Final Thoughts: 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies
The results are in. The top five: The Shining (1980), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), AND Psycho (1960).
Culture Snob
Box Office Power Rankings: October 26-28, 2007
What the hell are Dane Cook and Juliette Binoche doing in the same movie? She, like Virginia Madsen, is commonly luminous, while he is merely overexposed. The movie they share, Dan in Real Life, tops this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, while the weekend’s other major release, Saw IV, rode wretched reviews to a fifth-place finish.
Tagged: Box Office, Box Office Power Rankings
Totally Unrelated: Getting Used to It
The morning after the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series (following two miserable seasons of championship drought), two people approached me in McDonald’s. I was wearing a Red Sox shirt. We were in northern Arkansas, beginning an 11-hour drive north after a weekend of wedding festivities. Incidentally, I eat at McDonald’s about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series.
Tagged: Baseball, Blog-a-thons, Boston Red Sox, Red Sox
Give Him Your Willie! Errr … Willies
Ballots for Ed Hardy Jr.’s 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies are due by the end of October 28. Remember: Your movies can’t win if you don’t play.
Tagged: Horror, Lists, Self-Involvement
Not One of Us
More than a half-century separates these two movies, and they obviously live in different parts of town. Tod Browning’s horror classic Freaks was controversial upon its release in 1932 and hasn’t lost much shock value, with its use of real sideshow performers and the uncomfortable mixture of exploitation and sympathy. Peter Weir’s Witness is a mild drama about the Amish that masquerades as a cop thriller. (Or is a cop thriller disguised as an Amish drama?) Yet the two have much in common.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Double Bills, Dramas, Freaks, Horror, Peter Weir, Tod Browning, Witness
Box Office Power Rankings: October 19-21, 2007
I warned you last week to expect wackiness in this edition of the Box Office Power Rankings, and for once, I don’t disappoint.
Tagged: Box Office, Box Office Power Rankings
The Eyes of Anna
Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.
Box Office Power Rankings: October 12-14, 2007
It was a perfect storm in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings. The audience magnet of Tyler Perry met the critical favor accorded Michael Clayton met the in-between-on-both-measures We Own the Night, so we have a three-way tie for this past weekend’s title.
Tagged: Box Office, Box Office Power Rankings
Open Hand
There are dozens of close-ups of hands in Peter Weir’s Fearless, and mostly the extremities belong to Max Klein, the distant plane-crash survivor played by Jeff Bridges. What follows is not a comprehensive catalog but covers the majority of these shots. They are presented in the order in which they appear in the movie.
Shootin’ the Shit
Smoke begins in Auggie Wren’s cigar shop with omniscient chatter about the Mets and ends in a deli with a made-up tale about how Auggie got his first camera. Almost everything in between is also bullshit, in the sense that its relationship with objective reality is utilitarian. We speak the truth when it suits our needs, but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of the story we’re trying to spin.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Close-ups, Harvey Keitel, Paul Auster, Smoke, Wayne Wang