Posted on January 13, 2012 by Darren
You shall pay, black prince. I shall place a curse of suffering on you that will doom you to a living hell. I curse you with my name. You shall be… Blacula!
– racist!Dracula
It’s hard to make sense of Blacula. On one hand, it’s an interesting attempt to update gothic horror stereotypes for a modern audience, translating the horrors of vampirism skilfully from foreign countryside to an urban environment. On the other hand, it’s an uneven mess of a film, with plot holes so large that Blacula doesn’t need to turn into a bat to fly through them. It’s an interesting experiment, and one successful enough to spawn a sequel in Scream Blacula Scream! and to inspire films like Blackenstein, even if some fascinating concepts don’t necessarily add up to a fascinating whole.
A role he can sink his teeth into?
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Blackenstein, Blacula, Bram Stoker, dracula, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, film, Marshall, Movie, non-review review review, review, vampire, William Marshall | Leave a comment »
Posted on January 13, 2012 by Darren
War Horse is a fairly solid prestige picture. Spielberg is on fine form, reminding viewers of just how he became an audience favourite. He displays a warm confidence with the material, as if getting comfortable once again with this sort of crowd-pleasing fare. The film has some fairly significant flaws, stemming mostly from a disjointed and disorganised screenplay, but it’s the director’s charm that manages to carry the film through. Ironically, for a film focusing on an equine, it feels like one of the most warmly human films that Spielberg has produced in quite a while.
No horse play!
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Albert, Benedict Cumberbatch, film, horse, horses, Joey, Movies, non-review review, oscar bait, Oscars, review, Saving Private Ryan, spielberg, steven spielberg, tom hiddleston, war horse, World War, World War I | 5 Comments »
Posted on January 12, 2012 by Darren
Discussing the upcoming adaptation of Marvel’s The Avengers, it was strange to hear director Joss Whedon assure fans that the film would not be “obnoxiously 3D.” I am hardly the biggest fan of 3D, for a multitude of reasons I’ll undoubtedly get into in a minute, but I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. After all, since Whedon isn’t filming in 3D, what’s the point in doing it at all if you aren’t at least going to treat it like the gimmick that it is?
Out of their depth?
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 3-D film, 3d, 3d film, art, avatar, avengers, film, gimmick, Hugo, james cameron, joss whedon, martin scorsese, Movies, steven spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the avangers (film) | 7 Comments »
Posted on January 11, 2012 by Darren
Green Hornet is an interesting film, if only because it’s hard to figure out the potential audience. It adopts a brutally cynical approach to the types of superhero films that have been released over the past few years, while remaining steeped in their trappings. It’s a comedy, but it doesn’t venture too far into slapstick or laugh-out-loud moments (though there are more than a couple). Instead, it seems to smirk its way through the movie, deconstructing the sort of plots, characters and dialogue that superhero films give us, but never completely tilting its hand. It’s hard to tell if this is a parody of a standard superhero film, or a straight-forward example of one – the movie fluctuates between the two extremes, but never really picks one and engages full throttle.
A bomb...
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Britt, bruce wayne, comedy, Comics, david gordon green, deconstruction, edward furlong, Edward James Olmos, Gondry, green hornet, Kato, Michel Gondry, non-review review, review, Seth Rogen, Swiss Army Knife | 3 Comments »
Posted on January 10, 2012 by Darren
Shame is a masterpiece, a master class in cinema, and the perfect example of a director and lead actor working synchronously and seamlessly. The movie wouldn’t work without director Steve McQueen willing to push it as far as possible, knowing when to pull back and when to dive in, matched by Michael Fassbender’s fearlessness, throwing himself into a naked performance. (This is where I make a cheap joke about it being “in more ways than one.”) Shame is pretty much the perfect note on which to start 2012.
Stands out from the crowd...
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Carey Mulligan, Fassbender, film, McQueen, Michael Fassbender, Motion Picture Association of America film rating system, Movie, new york, New York City, non-review review, review, Sexual addiction, steve mcqueen, subway, youtube | 10 Comments »
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Darren
When I was compiling my “top twelve” list for 2011, there were a lot of films contending for a place on that list. I felt bad about having to leave off stuff like We Need to Talk About Kevin and Preludio and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. However, I didn’t find myself trying to justify the inclusion of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, despite the fact that I found the film completely and utterly compelling. I’ll be the first to concede that Soderbergh’s disease epic had some fairly considerable flaws, too many for me to legitimately rank it “one of the best of the year”, and yet I think it’s one of those movies I couldn’t stop thinking about. What it is it about an ambitious failure that makes it so much more fascinating than a modest success?
Figuring out the formula...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: ambition, Contagion, failure, film, films, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Horror film, mark strong, Movies, Soderbergh, Steven Soderbergh, We Need to Talk About Kevin | 8 Comments »
Posted on January 9, 2012 by Darren
It’s interesting that Hammer chose to package Dracula: Prince of Darkness in the “best of” collection I picked up for my gran over Christmas. It isn’t that it’s hardly the strongest entry in Hammer’s canon, but it’s also not the strongest instalment in their Dracula franchise. It’s the third release in the series chronologically (and, arguably, in terms of quality), following The Horror of Dracula and The Brides of Dracula). It’s not a bad film, if you’re a fan of these sorts of sixties gothic horrors, but it’s not necessarily a good one either. It’s functional, if not efficient, and never really finds anything particularly compelling about any of its characters or its set up.
You can Count on me!
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Andrew Keir, Christopher Lee, Darcula: prince of Darkness, dracula, DRACULA PRINCE A DARKNESS, film, Hammer Film Productions, hammer horror, Jimmy Sangster, Lee, Movie, non-review review, Peter Cushing, review | Leave a comment »
Posted on January 7, 2012 by Darren
Margaret Thatcher is a complex character. She’s certainly a divisive political figure, but I think that her detractors and her supporters would both admit that the woman isn’t a two-dimensional pop psychology case. The biggest problem with The Iron Ladyis the way that it attempts to offer a simplistic analysis of Thatcher, presenting her as a failure of a wife and a mother who compensated by running her cabinet and her country like a stern matriarch. While Streep gives a solid performance, and director Phyllida Lloyd tries her best to make the movie visually engaging, it feels a bit cheap and shallow. It doesn’t help that the movie trots out the familiar Oscar-baiting bio-pic clichés as if it were assembling an IKEA cabinet. Whatever you may think of Thatcher, she deserved more nuance and complexity than The Iron Lady affords her.
The Broad(bent) strokes...
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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Falklands War, film, Iron Lady, John Major, margaret thatcher, Movie, non-review review, oliver stone, Phyllida Lloyd, review, Richard E. Grant, thatcher, The Iron lady | 4 Comments »
Posted on January 1, 2012 by Darren
Enough with the best of 2011! That was so last year. Let’s instead reflect on some of the films I am most anticipating in the year ahead. As noted elsewhere, this is all just my opinion, so it’s bound to be a bit crazy and off-the-wall, but hopefully it’s interesting enough.
Hopefully, 2012 isn't a cinematic disaster...
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 2012, Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Batman in film, Christopher Nolan, james badge dale, james bond, jason reitman, Leonardo diCaprio, quentin tarantino | 6 Comments »
Posted on December 31, 2011 by Darren
I’ve compile my list of my own favourite films of 2011, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to outline my own favourite movie moments of 2011 – those breathtaking sequences when I was glad to be setting in a darkened room surrounded by strangers. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the raw combination of images and sounds can have such a dramatic effect on you, moving you and bringing you to from the height of joy to the depths of sorrow. I’m very happy with 2011 as a year for cinema, and these are just ten reasons why.
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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: david fincher, Georges Méliès, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Horrible Bosses, jameson dublin international film festival, kenneth branagh, steven spielberg | Leave a comment »
