JULY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Two months into summer, two great films, and one awe-inspiring record-setting mediocrity. The season's second, generally small half begins now, and on paper at least, it looks promising. At least, for myself, there are more films I'm looking forward to in July than there were at the start of either May or June. There's always room for a surprise - or a disappointment, of course - but I confess myself feeling uncharacteristically optimistic.1.7.2015And here come two sequels to crap all over that optimism, though Magic Mike XXL certainly would seem...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR GETS MEAN - THEY'RE DEAD, THEY'RE ALL MESSED UP

As an inveterate lover of making grand historical movements out of molehills, it pleases me to know end that it's possible to pinpoint the exact year that American genre films switched from the classical to the modern age: 1968. In that year, both science fiction and horror made an immense, revolutionary leap forward, with a pair each of movies that made it simply impossible to take seriously the genre as it had developed to that point. Science fiction...

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THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST

A review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.The career of director Michelangelo Antonioni is not the kind that can be neatly summed up in blunt descriptions like "culmination", so I can't use that word to describe his 1975 triumph The Passenger. It does, however, clearly punctuate the director's career: the seventh feature in a chain of hyper-modern masterpieces stretching...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - THE BOLT-IN-THE-NECK GANG

On 10 April, 1966, Embassy Pictures released one of the most amazingly ludicrous double features in the history of crappy movies: not one but two horror/Western hybrids directed by William Beaudine, among the most prolific directors in the history of the medium. Alphabetically (I don't know which was the A-picture and which the B-picture - but spiritually they are both, of course, B-pictures of the first water), the first of these was Billy the Kid...

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A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

A review requested by Rachel P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.The broadly-defined genre of Prestige Picture Adaptations of Unassailable Literary Classics is terrifically old and terrifically durable, though it has had specific high and low points over the years. The most recent high, in the English-speaking world, covered most of the 1990s, when the successes of Kenneth Branagh's Henry...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - PARTY MONSTER

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-'60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself as a filmmaker in the 1960s, who was the first...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD

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: Pixar's grand return to artistic greatness, Inside Out, goes inside the human brain to take one look at how our minds interact with our memories. Here is another such look.Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been one of the most highly-regarded...

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BEST SHOT: THE RED SHOES

Well, Nathaniel went and did it: he finally picked the most beautiful movie ever made for Hit Me with Your Best Shot. We turn, this week, to The Red Shoes, the 1948 ballet drama written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, designed by Hein Heckroth, shot by Jack Cardiff, and generally speaking the movie in which Technicolor reached its peak, as well as possibly cinema itself, though I'd probably need to be a bit cagey about the...

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KENYA BELIEVE IT?

A review requested by a compassionate fellow, brimming with love for his fellow man, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.Revisiting a political advocacy documentary whose stated intent was to influence a presidential election years after it failed to do so probably isn't sporting, regardless of one's opinion about the politics involved. On the other hand, the 2012 essay film 2016: Obama's...

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NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict...

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ROBOT JOCKS

A trio of reviews requested by Bryce Wilson, with thanks for his multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.It is not enough to begin at the beginning. We have to go before the beginning, to 1995, when the 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion started to air on Japanese television. Telling the story of how skyscraper-sized humanoid biological robots called "Evas", piloted by emotionally damaged teenagers,...

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