About six months ago, my block in Astoria was papered with pink NO PARKING signs vowing to tow anything that disrupted the filming of a movie. Within the massive trailers, reclusive celebrities hid until it was time for their close-ups, and along the sidewalk, non-celebrities grazed on coffee and donuts, spoke into walkie talkies, and removed wandering […]
This is quite the find considering The Godfather is the best movie ever made and anyone who disputes that fact should be run over by a tank driven by a cheetah. (via Filmdrunk) The entertaining Tumblr site Ruin-A-Wish Foundation recently found a book page from a copy of The Godfather that apparently belonged to the film’s eventual director, Francis Ford Coppola. The […]
The prison film might be the genre most antithetical to how we view heroes and villains. As opposed to films set in courtrooms where the victim usually wins and the bad guy goes to jail to contemplate his or her crimes, the protagonists in prison films are often the guilty party, the ones who couldn’t get away […]
I Love You, Phillip Morris, exemplifies Jim Carrey’s decade-long transition from comedic goofball to charming leading man. In a way, Carrey has been emulating Tom Hanks, who was best known as a comedic actor before melding comedy sincerity in 1988’s Big. From then on, most comedic roles undertaken by Hanks could better be described as dramedies: […]
(image via AceShowbiz.com) Remember when the internet asked people to turn on their video cameras and record the events of a single day of their lives? Well, 80,000 people really did that last summer. And they shipped 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries off to director Kevin MacDonald and editor Joe Walker. Over the last year, they […]
Confusingly, The Change-Up fluctuates between a decently acted film that boarders on endearing, and the dumbest, trope and cliché-ridden film that I’ve seen in a while. Granted, I’ve avoided watching anything Happy Madison-related, but I can’t imagine that they would fall far below the bar set by this most recent film that tackles “the grass is always […]
(image via Woodland Trust) 1995 offered numerous options for the American kid who preferred outrage over sloth. There were corporate scumbags in America to loathe. There were faceless Communist tyrants in China to defeat. There were political prisoners everywhere to be freed. And there were precious resources of an abused planet to save. It was a time […]
While it falls behind Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, Cache, and The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf is certainly worth a look in that it is a phenomenal exercise in lighting as well as a rather novel take on apocalypse-film genre. Characteristically, Haneke shoots this 2003 film with meticulous precision and strands the viewer […]
In an earlier post, I tackled the connection between Steve Rogers’ transformation into Captain America as a government sponsored PED initiative, and while I still stand by that assertion – and the way in which America’s sponsorship of PED use to “escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell theoretically absolves them of blame because it’s for “the […]