COMING TO GET YOU

History remembers 1953's House of Wax as the first big studio film shot in 3-D during that gimmick's earliest incarnation. History remembers this so well, in fact, that history tends to overlook that House of Wax has perhaps even more significant a claim to fame: it was more or less the movie that first linked Vincent Price to the horror genre. I can't make that claim entirely divorced of hedging: it would be another half-decade until he appeared...

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THERE IS NO DOG BUT DOG

Bias time: I was barely prepared to like John Wick at all, and the possibility of loving it seemed so laughably remote that it hadn't even occurred to me. And yet here we are, and I kind of loved John Wick. It's a silly world.On paper, the film is generic as generic gets: John Wick's (Keanu Reeves) wife dies of an unnamed disease (Bridget Moynahan plays the role, such as it is), and her final act on this world is to arrange for a beagle puppy to...

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NONNEIN

Feature-length toy commercials may not get much more crass than Ouija: "You can buy one of these at your local toy store", one character literally snorts at one point, and that's after the infomercial-like exchange during which two other characters speculate about how nice it would be if there were some sort of... anything... that let you communicate with the dead people you've known... some sort of easily obtainable board, perhaps. But points for...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1989: In which I wanted a Ron Howard picture in the series, dammit, and this is the one I picked

The post title says it all, really. Ron Howard is an important Hollywood director, and I felt that I had to include him; but there was no reason I could come up with for any individual title in his filmography. 1989 had no other compelling contenders, plus I had never seen the director's film Parenthood from that year, which was a plus.Forgive the ungainly backstage ruminations on how I assembled the Hollywood Century schedule, but I share it now,...

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A BOY AND HIS MONSTERS

36 years after Daiei Film wrapped up its loose trilogy of yokai-themed spooky-but-not-quite-horror films for children, Kadokawa Pictures elected to resurrected the franchise - Kadokawa being the place where the disintegrating remains of Daiei ended up around the beginning of the 2000s. And naturally enough, given the desire to whip up a new children's movie, the studio turned to director Miike Takashi, well-known for his hyper-violent, imaginatively...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1988: In which the mindless destruction and brutality that have defined the 1980s in cinema attain artistic perfection

Speaking entirely personally, you understand, I'd be quick to identify the 1980s as the worst decade in the history of American filmmaking (though I recognise the strong argument in favor of giving that title to the 1960s, and frankly, the 2010s aren't heading in a very promising direction). It was a formulaic, money-driven, recklessly safe period in Hollywood, even conceding that Hollywood is always all of those things; and it certainly produced...

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BAT MAN BEGINS

There was not ever going to be a good reason to tell the secret tragic backstory of how Count Dracula, one of English culture's all-time best unrelentingly wicked bad guys, was actually motivated by love of his family and country. Let's be totally clear about that part. Secret tragic backstories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Darth Vader had already tried to ruin two of cinema's finest villains; the same treatment for Bram Stoker's merciless,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1987: In which one of the most legendary flops of all time ruins a career for no good reason

The gap between American cinema in the 1970s and in the 1980s, as much as anything, is the gap between little and big movies. The '80s did not invent "big" cinema, of course, but the post-Star Wars ecosystem loved high concepts and sprawling productions a whole hell of a lot, and this love began infecting everything, even things it clearly shouldn't have.And here we are, at one of the biggest "shouldn't haves" in the history of Hollywood filmmaking:...

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ALL RAPT UP

The moment when you start to voice the old "I can't believe they left that part of of the book out of the movie! That was the best part!" complaint, and the movie about which you are complaining is Left Behind, that's when you discover that you need to take a nice long break from watching movies, and perhaps should go for more walks out in the woods. But they did leave the best part out, and I can't believe it. They also left out a huge amount of...

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: FORCE MAJEURE (RUBEN ÖSTLUND, SWEDEN / DENMARK / FRANCE / NORWAY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/12World premiere: 18 May, 2014, Cannes International Film FestivalThere's an entirely great film living solely within the footage that makes up the complete Force Majeure, and plenty of people would apparently argue that the great film is the final cut. Hence the film's victory in the Un Certain Regard program at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, its selection as Sweden's official submission to the Foreign Language Film...

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TANKS FOR NOTHING

War is violent. Did you know? Was this something that you might have guessed at, even in your most wild fantasies? Because the new World War II movie Fury seems to have run out of ideas above and beyond "war is violent", though it makes up for that by suggesting that war was really really fucking violent, and showing that violence in all the wide-eyed amazement that can possibly be scrounged up. And then filtering it through cinematography by Roman...

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