See what I wrote earlier about discontinuity? Resident Evil: Extinction, from 2007, ended with Alice discovering an entire warehouse full of superhuman Alices in test tubes and a vague plan, like the Brain does every night, to try to take over the world. Well, to wreak revenge on the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, anyway. Resident Evil: [...]
For all the Coen Brothers’ supposed cleverness and flash — and I mean it here in a pejorative sense — one almost forgets that they can be capable of tight, disciplined writing as well. The first five minutes of their debut film, Blood Simple, for instance, is a fantastic example of perfect narrative compression. (I [...]
Nasty and depraved fun, though the latter is almost wholly dependent on whether you watch this movie with like-minded individuals in advanced stages of alcohol-induced fuzziness. The other factor, of course, is whether you’re the sort who’d actually enjoy watching a film about a mad scientist, three hapless and expendable tourists and a rather unsettling [...]
If Casey Affleck’s 2010 documentary I’m Still Here isn’t some sort of hoax, then Joaquin Phoenix’s nuanced and complex star turn in James Gray’s romantic melodrama Two Lovers may really be his last role as an actor before he becomes a hip hop artist. (Judging from his MC skills in Two Lovers, he might not [...]
So where were we? Oh, yeah: Alice escapes from prison (naked, of course — it must be written in Milla Jovovich’s contract), and comes back out into a world now increasingly populated by zombies. (Or, more properly, “the infected.”) The virus, it seems, has now spread across the planet. So has accelerated desertification, apparently, which [...]
Right now I can’t think of a more oddly discontinuous film trilogy (now a quadrilogy / quartet, but I haven’t seen the latest one yet) than the sci-fi/horror/action Resident Evil series: characters appear and disappear, both locale and tone shift radically from movie to movie, the heroine seems to get inexplicable weapon and power upgrades [...]
Loyal readers of this blog (all four of you) may have noticed the inordinate amount of crap filling this page in the recent week, not to mention the increasing frequency of posts. This is, in fact, a writing experiment in progress: an experiment in disciplining myself to squeeze out 150-200 words a day on some [...]
The thing about leaving your childhood behind for the world of adults is that you’re actually too young to fully appreciate that bittersweet period, good or bad. Toy Story 3 makes that leave-taking the emotional core of the film, and a fitting, almost moving conclusion to this three-part saga about plastic characters. But calling them [...]
By now the pleasures and contradictions of Inception have already been enumerated and dissected to exhaustion: that damn spinning top, floor plans of its dream architecture, the way Hans Zimmer’s trombone-heavy soundtrack is really “Je, ne regrette rien” slowed to a dreamlike sluggishness, how it violates screenwriting principles by unthinkably burdening it with exposition for [...]
The latest act of silliness from Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. There’s a plot here about corporate miscreants, but like their older work of minor genius, 2004′s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the thin narrative only serves as the tissue that loosely connects a series of largely-improvised sketches. (The end credits are far more [...]
Now I remember where I last saw Eric Roberts as the villain, just before The Expendables: it was in Corey Yuen’s D.O.A.: Dead Or Alive, just three or four years before. But Roberts is hardly the reason to see this film (though he executes some improbable moves, obviously with the help of body doubles made [...]
There are lots of ideas simmering in the brew of Splice’s intelligent and ambitious screenplay; the problem is that they don’t all quite come together in a coherent whole. But at least there’s an admirably tight focus, for there are basically only three characters in Vincenzo Natali’s technological horror film. Two of the parts of [...]
Here’s a horror film that would have worked, paradoxically, without the horror; it’s disturbing enough on its own. The Last Exorcism borrows from the now-venerable horror trope of the faux-documentary, like The Blair Witch Project, [REC], or Paranormal Activity (that’s a link to an old blog entry), but the shocks (at least in the beginning) [...]
It’s not particularly easy recommending Alexandre Aja’s Piranha – not because it’s beneath my readers’ discriminating tastes – but because it’s ultimately a waste of Aja’s directorial potential. Aja more or less ushered in the new wave of French horror with 2003’s almost-wordless High Tension (see a short blurb at the bottom of this entry [...]
A disappointment, but an interesting one. Guadagnino’s lush portrait (Io sono l’amore) of a woman imprisoned by bourgeois expectations has, in its evocation of other Italian cinematic families of wealth (the Finzi-Continis, for instance), ambitions toward the heft of similar domestic epics, but is let down by the hackneyed plot. The film begins with the [...]
The Wily Filipino