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Vampire Film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” Excels
In this century, properties like Twilight, Vampire Academy, and even things like Underworld and Blade have infantilized the vampire genre. These films are overtly focused on either relationship drama for the girls or supernatural action for the boys, leaving very few recent vampire movies capable of approaching these creatures of the night and their mythology with any nuance or depth. Enter A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a wonderful bit of nuance and grim splendor.
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“Burying the Ex” Trailer Uses Zombie Girlfriend as Metaphor for Hobbled Relationships
Keeping in line with the horror comedy of something like Zombeavers, I watched the trailer for Burying the Ex. Here, we are introduced to Max (Anton Yelchin, of Star Trek fame) and his relationship problems. For reasons that are unclear (though not particularly important), he wants to break up with his girlfriend Evelyn (Ashley Greene) but is struggling to actually go through with it. He’s relieved of the chance when Evelyn is hit by a bus, presumably just before he had worked up the courage to pull the trigger. After spending some time moping around his apartment, his friend urges him to get back out into the dating pool where he meets Olivia (Akexandra Daddario). However, as the trailer explains to us, some relationships just won’t die.
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The B-Movie “Zombeavers” is Funny, Weird, and Spooky Schlock.
The very best B-movies are the ones that do not take themselves too seriously and can create a playfully scary tone, hopefully while people run away from puppets or people in rubber suits. Gore is a plus, too. If these are the criteria, then Zombeavers is a champion. The scene before the opening credits (which have some really fun animation) has Bill Burr and John Mayer as truckers transporting some toxic waste (of course). Burr’s character isn’t paying enough attention and slams into a deer, losing a barrel of the waste in the process. The barrel rolls into the creek, and gets caught in a beaver dam, where it begins to leak. This is all the explanation we will ever get for the origin of the zombeavers.
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Tomorrowland’s Wonder and Spirit Marred by Preachy, Unsubtle Third Act
There are moments in Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland that overflow with joy and awe as the film whisks us away to another world of boundless imagination, possibility, and promise. In fact, the more we are forced to decipher from the fleeting glimpses of Tomorrowland and the more we are encouraged to wonder at what it truly is, the more successful the film is. It is an unfortunate shock then that as soon as the film pulls back all obfuscation of the eponymous world, it descends into awkward preaching and pandering.
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Fassbender Disappears in Steve McQueen’s “Hunger”
Who wants to have exactly zero fun watching Michael Fassbender starve himself to death? If there are any takers, I’d love to point you to Steve McQueen’s Hunger, a dramatization of the 1981 Irish hunger strike. McQueen burst onto the scene with this sobering tale of a five-year-long protest by incarcerated members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In Hunger, McQueen offers up the raw filth of the history, but also reveals the depravity justified by a ruling government when dealing with “enemies”, a timely theme considering the ascension of the surveillance state and hard questions about the incarceration of enemies of the state.
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“It” Remake in Limbo, Loses Director
Those who were excited to see Cary Fukunaga’s rendition of the Stephen King classic It are going to have to find something better to do with their lives now, as the director and New Line Cinema have parted ways over budget concerns and disagreements about how best to structure the marathon story. Fukunaga, best known as the director of eight episodes of True Detective, was keen on casting Will Poulter of Maze Runner fame as the iconic Pennywise, and wanted to structure the film similar to the ABC two-part miniseries from the early 1990s by crafting the story as two separate installments. New Line Cinema was less keen on the idea of shooting two complete films, and would prefer a more recognizable actor play the eponymous creature in clown form. Unfortunately, these differences appear irreconcilable, and the director and production company have thus parted ways.
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“Black Mass” First Trailer Reaction: Here’s Johnny!
When was the last time you were legitimately excited about a Johnny Depp movie? Be honest. Maybe you thought he and Tim Burton would pay appropriate homage to Alice in Wonderland (and were wrong). Or, before that, perhaps you thought a more faithful take on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was warranted (also wrong). Mortdecai? The Lone Ranger? Dark Shadows? Holy shit, Depp probably hasn’t done anything worthwhile in this century, with the possible exception of the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick. So, it is a relief to see him put down the makeup and funny hats and return to a serious role with Black Mass, which released its first full-length trailer recently.
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“The Raid” is Martial Arts Action at its Very Finest
The best action movies succeed by crafting sequences with jaw-dropping visuals and physical stunts, hopefully with characters that we care about and in a way that advances the story. More and more often, action movies in this century lean hard on the crutch of CGI to dazzle us, and usually they are happy to dispense with the story and characters in favor of large explosions, cartoonish monsters, and entire sequences “filmed” in a computer program. Used well, CGI is a powerful tool which can instill a film with detail, and acts to enhance that which appears on the screen – but we seldom see such restraint (the revelatory Mad Max: Fury Road is the most recent exception). In light of this trend, it is an absolute and almost visceral pleasure to experience The Raid from director Gareth Evans. The Raid (aka The Raid: Redemption) is a hybrid between your standard crime film and a martial arts escapade with a story semi-reminiscent of Dredd: an elite police team stages a raid on an apartment building controlled by a crime lord, but things go horribly wrong about six floors up, and the team is forced to fight their way out and struggle for survival as the crime lord’s henchmen descend upon them,
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“Pitch Perfect 2”: a Suitable Encore
There was never a reason to expect the sequel to Pitch Perfect to be very innovative. If you thought that the first movie was a tired exploitation of the popularity of Glee with a half-hearted attempt at comedy, then that’s what you’ll get with this rendition. Similarly, if you were amused by the a cappella mash-ups of recognizable hits and idiosyncratic humor of the original, then you’ll find much in which to delight with this continuation. There are a definite nods to the original, and I feel like the weaker parts of the first installment were minimized with the sequel, resulting in a slightly better movie overall.
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Ten Must-See Films from the Cannes Film Festival
I try my best to limit the number of listicles that I post, which simply amount to some number of things ordered for people to bicker over the order or exclusion of particular things. But, this isn’t so much something like “Harrison Ford’s Top 10 Movies (You’ll Never Guess what #3 is!)”, but instead a brief recounting of my highly-anticipated films to come out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival (which closed yesterday). These aren’t presented in any particular order, but I will mention those which have me the most interested. Almost all of the films that I am excited over competed for the Palme d’Or, but a couple of the films shown outside of competition have me intrigued as well. To make this as easy as possible, each film that I mention will contain a link that film’s imdb page. So, if you find yourself interested, you can find more information with a single click.
Film Criticism and Fiction Writing by Derek Jacobs
