My girlfriend is a big George Romero fan, so of course we went to see his new low-budget zombie film this weekend. At first I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. Apart from a fantastic scene involving a news team on the scene when some of the first zombies appear, the first 15 [...]
It’s funny. You grow up pre-internet in the suburbs and in small towns where a trip to the library or the mall is your only chance to make contact with a larger culture. You go to college in a modest city with not one but three or four art museums, a couple of arthouse theaters, [...]
Maybe I’m just feeling better, but just to prove I’m not a film snob: Blood and Iron is MUCH better than Sword of Storms. The script’s both funnier and eerier, the compositions are far more interesting, the fights are less tedious, and the whole thing feels a lot more like a Hellboy comic than the [...]
I have the flu. Yesterday was the worst; I felt so messed up that I couldn’t enjoy anything — reading, playing video games, watching movies, nothing helped. I just wanted to sleep, but even that didn’t help much because my mind kept going. It was just talking nonsense and wouldn’t shut up. Today I realized [...]
My expectations for this film, formed the moment I saw the trailer, were handily met: it’s a top-notch soundtrack with a sumptuous music video. It kicks off with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It,” and follows up with Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” before using the Cure’s “Plainsong” more effectively and majestically than [...]
I never saw Ang Lee’s Hulk when it came out, but I caught about an hour of it on TV while I was in the gym the other day. It looked pretty much like I expected: angsty, heavy, tedious, and fake. “Angsty” and “heavy” I can understand. If you really stop and think about the [...]
I enjoyed Tim Burton’s version of Sweeney Todd a lot. The music was a lot more appealing this time around, maybe because I was familiar with it this time, and maybe because it wasn’t so aggressively oversung in places, just allowed to flow like the language it stood in for. It helped, too, that the [...]
No, not the new Tim Burton movie. We just watched the Emmy-award-winning film of the stage musical, the one with Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett. Like many people, I’m not a huge musical fan. I’ve been in five of them and had great times, but watching them really tries my patience these days unless it’s [...]
My girlfriend got me into zombie movies. The appeal, at least for me, is complex and multidimensional. On the one hand, there’s a thrilling sense of doom: the world has, if only temporarily, come to an end. There’s almost no one left and survival depends on being able and prepared to kill things that aren’t [...]
I went into The Golden Compass with lowered expectations, having heard in advance that it showed all the usual flaws of novel adaptations: Frenzied leaping from place to place and plot point to plot point, since contemporary novels are almost invariably too long to squeeze comfortably into a 2-hour film. Undue emphasis on the gee-whiz [...]