At Strange Culture, RC is hosting the Film + Faith Blog-a-thon, running through November 9. (The announcement is here.) I’m hoping for a diverse, engaging, thoughtful, and provocative batch of essays, because the spiritual component of movies is critical but often neglected.
Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a “garden of forgiveness” at Ground Zero in New York City. Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said “no.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
I warned you last week to expect wackiness in this edition of the Box Office Power Rankings, and for once, I don’t disappoint.
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.
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.
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.