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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Darkness and Doubt

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Sinister (2012, directed by Scott Derrickson) is a stock, mid-list horror film. It's a kind of film that I like to describe as a ...
Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

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I have mixed feelings about anti-westerns. Do you know the type of film I'm talking about? The ones that debunk the myths of classical ...
1 comment:
Sunday, July 28, 2013

Wolverine in Japan

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I mentioned to some of my friends a couple of days ago that I hoped that there would be the requisite naked Hugh Jackman in the new Wolveri...
2 comments:
Thursday, July 25, 2013

Rising as the Sun Sets

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This was written for the Muriel Awards Hall of Fame vote this month. This was among my nominees for inclusion, so I got the job of writing...
2 comments:
Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Stomp

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See if you can follow me on this: some years ago, I was presented with the prospect of a movie in which both Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richard...
3 comments:
Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Down to the River

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Jeff Nichols's last film, Take Shelter , tripped itself up over genre. It seemed like a film that wanted to embrace genre, all the whi...
Friday, July 19, 2013

The File on Barbara Stanwyck

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This is part of the Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon being run my friend, Aubyn, over at The Girl with the White Parasol . There are a LOT of wr...
8 comments:
Saturday, July 13, 2013

Dynamic Duos: Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

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This is part of the Dynamic Duo blogathon, which is being held by Once Upon a Screen and The Classic Movie Hub . Pay em a visit. Lots of g...
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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

East is East

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There's a scene early in T he East (2013, directed by Zal Batmanglij) in which our heroine, Jane, puts a gold cross around her neck. S...
Sunday, July 07, 2013

The Old College Try

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The short subject before Monsters University (2013, directed by Dan Scanlon), Pixar/Disney's new prequel to Monsters, Inc . wasn't...
Friday, July 05, 2013

Hothouse

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Contrary to its title, Park Chan-Wook’s English-language debut has nothing to do with Bram Stoker or Dracula. Park, after all, has already ...
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Border War

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With The Last Stand (2013), director Kim Jee-woon makes a conditional success of a kind of film that defeated the Hong Kong directors in t...
1 comment:
Sunday, June 23, 2013

Aimless in New York

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Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha (2013) is a portrait of post-college/pre-rest of your life anomie. Anyone who has drifted...
Sunday, June 16, 2013

Brittle Steel

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A couple of years ago, DC Comics went through a big shake-up of their line of superhero comics. As happens when you have a universe shared ...
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Sunday, June 09, 2013

Where Eleven Films Have Gone Before

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It's entirely possible that there's an interesting movie lurking inside Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, directed by J. J. Abrams). ...
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Friday, June 07, 2013

Notes from an Absentee Landlady

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I haven't been blogging about film much lately. This is partially from blogging burnout. It's partially due to an extended period of...
Friday, May 31, 2013

Irons in the Fire

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Iron Man 3 (2013, directed by Shane Black) is generally a smarter movie than any other superheroic part three I can think of. Other part ...
Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Wake the Dead

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Most contemporary ghost stories are about haunted people rather than haunted places. This is the legacy of Henry James and Shirley Jackson,...
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Tuesday, May 07, 2013

The Magic Goes Away

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I don't normally write obituaries on my blog, but the news today of Ray Harryhausen's passing is something I can't let pass wi...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Pattern Recognition

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There's a word for the psychological effect that causes people to see Jesus in a piece of toast. It's called "pareidolia"...
1 comment:
Friday, April 26, 2013

Love Among the Ruins

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Like all movie fans, I have holes in my knowledge. There are plenty of classic or critically acclaimed films that for one reason or another...
Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Sins of the Fathers

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If you pay attention to movies, you may have heard that The Place Beyond the Pines (2012, directed by Derek Cianfrance) has a killer openi...
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Monday, April 22, 2013

Spam in a Cabin

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I didn't go into Fede Alvarez's new version of Evil Dead (2013) expecting to hate it. Contrary to what you may think of people wh...
1 comment:
Saturday, April 20, 2013

Things Are Tough All Over

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The last film on the schedule for last weekend's Italian Film Festival was Escort in Love ( Nessuno mi può giudicare , 2011, directed b...
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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Exiles on the Flood

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Shun Li and the Poet ( Io sono Li , 2011, directed by Andrea Segre) is set in Chioggia, a town near Venice, on the Venetian lagoon, but it...
Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Constant as the Northern Star

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I had a weird bit of synchronicity happen to me on the way home from the theater after the first day of the Italian Film Festival. The seco...
Monday, April 15, 2013

Day In, Day Out

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The traveling Italian Film Festival rolled into my fair city this weekend. Our version of the event consists of four films over one weeken...
Friday, April 12, 2013

Netflix Roulette: Firestarter Rekindled

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Anyone who goes in for genre films has to have a streak of masochism. Genre movies are so rarely good that if you can't take the punis...
1 comment:
Monday, April 01, 2013

White Elephant Blogathon 2013: The Ice Pirates

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I feel like I got off easy the first two years I did the White Elephant Blogathon. The way this works is that the participants throw a mov...
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Sunday, March 24, 2013

Blogorama: Snowpocalypse Edition

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We had another eight inches of snow dumped on us today, thus foiling my plans to see the new Park Chan-Wook film this afternoon. In the inte...