the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: Blacula

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 »

Non-Review Review: War Horse

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 »

In Defense of “Obnoxious” 3D…

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 »

Brad Meltzer’s Run on Justice League – The Tornado’s Path (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Darren

This January, I’m going to take a look at some of DC’s biggest “events.” This week I’ll be taking a look at Brad Meltzer’s impact on the DC universe.

Justice League has always been a bit of a funny little book. The concept is so straight-forward that you’d imagine it would be quite difficult to muck up. After all, it’s a series about DC’s most powerful and iconic heroes teaming up to do impossibly cool stuff and to look good while doing it. DC has been doing this long enough to have an idea of what works on the title and what doesn’t. While Justice League International has its fans, it’s hard to argue that the appeal of the Justice League wasn’t encapsulated by Grant Morrison’s hugely successful nineties run. As such, putting the big characters back on the title shouldn’t seem like a big event of itself – it should be the default setting. So it always seems to me a bit strange when DC relaunch the series with a big name writer and the iconic line-up, only for editorial to inevitably screw things up down the line.

Team photo...

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: batman, Brad Meltzer, Bruce, bruce wayne, continuity, dark knight, dc comic, dc comics, ed benes, Firehawk, justice league, justice league of america, justice league of america: the tornado's path, Red Tornado, the red tornado, The Tornado's Path, Tornado's path, wonder woman | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Green Hornet

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 »

Absolute Identity Crisis (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Darren

This January, I’m going to take a look at some of DC’s biggest “events.” This week I’ll be taking a look at Brad Meltzer’s impact on the DC universe.

Identity Crisis is the first in the trilogy of stories that built off the original Crisis on Infinite Earths to offer a fairly significant reevaluation of the modern DC universe, examining where the characters and the fictional landscape was as compared to where it had been decades before. I’ve argued that Marvel went through a similar period of introspection from House of M through to Siege, but DC seemed to engage with the concept on a more direct level. Written by best-selling novelist Brad Meltzer, Identity Crisis is an attempt to explore the rather fundamental changes that occurred in superhero comics during the nineties, often as a direct response to The Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen, giving us a more cynical depiction of the concepts and characters that we take for granted. It’s controversial – as any similar reimagining would be – and, to be frank, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

However, it’s always fascinating, even if it is grimly so.

Time to hang it up?

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Absolute Identity Crisis, batman, Brad Meltzer, comic book, crisis on infinite earths, dark knight returns, dc comics, dc universe, deconstruction, exploitation, flash, Identity Crisis (comics), mark bagley, ralph dibny, reconstruction, retcon, secret identity, sexism in comic books, sue dibny, ultimate spider man | 5 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Shame

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 »

The Virtue of Ambitious Failure…

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 »

Non-Review Review: Dracula – Prince of Darkness

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 »

Non-Review Review: The Iron Lady

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.