This is what customer service is all about. Seven hours after voting closed in a poll for the next installment, we’ve published the Drunken Commentary Track for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia – and the movie’s three hours long.
The grief in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, the anger in it is misinformed, facile, naïve, misplaced, unfair, inconsistent, unsupported, or some combination of the seven.
Sick sick sick movies.
Eat some people, fuck the dead.
It’s time for haiku!
Are you Ravenous?
Do you see the potency
That human meat gives?
Guy Pearce, his cheekbones,
Gold-rush cannibalism –
What’s there not to like?
With Rob Zombie’s remake in theaters this weekend, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore why Michael Myers (or “The Shape”) worked so well in John Carpenter’s 1978 movie Halloween.
(An experiment in theft [or fair use] and editing as part of Lazy Eye Theatre’s Bizarro Blog-a-thon.) Sunshine and Groundhog Day have a lot in common. In each, we see things we’ve seen before, over and over again. But in Sunshine, this doesn’t describe the plot of the film, but the movie itself.
The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the “art” films of yesteryear and the people who made them. Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they’ve actually seen them or not.
I’ll keep this brief: If you’ve seen it, chances are excellent that you either love or loathe Moulin Rouge. But have you ever spent the time to really figure out why? In this Drunken Commentary Track, Culture Snob and River Cities’ Reader film critic Mike Schulz argue about Baz Luhrmann’s paean to love.
The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle. Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie’s opening scenes are equally Tykwer’s, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous.
Sometimes the biggest gift a film can give us is to force us back into the real world rather than letting us escape. The German movie Requiem is about demonic possession, yet in spite of its subject matter, it’s a serious, wrenching piece. And because of its subject matter, it’s all the more effective, as the audience isn’t expecting to be challenged.
In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end. He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked. This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.
