STANLEY KUBRICK: A BIT OF THE OLD ULTRAVIOLENCE

By no means is it an accident that the 1971 dystopia thriller and blackhearted social satire A Clockwork Orange opens - after the disorienting title cards, blocky white text on screaming primary color backgrounds with droning electronic music in the background - with a shot of its protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell) staring directly into the camera, his head tipped forward and his eyes rotated up almost to the top of the their sockets, as he stares,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1938: In which bloody history is turned into a frosted cupcake

MGM was the stylish studio. If you know nothing else about Hollywood in the 1930s, that is the thing to know: when it came to the most glamorous stars wearing the most opulent clothes on the most richly detailed sets, acting out the most robustly dramatic scenarios while the most emphatic strings wept on the soundtrack, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had your back. When we think of the '30s as a decade of grand escapism in reaction to the the Great Depression,...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 2 POLL: PROTO-SLASHERS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWNThanks to everyone who voted!The slasher film, as a genre, emerged in its final state with the release of Halloween in 1978; but that development came only at the end of a half-decade during which the rules of formula began to coalesce out of bits and pieces of horror and thriller films dating back as far as the late '20s and early '30s. This week, the vote will be between three movies that were released during the final years before Halloween finally set the rules in stone.Drive-In Massacre...

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DAYS OF BEING MUTANTS

New rule: Bryan Singer should only direct X-Men movies, and X-Men movies should only be directed by Bryan Singer. For here we are with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is almost indisputably, I'd say, both Singer's and the franchise's best picture since X2 back in the long-ago of 2003 (from which early perch it remains, I would insistently claim, one of the five best superhero comic book movies of the 21st Century). Not bad for a series that's just...

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BEST SHOT: HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

It's 1941 Week at the Film Experience, kind of, and to mark the occasion, this week's entry in Hit Me with Your Best Shot is the Best Picture Oscar winner from that year, How Green Was My Valley.The film is best known for a bad reason: having beaten Citizen Kane for the Oscar, How Green Was My Valley is history's foremost example of the Perfectly Fine Film That People Hate Because It Won An Award - its descendants including such films as Shakespeare...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TRAVELING TO THE PAST TO SAVE THE FUTURE

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: seven films into a 14-year-old franchise, X-Men: Days of Future Past trots out everybody's favorite hackneyed genre trick, time travel, to add some spice and get the widest possible array of desirable actors assembled in one place. Time travel...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: CAMPING KILLERS

If there was ever a time when the notorious genre of the slasher film wasn't in its rotten, decadent phase, that time was at any rate not 1988. By this point, all the good ideas had been used up, all the mediocre knock-off ideas had been used up, the audience was all used up, and if it wasn't for VHS rental stores, there wouldn't have been any economic viability to keep making the things at all.Which brings us to Cheerleader Camp, a co-production...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1937: In which budgets are exploded in the name of spectacle; and we learn an important lesson about film preservation

There's nothing easier than losing favor with Hollywood: no matter how successful a director's high peaks might be, all it takes is one project that ends up costing far too much and makes far too little back at the box office to tarnish even the brightest shining star. This truism takes us to one Frank Capra, who was the closest thing Hollywood in the '30s had to a brand-name filmmaker, and whose highly profitable run of movies with Columbia Pictures...

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TIM AT TFE: DOROTHY'S REVENGE

I don't post about these anymore, because I take it for granted that you're all heading over there to read my stuff, RIGHT? But I was especially proud of my essay at The Film Experience this week, taking down Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return and the bizarre conspiracy theory that has poked up about it.Go, read, enjoy! And I will have more reviews up here in the very near future - today was a traveling day, and I didn't have time to get anything complet...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 1 POLL: CAMPING KILLERS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: CHEERLEADER CAMPThanks to everyone who voted!There's no more seminal setting for a slasher film than camp, and no better place to start out a new edition of the Summer of Blood. The three candidates I've selected for this week are:Cheerleader Camp (1988)From IMDb: "An unknown killer is killing off the members of a small cheerleader group at a remote cheerleader training camp."The Final Terror (1983)From IMDb: "A group of forest rangers go camping in the woods, and trespass into an area where a backwoods mama likes to kill...

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VAMPIRE LOVERS

I have on three different occasions now described Only Lovers Left Alive as Vampires Who Write for Pitchfork: The Movie, and I still don't have the damnedest idea if I mean that in a disparaging or highly complimentary way. It's that kind of movie, where the singular weirdness of it more than trumps judgments that try to pin it down into good or bad, worth-it or not-worth-it. It is absolutely and unequivocally a Jim Jarmusch picture, at any rate,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1936: In which we bring a little color into the world

The second major technological revolution in cinema history, the arrival of color, was neither as abrupt nor as immediately ubiquitous as the rise of talkies: there was a certain mistrust of the artistic validity of the technology that lingered for years after Technicolor introduced Process No. IV, its legendary three-strip color system that permitted for the most vividly saturated, luminous colors that have ever been known; The Wizard of Oz and...

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BEST SHOT: X-MEN

With X-Men: Days of Future Past breathing down our necks as the third superhero movie in a two-month span, Hit Me with Your Best Shot does a bit of time traveling all its own. Nathaniel R's selection for tonight is the first X-Men, the movie that kicked off the present superhero fad 14 years ago, and the subject of the very first episode of HMWYBS, so long ago that The Film Experience wasn't even at its current home.I wasn't playing along yet at...

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STANLEY KUBRICK: BEYOND THE INFINITE

2001: A Space Odyssey is the sort of movie that frequently gets called "difficult". Which is, ultimately, never true of a film that costs that much money laid out by a major studio (MGM, in this case), though I'll concede that if by "difficult" one means "the ending is a deliberately obscurantist explosion of borderline nonsense", then I can see why you'd think that.Here's my notion: 2001, it is generally known, came about because Stanley Kubrick,...

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