Category: movies/tv

(Fun and Gore, really)

Horror movies, for all their excess and transgression, are every bit as rulebound as the romantic comedy. Maybe even moreso. This Night of the Demons remake is no exception. There’s the big rules that have to be followed, like punishing the stupid: those who think having a Halloween party at the local scary house is a good idea. And there’s the smaller dynamics, like making sure the character peddling drugs doesn’t get out without paying, in blood.

There…

review up here.

and, that big, hammer-axe zombie: coolest ever. want to know its whole story. want a movie about it, really.…

I remember, I remember

I remember

The night Grindhouse opened, I somehow lucked into sitting there at the Alamo Drafthouse, where the cups were special that night, matched the movie somehow, and the trailers, man: Hobo With a Shotgun, Thanksgiving, and Machete. Danny Trejo not just in a bad-ass role, but inhabiting that character. Explosions and blood all over the place. Robert Rodruguez taking El Mariachi and giving him a blade, not a pistol.

And now that trailer that could…

In a movie, no matter the genre, you will always become that which you were just pretending to be. So, this charlatan exorcist in The Last Exorcism, exposing exorcisms as fraudulent for a documentary crew, what do you think? In a horror movie, will he finally have to become a real exorcist, or might he get a pass, just get to grin his way out of the shot and go back to his happy life?

But I don’t want to spoil anything for you, either.

Most of the other reviews I checked out, they all said t…

Most directors can do one thing just really, really well. David Lynch, say, he can follow a telephone cord up and up such that you get all caught up in the languorous spiral, and that becomes not just the whole room, but the whole story. Wes Craven, he can rig a chase through a tight hallway so that, before it’s over, you’re looking over your own shoulder. Christopher Nolan’s gift—and, though it’s there in all his work, I hadn’t realized it until Inception—it’s ticking clocks. It’…

M. Night Shyamalan had his work cut out with The Last Airbender. Not only did he have to run with a different title than the original Nickelodeon series—thanks, James Cameron—but he also had to somehow condense sixty-one episodes (1342 minutes) into something feature length. Or, the trailers didn’t tell us otherwise, anyway, but let me happily spoil that for you: he doesn’t try to cram all sixty-one episodes into a hundred and three minutes. I haven’t searched it up, but this …

The Nightmare continues . . .

…

For me, anyway. However, the caveat — movies I haven’t seen yet:

THE HURT LOCKER: the title kept me away, yeah. very undescriptive. or, maybe makes perfect sense afterward, but none before.
500 DAYS OF SUMMER: dug the trailer, did the actors, heard great stuff about it, but, being not-horror, it kept slipping down the list.
THE FANTASTIC MR FOX: I still trust Wes Anderson. will see this one before too long, here.
ANTICHRIST: man, the Green Goblin and some scene tha…

AVATAR 3D in IMAX, wow. it’s SCANNER DARKLY and FERN GULLY and BRAVEHEART as percolated up through DANCES WITH WOLVES and POCAHONTAS. loved it in spite of those last two, even. and, though I can’t find it in his bibliography now, I was pretty sure I’d read a Samuel Delaney book/story about wearing bodies like suits to explore alien planets, and the explorers wearing those bodies of course just running off into this new place, never coming back. help? were th…

One of the big axioms of storytelling is that you know a character best by the decisions he or she makes under extreme circumstances. It’s why you push your characters out into the street, see how they react when traffic’s slamming in from all sides at once. Granted, you can rig your story so that it’s all kitchen sink drama, low-key enough that ‘extreme circumstances’ gets redefined as a standoff about who’s going to answer a ringing phone, but that kind of slow-ha…