film criticism by maryann johanson | 25 years: 1997–2022
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but you’ve been turned into a frog and know you won’t be able to see over the seat in front of you, not even with a kiddie booster seat. But you can have a multiplex-like experience at home with a collection … more…
Riotously awful and simultaneously vile, this orgy of sexualize violence with no point except to give itself something to jerk off to…
It’s all those balloons holding it aloft: 1. Up: £3.8 million (3rd week; drops 26%) 2. Saw VI: £1.7 million (NEW) 3. Fantastic Mr. Fox: £1.5 million (NEW) 4. Couples Retreat: £.93 million (2nd week; drops 49%) 5. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant: £.798 million (NEW) (actual numbers, not estimates) Up had edged close … more…
Fun for Wednesdays! We look at an image from an upcoming movie and write snarky, witty, or otherwise entertaining captions for it. No prizes, it’s just for fun. A new movie by Terry Gilliam, and Heath Ledger’s last starring role? Something not to be missed, surely… and now that I’ve seen it, it’s got my … more…
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… Well. I was about to say that this looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before, except that I do see shades of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in the snippets here. And maybe some stuff that Tim Burton has dreamed up… a bit of Edward … more…
I’m stoked for my very early screening this week of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (opens in the U.K. on October 16, and in the U.S. on December 25), Terry Gilliam’s new movie and Heath Ledger’s last. I’m avoiding reading the reviews from Cannes, but I am intrigued to see how Gilliam manages to work … more…
I feel like I’m living in a fucking Terry Gilliam movie or something. Former Texas congressman Tom DeLay — whom Houston IndyMedia called, in 2003, a “warmonger, liar, scam artist, religious and racial bigot, socipathic bully, corporate whore….and the most powerful man on Capitol Hill,” and offered a long list of his crimes to back … more…
The term “outside artist” has never been so apropos, or so wistfully sad, as it is in the case of Henry Darger, who spent his childhood in a home for “feeble-minded children” and his adulthood in near seclusion, working as a janitor and, in secret, on a 15,000-page novel with accompanying — and epic — … more…
And they don’t come much geekier or more touchstony than 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not only damn near one of the funniest movies ever made but certainly one of the most quotable… at least for us endlessly self-referential types for whom all of life is but a never ceasing trail of opportunities to show off the ridiculous capability we have for retaining movie, computer, and science fiction trivia.
