SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

You couldn't order a more perfect first generation horror movie knock-off than The Vampire Bat. The 1933 effort by Majestic Pictures (which had no other meaningfully long-lived productions before it was absorbed into Republic Pictures at the end of the '30s) is very close to the platonic ideal of a cheap-ass attempt to simultaneously copy both Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein, the two films that ignited the horror boom of the '30s while almost...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - HOUSE OF MYSTERY

There's a particular subgenre of movies that's really popular, and relied on so heavily that just a few years after it broke out, the Hollywood studios have almost driven it into the ground. Hoping to freshen things up, one of the savviest producers around decides to offer a job to one of the most impressive directors working in another country, to bring a bit of that foreign stylistic flair to the moribund genre. And it works - the film that immigrant...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IN THIS LABYRINTH, WHERE NIGHT IS BLIND

The 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera is two things. One of these is the best of the small population of pure horror films made in the United States during the silent era. The other is a thorny mess to talk about, so we need to have some history. The short version of the story is all we need, which is that in 1929, Universal shot a large amount of new footage and heavily revised the movie for a 1930 re-release including sound passages, chopping...

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THE 1995 CANNES PROJECT

Updated thoughts now that it's over: Thanks so much to Nick for putting all of this together! I don't suppose I'll have as many chances to do such high-volume movie watching come the end of summer, and I'm tremendously happy to have started off my last summer of pre-grad school freedom with such a crazy, totally rewarding and surprisingly instructive project.Whip-smart film writer and all-round good human being Nick Davis makes a habit every year of celebrating the Cannes International Film Festival by spending some time exploring a previous edition...

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CANNES 1995: CLOSING DAY

About the projectTHE QUICK AND THE DEAD (Sam Raimi, USA/Japan)Screened out of competitionThe revisionist Western wouldn't exist without star and co-producer Sharon Stone, who hand-picked the director and two of her three co-leads; but it barely survives her (and that "barely" is me being more generous than the movie deserves). Her shallow, anachronistic performance is grating enough that even a rarely-worse Russell Crowe seems good in comparison. It's not right to lay all the blame on Stone, though: Simon Moore's screenplay is a nightmare of clattering...

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CANNES 1995: DAY 11

About the projectLA HAINE (Mathieu Kassovitz, France)Screened in the main competitionA snapshot of urban race relations that, in its youthful rage, its mixture of quotidian life and political urgency, and elements of its style, is easy to summarise as the French Do the Right Thing. The film's brazen success at message-slinging even lives up to that comparison, though it also suggests, rightly, that La haine isn't the most original thing out there. Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, and Saïd Taghmaoui are magnificent as the three buddies whose casual...

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SHINING AT THE END OF EVERY DAY

There has been some effort online to stress Damon Lindelof's presence as co-writer of Tomorrowland and thus somehow save the reputation of the film's director and other writer, Brad Bird. Which presumes in the first place that Tomorrowland is bad enough to justify insulating the beloved auteur from it, and I think that's far from an objective truth, even though it's obviously the worst of his five features. But more to the point, there's no separating...

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CANNES 1995: DAY 10

About the projectUNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica, France/Germany/Bulgaria/Czech Republic/Hungary/Serbia)Screened in the main competitionThe Palme d'Or winner, and it's easy to see why: the film's study of war's effect on the 20th Century is spiked with humor, black as the heart of a collapsed sun, that repeatedly knocks it around the head with a psychotic carnivalesque flair. Everything from its use of music (which is pure genius) to its frequently inexplicable blasts of almost surreal touches in the characters and mise en scène make it the one film...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: DISNEY THEME PARKS AT THE MOVIES

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: Disney's latest effort in brand-mining, Tomorrowland, takes the name (if nothing else) from one of the most famous attractions at Disney's various theme parks. Journey with me back to the beginning of this particular game.The effect of the monstrous...

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CANNES 1995: DAY 9

About the projectTHE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (Nicholas Hytner, UK)Screened in the main competitionAlan Bennett's drily sarcastic screenplay and Nigel Hawthorne's delectable turn as the imperious, then terrified, then deeply confused George III of Great Britain are the clear justifications for a movie that does a great job of exploring the nasty world of 18th Century British politicking, and not such a great job of populating it with characters worthy of it, His Majesty notwithstanding. It meets my cardinal rule for costume dramas, making the period...

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POINT OF VIEW

A review requested by Nathan Morrow, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.As titles go, Mind Game is perfect: it describes exactly what the movie is and plans to do to its audience (it's also in English and Latin characters, despite the film being overwhelmingly in Japanese). The 2004 animated feature is a psychological portrait that uses metaphysics, memory, and delirious shifts in perception...

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CANNES 1995: DAY 8

About the projectULYSSES' GAZE (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece/France/Italy)Screened in the main competitionGod bless anybody who can make it through all three hours without their attention faltering at least once. Angelopoulos's immodestly slow-moving cinema of languid shots and low-key performances isn't for everybody, and Ulysses' Gaze is a particularly extreme version of that. It sends Harvey Keitel as Greek-American film director "A" on a mission to find the oldest piece of cinema made in the Balkans, and straight into a heavily symbolic meditation...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SILENT HORROR - IT'S ALIVE

To begin with, define "horror" in a way that makes everybody happy; then solve the intractable mysteries of cinema history prior to 1920. And once you have done these two things, you can authoritatively state, "this is the first American horror film". But until we reach that point of pure intellectual fulfillment, the best we can do is to make our best approximation. So it's more a matter of convenience than rock-solid history that leads me to anoint...

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CANNES 1995: DAY 7

About the projectTHE NEON BIBLE (Terence Davies, UK)Screened in the main competitionYears later, Davies would confess that he found this, his third feature, a failure whose value was chiefly that without it, he wouldn't have been able to make The House of Mirth. And I am not one to disagree with a gifted filmmaker: it's hard not to regard this as the reigning low point of Davies's otherwise unblemished career. Which isn't the same as dismissing it as totally without its own merits: it's dazzling to look at, recasting the U.S. South of '30s and...

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THE PITCH IS BACK

Being "disappointed" in Pitch Perfect 2 would require having meaningfully elevated expectations for it, and hopefully not too many people would make that mistake. Cinema history is littered with comedy sequels that fail in exactly the way this one does: re-create the same plot beats and thematic arc, only do everything bigger, more expensive, and less funny. There are few enough exceptions that the course of wisdom is to just assume that you're heading...

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