HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1971: In which an underserved market is tapped

There's no shortage of aesthetic and cultural upheavals that rocked the American film industry in the 1970s, but the most important from a sociological standpoint absolutely has to be the sudden discovery made by the studios early in the decade that nonwhite people liked to watch movies, too. A lesson that has been forgotten and relearned and forgotten again in a depressing cycle over the intervening 40 years (just look at the eye-popping shock in...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE 21st CENTURY SLASHER

In my head, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a beloved consensus highlight of 2000s meta-horror that is well understood to be an essential work for genre fans. And maybe that's how it works in the real world, since every review I read about it seems to contain the sentiment "this is such a great film, even though nobody has ever heard of it or seen it", and all those dozens and dozens of reviewers can't have stumbled upon the same microscopic,...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 15 POLL: READERS' CHOICE #3

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECTThanks to everyone who voted!And so we come to end, my dear readers, of another year's Summer of Blood. It's been one of the most fun for me to write, and I hope fun for all of you to take part in, and to wrap things up I have one final poll for you to vote in.In the first and second Readers' Choice weeks, you nominated a total of 62 horror or horror-like films to be reviewed as part of the Summer of Blood; the winners of those races were 1977's House and 1982's The Thing. For this climax to Antagony...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - STATUE OF LIMITATIONS

I don't know what the hell it is with third films always being such a titanic step down in quality, but at least Daimajin Strikes Again comes by it honestly: it was Daiei's third film in the loosely-connected series within the span of eight months in 1966, meaning it was also screenwriter Yoshida Tetsuro's third Daimajin movie in the same span, and there's only so many ways you can re-arrange the same essential plot elements in such a brief window...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1970: In which an old curmudgeon jumps in with the young turks, and brazen experiment can also be popular entertainment

The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man's game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in 1944; Paul Scharader and Steven Spielberg were the babies, born in 1946. We start to creep older with Warren Beatty (b. 1937), Dennis...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE MERRY WORLD OF FRANK MILLER

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: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men are brutal nihilists and women are slutty slutwhores and buildings are CGI. All this was a little fresher last time around.There's such a huge gap between...

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BEST SHOT: GONE WITH THE WIND, SECOND HALF

The sequel to last week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot, which finds us looking at the second, more exclusively post-war half of the legendary epic Gone with the Wind.I don't usually post this early in the day, but I had a reason for doing it today: I am most certainly not going to be the only person to pick this shot, and I hoped that by getting in first, I might possibly seem a little less hopelessly obvious.Not the first time I've shared...

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AN UNHEALTHY DOSE OF SKEPTICISM

The very best thing that ever happened to Magic in the Moonlight is that writer-director Woody Allen made The Curse of the Jade Scorpion prior to it. The two films resemble each other in multiple ways: they're both set just outside the Great Depression (Jade Scorpion in New York in 1940, Magic in 1928 in France), both have plots based on the voguish paranormal interests of their setting (hypnotism, spirit mediums), both touch on rather awkward Orientalism...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1969: In which the gaseous, bloated corpse of the old system heaves up its last opulent monstrosities

Earlier this year, I reviewed the legendary dismal 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon; and would would like to suppose that it's enough to have hacked through just one of that year's most notorious genre misfires. But if one is looking at the ebb and flow of Hollywood filmmaking over the years, it would be a terrible mistake to try and get away without coming to grips with the other musical from '69, Hello, Dolly! For it is even better as an example of...

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SERVICE NOTE

Oh my readers, I feel rather bad about taking an impromptu 2-day vacation without even a by-your-leaves, especially with all the series I'm juggling. But it has been a busy weekend of fun, friends, weddings, and silently contemplating the nature of death. Should all be back to normal by Sunday night, and I thank you for your patien...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD

By the time the first Daimajin film opened in 1966, it already had a sequel mostly ready to go. In fact, Daiei Film released an entire Daimajin trilogy in that single calendar year, a burst of extreme energy after which the stone daikaiju would go completely silent until a 2010 TV series created by Daiei's successor, Kadokawa Pictures.Before I can speak about the first of these sequels, I'm going to have lay a bit of groundwork. For films that barely...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 14 POLL: THE 21st CENTURY SLASHER

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNONNB Because I decided, "what the hell, might as well just buy the blu-ray", the review will be later than usual: look for it Tuesday or WednesdayThanks to everyone who voted!We are almost to the end of this audience choice edition of the Summer of Blood, and our tour of the many corners of the slasher film throughout history. For this final slate of three blogger-chosen titles, we arrive near the modern day, as changing filmmaking techniques and audience tastes have forced the trite...

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ICH BIN EIN HAMBURGER

For reasons owing mostly to a capricious, unfair universe, A Most Wanted Man will probably always be first remembered as the movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman's last starring role. That's a cruel fate for any film to have to live up to, but at least in this case it's helped out by Hoffman being absurdly good in the role: fighting against a German accent and a screenplay adapted by Andrew Bovell from John Le Carré's 2008 novel that goes out of its...

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