Splice (review)
What if there were realms in which *woman* was not meant to meddle? It’s not as progressive as it sounds. But you knew that already.
Frankenstein
classic ‘Doctor Who’ blogging: “The Movie”
Made of spoilers. Don’t read until you’ve seen the episode.
question of the day: Sam Worthington as Dracula? How else can the Universal Monster reboot go down in flames?
So, we have Benicio Del Toro about to land as the Wolfman, and now we get word that Sam Worthington may be playing Dracula in a Summer 2011 flick. What’s going on is this: Universal is trying to reboot its Universal Monsters brand. Besides Dracula and the Wolfman, the Universal Monsters stable includes Frankenstein, the … more…
September 11: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but it’s all this settling back down into pre-autumnal routine has got you exhausted. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection of the right DVDs. And when someone asks you on Monday, “Hey, did you check … more…
DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
President Obama may have us all feeling more confident that the collapse of civilization because of credit swap defaults — instead of the way-cooler zombie apocalypse or ape uprising The Movies had promised us — has been headed off for the moment, but that don’t mean a penny saved ain’t still a penny saved. And … more…
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (review)
It’s probably very much funnier if you’re already a bit of an Anglophile, if you drink a lot of tea and long to attend a weekend house party in the 1930s at a manor in Sussex where you take the train down from London and someone meets you at a station that’s called a ‘halt’ and you don’t think murder is all that bad as long as the mystery of it is solved by a gentleman who has his manservant dress him for dinner. Cuz the Wallace & Gromit claymation toons have always been very much about both celebrating and sending up the peculiar British character, and you have to recognize it as a bit silly and a bit of an exaggeration that was never really real anyway but still completely love and embrace it nevertheless to really get the warmth and affection with which they — the Wallace & Gromit toons, that is — are offered for your entertainment.
Unleashed and Crash (review)
With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.
top 11 movies of 2001: the great, the good, and the really, really ugly
Another year of really, really crappy movies was saved, in the end, by a Bohemian storm, a magical ring, a robot boy, and a lonely mademoiselle. A feeling of the otherworldly permeates every movie on my best-of list this year, even the one documentary. And the weird thing is that most of these films were … more…
Jurassic Park III (review)
Isla Sorna has become something of an attractive nuisance these days. Never mind that InGen’s real-life monster island is surrounded by restricted airspace and that travel to it is absolutely forbidden. Never mind that it’s common knowledge that people have been eaten there. Does this stop adventurous types from trying to catch a glimpse of an honest-to-goodness genetically engineered freak dinosaur? Of course not. InGen’s legal budget must require advanced mathematics to grasp.
Frankenstein (1931) (review)
Will the male half of the species ever get over its fear and awe of the reproductive power of the female half? If the enduring popularity of the Frankenstein story and its variants is anything to judge by, the answer is no. And endure it does: From Frankenweenie to Frankenhooker to Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound, this is a story that has inspired almost countless retellings. But the original filmed version, directed by James Whale in 1931, is still the best.
