their plight, but the movie only gives us simpletons who don’t seem to remember basic emotional cues, much less create a running dialogue about what may be lurking in the shadows of the desert.
Sunday, February 12, 2023
Into the Storm / ** (2014)
Movies like “Into the Storm” are an endurance test – not merely for the attention span of the audience, but for the patience of minds like mine that are exhausted by repeated visits to the tired and storm-battered corners of middle America. They seem to be manufactured rather than made, assembled out of parts of any number of pictures that highlight the framework, then spliced together by hands that have been convinced they can still pass as solid entertainment in a culture that has ready access to their older (and often better) predecessors. Only occasionally will they be dressed up in the skin of something novel, although there always remains the question of purpose: if the source was good enough to redo in the first place, what are the odds of doing it better a second time? For a good way through this latest excursion in volatile tornado alley, I was at least cautious in my disdain: perhaps under new direction, through the “found footage” camera lens that is a go-to for just about all things, something more interesting could be done with the concept of ambitious disaster pictures. But fate, alas, is not on anyone’s side here – least of all those watching it all happen. When a character holding a camera up to his face announces “this is the biggest tornado I’ve ever seen” while foolishly standing just a few yards from its swirling vortex, I had not fear or concern for him: only the hope that he would get sucked up and the movie would be over.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Mandy / * (2018)
In theory, a movie like “Mandy” would be right up the same alley of brazen gorefests that have been known to captivate my morbid sense of voyeurism. Ripped from the familiar cloth as any number of audacious horror stories set in the lurid world of pulp fiction, the picture makes a bold promise from its very first frame: all that is about to happen will be unlike anything we have witnessed on screen – or, at the bare minimum, fresh enough to draw comparisons to Dario Argento and Mario Bava, the architects of the decadent excess we associate with Giallo. Indeed, countless critics and colleagues have hailed the picture as a triumph of its medium, a surrealistic experience where the framework of the familiar revenge formula is twisted into a fever dream of contemplative symbolism and thematic excess. And who wouldn’t want that, especially nowadays as the genre appears caught somewhere between the extremes of vague nuance and gratuitous overkill?
Sunday, January 22, 2023
Terrifier / * (2017)
Marginal movie villains are in copious supply in the films of today, but plausible, convincing ones have become an increasingly rare breed: they now seem to persist more in theory than in practice, where they can be liberated from old formulas and allowed to wreak their sense of chaos in the untamed wilds of a perverse imagination. Once in a great while, one will even find its way in front of a film camera that earns the right to manifest them; if a skilled director or writer has the capacity to evolve their sense of animosity beyond the shackles of the ordinary narrative, we get captivating antagonists like Pennywise, Anton Chigurh and Agent Smith at the center of the chaos. For a brief time during the early minutes of “Terrifier,” we can sense the spark of the latter. Imagine the scene: a mute clown in white and black makeup with bleeding gums and inhuman teeth appears out of the shadows of Halloween night, follows two 20-something women into a late-night pizza parlor and ominously taunts them. Not a word or sound escapes his mouth, although his mannerisms reflect an unhinged insanity brewing beneath the exterior. Later, long after the clown has been tossed out of the establishment for vandalizing the restroom, the girls return to their car and discover their tire has been slashed, setting a chain reaction of events into motion that will end with immeasurable death and blood splattered all over the pavement of a run-down warehouse in the city.
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Jurassic World: Dominion / ** (2022)
In many ways, you have to grin gleefully at the great audacity of Colin Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World: Dominion,” a movie that feels less like a fatalist dinosaur picture and more akin to chase capers like James Bond or Indiana Jones. Not content to center the action on any sort of enclosed setting, his premise sets us up for all the big obligatory tropes of modern blockbusters: lots of locales, intersecting casts, intrigue, big secrets beneath all the hurried dialogue, tugs of old nostalgia, uncertain villains, climactic twists overloaded on coincidence, seemingly unrelated narrative angles that can be shoe-horned into the broader arc, and wide-scale action sequences that bookend every detail. Oh, and then there’s the dinosaurs. Some are old, others – many others – are new. You almost expect that of a series that has become saturated in wall-to-wall ambushes with the prehistoric monsters, but rarely have they been so numerous, or indeed so accessible. Yet our eyes can barely keep them straight as their prospective prey shuffle between locations ranging from Malta, the Heartland of the Americas and even to the snowy peaks of a forest reserve in northern Italy. That might have been forgivable in a story more focused on a single purpose. Such a story was probably lost in very early drafts of this convoluted screenplay.
Sunday, September 26, 2021
Taxi Driver / **** (1976)
Like the most notable of cynical movie narrators, Travis Bickle arrives in “Taxi Driver” less an observer and more a force of nature nearing the breaking point of his stability. What separates him from a breed of other loners eager to critique the system is how far he is willing to go in dismantling it. This is not a man who gazes directly at the cultural construct of 1970s New York with pragmatism, and when he becomes driven to shake up its foundation, each choice plays like a step further away from a tangible moral center. In many instances that can be amusing to watch, at least when the results are uncomfortable rather than dangerous. Consider his interaction with women: early on he attempts to earn the interest of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a political volunteer for an aspiring presidential candidate. At first she is just as amused by his blunt worldview as we are, until their first date ends up in a seedy theater showing porno. Now contrast that to how he approaches Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute whose eyes seem to plead for him to save her – admirable, perhaps, if you were to just passively observe the behavior. But while his is a pattern that is the staple of many movie characters whose madness walks in the guise of noble intentions, rarely are they this frontal, or so pointed in arriving at the core of the crumbling psyche.