1. Jaws We almost never lose site of the beach and the ocean in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 timeless film Jaws – over someone’s shoulder, outside the window, just beyond the swing set in the back yard, the threat of the great white is ever present. Far from their home in the Big Apple, Amity Island’s …
Back in the 60s, the world of film and television wasn’t as dominated by big franchises as it is now simply because there obviously weren’t as many. In the realm of science fiction, there were really only a few big names and two of them were Star Trek and The Planet of the Apes. Now …
It would be easy to only view Dawn of the Planet of the Apes through the lens of previous Apes films. The references complement the new themes at work.
Leave it to Mad Men to recapture the power Planet of the Apes’ ending must have held for audiences that hadn’t been inured by decades of spoilers. Juxtaposing the scene on the beach and all that it implies with the violence that swept the nation in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination only serves to deepen its significance. “Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad,” and Mad Men is a show that’s always understood this.
Anybody who has ever been to a high school reunion (and I’ve been to my share) will tell you that the calendar and the clock can be incredibly cruel (particularly when combined with the long-term effects of gravity, but let’s not go there). Time punishes creative works as well. Some work grows dated, stale, stiff. …
Whether you measure your movies by box office, reviews, or popular appeal, Sony’s $125 million remake of the 1990 Ah-nuld Schwarzenegger interplanetary action fest Total Recall looks like a strike-out. The movie opened with a lethal softness; a $25.7 million first weekend meaning Recall won’t even come close to making back its budget during its …
*Exclaimer: Please don’t read this if you haven’t seen Inception, The Empire Strikes Back, Planet of the Apes, The Wizard of Oz, Saw, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense – As a probable testament to my poor academic acumen, I cannot, in good memory, recall the particulars of the situation …
There are all kinds of producers: hucksters, hustlers, con men and schlockmeisters. Some are in it for the glory, some like to walk the red carpet with a starlet on their arm. For some, the biggest award is a box office hit and it doesn’t matter what kind of crap they throw on the screen …
We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977). And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), …
At a time of the year that’s all about picking the best of the best among movies, it seems singularly appropriate to talk to someone whose year-round profession is assaying the good and the bad up on the big screen. “I’m one of the few people on the paper who’s never had a journalism class, …