Crawl (Alexandre Aja, 2019). To his credit, director Alexandre Aja clearly understands the lean and lowdown appeal of the premise to Crawl. With little fuss and effecticely shorthand character-building, Aja races headlong into the telling the story of a flooding … Continue reading Playing Catch-Up — Crawl; Her Smell; The Commuter
Piranha (Alexandre Aja, 2010). It’s remarkable that a film that so overtly embraces its own willful trashiness can still be dour, flatfooted and boring as hell. Richard Dreyfuss’s early cameo as a scruffy boater who’s a victim of carnivorous fish is only the first overt reference to Steven Spielberg’s superlative Jaws. The entire plot about the vicious water-dwellers is essentially lifted from the earlier feature, with the family vacation crowds in a terrorized tourist tour replaced by ribald Spring Breakers, all the better to fill the screen with R-rated nudity. It’s gory, ridiculous and almost deliberately inept. It’s also no … Continue reading Aja, Cameron, Hanks, Ophüls, Saladoff
Coffee for Two 