The Stop Button

I can understand Chinese people being upset with the stereotypes–Spielberg and company basically lift all the anti-Japanese stereotypes from early 1940s American films and apply them to the Chinese–but at least they’re only goofy and mischievous. The Indians in the film are downright evil. Temple of Doom’s atrocious script (I suppose Willard Huyck and Gloria […]

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Count Yorga, Vampire is a retelling of Dracula, modernizing it to the then-contemporary 1970 and changing the locale to Los Angeles. It’s also incredibly low budget–not so low budget it has bad acting (its acting is actually the strong-point)–but it has blacked out windows on houses and cars (so night scenes can be shot at […]

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Don Siegel had an anecdote about the length of titles. He showed them to his boss, who kept asking for them to be longer, then showed them to the boss again, telling him each time he’d made the changes. In fact, he had not–his boss was simply familiar with the titles and couldn’t gauge the […]

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Is there a dearth of WASP family dramas right now? I guess there must be. Dan in Real Life certainly fills the void–and is probably the only time I’ve ever thought about a movie in terms of it being a WASP affair (that accusation against Wes Anderson is, for example, one I find unfounded).
It’s a […]

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Surprisingly, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem does elicit some conversation. Or, at least the first forty or so minutes of it does. The rest might elicit armed revolt, I’ll never know.
The movie’s interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s atrocious. From the incompetent direction–the Strause brothers apparently couldn’t handle a Doublemint commercial–to the cheap CG (maybe […]

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Somehow, it’s impossible to find an actual Tarkovsky quote regarding 2001 online, just tidbits about Solaris being his humanist response to that film.
Damn.
I wanted to open with a comment about Norman Jewison sharing the opinion about the science fiction genre.
Rollerball’s a technical masterpiece. Jewison’s sense of composition and editing have never been better. It’s unfortunate, […]

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I was wondering why, for such a cheap-ish movie, The Squeeze looks so good. Its budget almost doubled, allowing for some really expensive looking sequences on an aircraft carrier, a decent amount of New York photography and… I don’t know, something else. It also almost starred Jenny Wright in the Rae Dawn Chong part, which […]

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