HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1982: In which horror went mainstream when we weren't looking, and the New Age of the Producer has begun

The question of authorship of 1982's Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe Hooper received credit, or if he was simply a very, very, very hands-on producer. It is a situation that undoubtedly...

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OCTOBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

October! The month of scary movies and the first self-conscious awards bait! We had a banner year for October releases which I absolutely do not expect to see matched; that said, October is also the month of the Chicago International Film Festival, about which I am particularly excited this year. But more about that in a week or so.3.10.2014So first up, the film that splits the difference between generic thrills and Oscary respectability: the David Fincher-directed bestseller adaptation Gone Girl. About which I will mostly confess that I read the...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - NICE GAMS

I wonder if 1995's Gamera: Guardian of the Universe is without precedent in how massive a shift it makes in tone from anything that precedes it? The closest thing I can come up with is Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, which brought a considerable degree of sharp-edged grimness to a property that most people still associated with bright colors and camp, but that ignores the huge volume of comic book material predating the Burton film that posited an even...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1981: In which a new decade of pointedly lowbrow high-concept comedy begins well enough

The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. Masterpieces can be found - masterpieces can be found in any era, of course - but the standard level of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking reached, I think, its lowest level during this period. And it's perhaps not even the case, exactly, that the quality of...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

Once upon a time, like, four days ago, I brightly and innocently declared that I knew what I was getting into with Gamera: Super Monster. I was incorrect. Based on the only things I knew about it, it seemed easy enough to figure out why people hated it: the 1980 one-off resuscitation of the franchise attempted to keep the struggling Daiei Film afloat after a decade spent on the brink of receivership tried to keep costs low by culling a huge percentage...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1980: In which the New Hollywood Cinema dies of autoerotic asphyxiation

The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol' popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and '77, and made all the studios go "Whoa! We don't want to keep making little movies about the lives of real people anymore! We want to make big dumb movies about paper-thin stereotypes that make umpty-jillion dollars!" Which isn't true...

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A SEPARATION

It's not the fault of Love Is Strange that at no point while I was watching it, was I able to banish 1937's Make Way for Tomorrow from my mind. And it's even less the film's fault that it can't compete with Make Way for Tomorrow: if we were to throw out every film that wasn't as good as Make Way for Tomorrow, we'd be left with only several dozen movies from the entire span of cinema history.It's not even the fault of Love Is Strange that it banks...

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GET ME OUT OF HERE

Well, we got there: 2014 was able to produce a sci-fi/thriller YA adaptation that's uglier than Divergent from back in March. Which isn't something I'd have necessarily predicted as a possibility, let alone a likelihood, and it doesn't strike me as being a sensible place to sink all that much time and energy. But the creators of the The Maze Runner did just that, no matter how much first-time feature director Wes Ball promises that he was trying...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THIS STORY IS A WARNING TO MANKIND

Gamera vs. Zigra didn't single-handedly drive Daiei Film to bankruptcy; but as one of the last handful of movies that company released before it did temporarily wink out of existence in December, 1971, it's a rather clear example of what was going on at the studio that forced such a drastic step. It's a dreadful movie, almost totally unwatchable in every way; if I were going to hunt around desperately, looking for something to say in its praise,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1979: In which everybody wants to be the new Star Wars

Star Wars made an enormous shit-ton of money in 1977. We've clarified that already, but it's worth bringing it up over and over again, because it was the definitive truth in American filmmaking in the latter half of the 1970s, basically until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial finally proved that a movie could make an even more enormous shit-ton of money in 1982.Now, enormous shit-tons of money are the one thing absolutely guaranteed to get everybody's attention...

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