Snowpiercer, the new film from director Bong Joon-ho, is ravishingly bonkers. Based on a French comic book saga, the film presents a future vision of the world plunged into permanent, uninhabitable winter, a result of overcompensation in the battle against … Continue reading Everyone’s happy, they’re finally all the same, ’cause everyone’s jumping everyone else’s train
Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan, 2012). I’ve got loads of residual affection for writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, but he sure doesn’t make it easy to be one of his defenders these days. Darling Companion was his first film in nearly decade, following the appallingly bad Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher. It doesn’t make an argument that he used his creative downtime wisely. As wispy of a film concept as anyone’s likely to come across, Kasdan’s story (co-written with his wife, Meg Kasdan) concerns an older couple who adopt a stray dog and then lose that new furry family member in the woods around … Continue reading Faxon and Rash, Kasdan, Lloyd, Lord and Miller, Snyder
At some point, the meta magic of filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is going to wear so thin it can’t hold up a flimsy excuse for a movie concept, but the inevitable erosion hasn’t happened yet. Mere months after their astonishing and daring subversion of the corporate synergy movie model turned The Lego Movie into the most unlikely critical hit in ages (the film’s commercial success, while more impressive than expected, wasn’t exactly in doubt) they’ve returned with a sequel to 2012’s television show adaptation 21 Jump Street, itself a headlong dive into the rabbit hole of mocking self-awareness. … Continue reading Well can’t you see me standing here, I’ve got my back against the record machine
The X-Men #141, published with a cover date of January, 1981, contained a story entitled “Days of Future Past.” There was nothing on the front cover, iconic as it became, that indicated there was a momentous tale to be found … Continue reading The hourglass is draining fast, it knows no future, holds no past
Somewhere out there in the vast reaches of the unknown, there is a multiplex of the multiverse, playing all the great and near-great movies that never came to be within our humble reality. (I, for one, am prepared to buy … Continue reading He has the power to foresee or to look into the past, he is the ruler of the stars
The Immigrant, the new film from director James Gray begins in 1921, as a woman and her sister are waiting in the anxiously hopeful misery of the line at Ellis Island. The supposed promised land is at the other end … Continue reading For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing
My first instinct upon seeing Under the Skin, the latest from director Jonathan Glazer, was that I’d never seen another movie like it, not really. But then my mind filled up with comparisons, in part, no doubt, in a probably … Continue reading Use your mentality, wake up to reality
Face front, True Believers. Who can doubt that this is indeed the Marvel Age of Movies? The comic book publisher that effectively launched their long climb to multi-media dominance over fifty years ago with the release of Fantastic Four #1 … Continue reading Time, time, time, see what’s become of me
At this point in the director’s career, it may be easier and more instructive to catalog how a new Wes Anderson film is different than its predecessors. For example, his latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is packed with all the … Continue reading What a beautiful dream that could flash on the screen in a blink of an eye and be gone from me
I once posited in this space that Veronica Mars was one of the unsung (or at least under-sung) creations in the long transformation of the television series model from collections of loosely connected episodes to the mythology-heavy novels divided into … Continue reading Now she walks through her sunken dream to the seat with the clearest view and she’d hooked on the silver screen
Coffee for Two 