SUMMER OF BLOOD: BE THERE OR BE SQUARE

There's much to say about Cube, a 1997 sci-fi horror film and philosophically-laden mindfuck by director Vincenzo Natali, but before I get into any of that, a word of praise. Because this, this is how you do a low-budget movie. Only enough resources to build one cube-shaped room? Then build that cube-shaped room as best as you possibly can, make it as simple but strange-looking as you dare, and use colored gels to change the color of it. Bingo, you...

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SEPTEMBER 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

Is it safe to come out? Is the Summer of Endless Mediocrity over?Yes, and what that says about the prestige season to come, I won't guess (and it wouldn't be fair to do so, regardless). Still, this isn't prestige season; it's Dumping Month #2, and what THAT means after this summer, I am terrified to think...6.9.2013Only one wide release, and boy, is it random: Riddick, the third film (fourth, counting a lengthy cartoon) in a franchise that has lied dormant for nine years, and went out on such a confounding, unliked note last time. The good news...

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AIN'T THEM BODIES DEAD

Nearly two years of hype since the film's 2011 Toronto International Film Festival has promised that You're Next was a brilliant dark horror-comedy. I will allow the possibility that I'm dumb as fuck, but not one single moment came across to me as comic. The best case scenario is that director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett were playing the "don't you get it? It's so stupid and bad! On purpose!" card, but that's not being funny, that's being...

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TIM AT TFE: BETWEEN THE CRACKS

This week's essay: on the cusp of the big awards season push, a look ahead to the little movies that aren't likely to be big hits or Oscar players, but which I am very much looking forward to anyw...

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YOU'VE GOT RED ON YOU

If only by a small margin, Hot Fuzz probably has the stronger reputation; The World's End is more sophisticated in all sorts of storytelling and filmmaking ways. But from where I stand, the very first feature made by director Edgar Wright, with stars Simon Pegg (who co-wrote with Wright) and Nick Frost, after the three of them moved on from their brilliant sitcom Spaced, is absolutely the best. Shaun of the Dead isn't merely the pinnacle of Wright...

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NOT WITH A WHIMPER, BUT A BANG

First, let's clear out the brush: The World's End, the third genre pastiche about English male behavior by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, just isn't as funny as Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. Even granting the deeply personal nature of what makes us laugh, I can't really imagine anybody thinking that claim is way off-base, though they might well disagree with it. Honestly, for lengthy stretches, it's not even evident that it's trying to be as funny...

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BEST SHOT: BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

The penultimate episode in 2013 of Hit Me with Your Best Shot at the Film Experience visits the 1969 buddy Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film for which I have particularly intense, maybe even blinding affection - I would never go so far as to call it the "best" movie of '69, but it's absolutely my favorite, by a mile. Which makes it easier to pick a favorite shot (I know it mostly by heart) and also daunting (there are so many great...

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DIARY OF A MAD WHITE WOMAN

I do not know that Woody Allen has ever made a movie that is so much about its central performance, to the exclusion of every other concern, as Blue Jasmine; the most recent film of his monumentally prolific career that even comes close is Another Woman, a quarter of a century old. This isn't meant as praise or criticism, merely an observation of what makes Blue Jasmine such a shocking outlier in the director's career, at a point where we'd assume...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: URBAN FANTASY

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: if we're being classy about it, overt Twilight knock-off The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones could be more generously thought of as a new entry in that most modern of fantasy subgenres, in which mythological beasts interact with the glass and...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?

This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992's Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered a plot point. Also, one character idly mentions that the main location is his parents' summer home, but nobody needs to worry, because they're never around much in the summer....

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BEACH PARTIES: STUFF AND NONSENSE

How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is a film of lasts: the last of the American International beach party movies directed by the series' animating spirit, William Asher; the last starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, no longer resembling teenagers even to the minute degree they did in the earliest films of the run, but still standing in for a certain sense of lingering post-Kennedy youthful idealism and innocence. The one thing it conspicuously...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL

The horror genre was at, perhaps, its all-time low in the early 1990s, and in Canada just as in the U.S. that means it was time for direct-to-video shlock to muscle its way in. Thus we arrive at Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which is as cheap and as horrendously acted as you'd ever want a DTV movie released in 1990 to be. Though as befit its country of origin, always anxious to do things just a little bit more oddly than the soulless Yanks with...

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TIM AT TFE: GHOSTS OF SUMMERS PAST

This week's essay: three recent summer movie seasons proving that 2013 wasn't as bad as all th...

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GREAT MOMENTS WITH MR. GAINES

It would be a lie if I said that Lee Daniels' The Buter was "bad": it is good, or at least within good's wheelhouse. But it's certainly not good in the way that I, for one, was hoping for, and considering the (legally-mandated) possessive right there in the title, is is less of what history has conditioned us to expect from "A Lee Daniels Film" than anything that director has ever made. Lee Daniels' The Butler is in fact awfully generic, as a story...

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