Movies

Confirmation Bias

14 January 2013

When a work of art includes a problematic subject or theme, there are always going to some segment of the audience that believes that confronting that subject is the same as condoning it. It is NEVER X to Y about Z, after all. The use of torture in Zero Dark Thirty, for instance, just glorifies torture, [...]

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Extreme Close-Up

2 January 2013

Les Miserables is a frustrating film. At its heights, it is one of the best films of the year. At its worst, it is chaotic and uneven, peopled with actors who don’t always have the vocal ability to handle some difficult parts, and perhaps worst of all, tedious in its second-half sprint toward the finish [...]

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Sinister

22 October 2012

“If you were tasked with remaking The Ring, how would you do it?” I was asking this question at a diner on a Saturday night, and it sparked a ninety minute digression on the now-faded spate of slick J-horror remakes that dominated American horror cinema for awhile, culminating in a four-way conversation about the audacity of [...]

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Fortunate

15 May 2012

At the apex of Nicholas Sparks’ unique brand of Nicholas Sparks-ness, The Notebook, a man proves his love for a woman by building a house for her. The house is a metaphor for the lives shared within it, an external marker of an internal sensation. It also Says Things about the role of masculinity in [...]

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A Special Hell Reserved for People Who Talk in the Theater

19 December 2011

It’s basically only acceptable to talk during a movie in three cases – first, when the movie is so awful that it’s subjectively awful and no living thing can find any enjoyment in its viewing; second, when it’s a horror movie, because the sort of fun, pop horror that you want to see in a [...]

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Activity

8 November 2011

The haunted house story is a timeless story that is rooted firmly in the economics of its time. One of the persistent lessons of horror is that we are not the masters of our collective domain that we think we are. There are monsters and sharks and mutants that will kill us for our arrogance. [...]

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Things About The Thing (2011)

17 October 2011

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but [...]

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More Finaler Than Ever

16 August 2011

There are maybe only four modern films that I have ever really enjoyed watching in 3D. Three of them have been horror films – My Bloody Valentine, Piranha 3D and now Final Destination 5. The opening credits alone speak to why that is – a cavalcade of sharp objects, fire and broken glass flying right [...]

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Shields and the Weilding Thereof

26 July 2011

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling [...]

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It All Ends

15 July 2011

It’s problematic. I look at a lot of the things I love in fiction – fantasy, science fiction, superheroes – and I see that that same basic story structure that props each hero’s journey up ultimately tends to be a little fascistic.  Because when Boy X gets Sword Y and learns how to fight from [...]

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