Born to a cacophony of jeers at Cannes, Antichrist blurs the line between the beatific and profane, forcing the audience to witness violence beneath the sensual. Coiled around each other in rapturous fornication, He (Willem Defoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) fill a beautiful, monochrome screen that casts the feminine face in a shade of light gray before […]
On a separate site, I commented on the recent glut of vampire films that have been produced, and if there’s one that you must see, it is Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. This film intelligently and intricately captures the beatific vampire mythology while avoiding becoming a horror-flick driven by carnage. Unfortunately, Let the Right One […]
“You know when you meet someone for the first time and there’s this instant attraction?” asks Alex Forrest of Dan Gallagher over a drink, echoing the trope of love (or lust) at first sight that provides and sustains agency within characters progenated in hundreds of plays, books, or movies. “This instant attraction,” she says with a grin […]
As a few million of you might know, Inception opened this past weekend to the delight of many and the derision of a few who expected a summer movie to be a masterpiece. Please note: there is no “second coming” in the summer. If you’re privy to the recent heat wave that has blanketed the Northeast, summer […]
The original The Karate Kid is a synecdoche of the 80s; one that combines the underdog, underprivileged, middle-class Daniel Larusso (Ralph Macchio) – replete with brown hair, brown eyes and a New York accent that casts him as an outsider on the blonde-haired-blue-eyed-laden beaches of Beverly Hills and its affluent residents, including bad-boy Johnny Lawrence, which admittedly […]
Halfway through 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Logan (Hugh Jackman) delivers the line “I come with you. I’m coming for blood. No law. No code of conduct,” which marks a departure from the moral, yet stigmatized killing machine who ventured heroically through the Civil War, World War I, II, and the Vietnam War. And, this seems to be […]
Often, remakes signify a growing lack of originality that seems to be burgeoning throughout Hollywood, and this stigma is often compounded two or three fold when a production company decides to remake a horror film. Some prime examples would be the most recent installments of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th or Rob Zombie’s Halloween […]
Two years ago, I was heading from Oregon to New York. As a week of Pinot drinking was slowly seeping its way out of my sweat glands and gradually returning my retinas to their inherently white color, the seven hour, two-part flight was a bit daunting. However, things began to look up as I arrived at PDX […]
Because of its rather unique take on superhero origin stories, Iron Man was quite enjoyable and offered a glimpse at the birth of a superhero from his purely embryonic origins. The initial need for superpowers was unnecessary as Tony Stark is depicted as an enviable character prior to his iron baptism – an affluent playboy who drives […]
The opening scene gives us Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a parking lot attendant ticket taker, confined to his cage, meticulously scribbling something while reading, “I can’t tell you how sick I am.” From this point on, the audience wonders whether Paul is all there, or if he is so socially awkward that his only way to communicate […]