2013-10-31

Scream



Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

Scream is a 1996 American slasher film written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven. The film stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Drew Barrymore, and David Arquette. It follows the character of Sidney Prescott (Campbell), a high school student in the fictional town of Woodsboro, who becomes the target of a mysterious killer known as Ghostface. Other main characters include Sidney's best friend Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), Sidney's boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), film geek Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), deputy sheriff Dewey Riley (Arquette), and news reporter Gale Weathers (Cox). 

Re-Animator



Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985)
Gory as hell and funny as it could be, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a horror film lover’s wet dream. With enough classic elements of Sci-fi and Horror with the genius turned mad scientist in Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) openly based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-Animator story and a distant homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Re-Animator didn’t become a cult classic for the quality of its acting. Maybe. But it’s the outstanding use of gore and blood that at first gets in your face. Then it’s the cartoonesque story of the two young students Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) and West (Combs) playing with life re-animating every corpse that gets in their way and the always in the wrong place Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton) that is the tender half of Dan. 

2013-10-30

The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
Often praised by critics and recommended by one of my friends, Christian Audet an Independent filmmaker and Horror aficionado, The Wicker Man is an intriguing and very interesting movie. Sgt Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is a catholic investigating the Summerisle community about a missing young girl. The people of the village don’t want to collaborate and Howie witnesses many pagan rituals that alarm him. Those are Celtic pre-catholic rituals including couples copulating in public fields, teaching children the importance of the maypole as a phallic symbol, women dancing around a fire naked to celebrate the coming of a child, and strange cures like putting a frog in the mouth for a sore throat.

2013-10-29

An American Werewolf in London

An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)
David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are two young men on a backpacking trip in Europe beginning by England and then fleeing to Italy. After a long day of walking in the rain, they attend a weird pub where they get expelled for asking a wrong question. Just after, they are attacked by a mysterious beast. It easily get obvious that it was a werewolf. Jack dies of his wounds but David got saved by the villagers who kill the beast. David then wakes up in the hospital getting treated for his scars and traumatism but it slowly gets clearer that he is now the new werewolf and that the curse of the werewolf must be stop by killing the last of them.

2013-10-28

Don't Look Now

Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
After the accidental death by drowning of their daughter, a couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) goes to Venice for a contract of church restoration. Laura (Christie) meets a couple of elderly sisters that told her that her daughter his still with them. It is one of the sisters, who is blind, that tells that she can see her sitting between them. Following this memorable scene the couple will be intertwined in a story of look alike and apparitions. It also contains one of the most well recognized sex scenes ever shot on film.

2013-10-25

Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990)
Of Jean-Luc Godard’s post masterpiece era, his films made after 1968 the year he discovered Maoism and let the traditional narratives of Cinema away to make a more instinctive form of films that are quite unique and complex but also not accessible for a wider public, Nouvelle Vague stands as a beautiful strange film that flirts with Science-Fiction, in a plot line manner, and the Hitchcock thriller. A film starring no other than Alain Delon that plays twin brothers who eventually are complete opposites of each other and that create a mystery on the meaning of it all.

2013-10-24

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1977)
This Gothic homage to F.W. Murnau’s Expressionistic masterpiece of 1922, brings to the big screen another vision of the classic story of Dracula. Shot simultaneously in German and in English, Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu highlights the bleak bringing of the plague and the loneliness of its title character.

2013-10-23

Nosferatu

Nosferatu (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922)
A classic canon of Films with a major F and one of the earliest instalments of Horror in movies, Murnau’s Nosferatu has inspired, influenced, been copied, and idolized. This review won’t try to repeat the thousands of analysis and critics it already been praised and sang. However, this critic who is now writing at the third person, ranks it as one of his personal favorite films. Not just Silent films but films in general. It even was on this critic’s ballot for the 2012 Sight and Sound Poll. But BFI didn’t asked me to cast my votes so I won’t be bragging much about it.

2013-10-22

Carrie (1976)

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)
With the reinterpretation of Stephen King’s novel by Kimberly Pierce lately, it was natural that the classic Horror film that amongst all film enthusiasts, Quentin Tarantino himself ranks as one of his favorite films of all time would be revisited. And for Halloween’s sake let’s have a re-watch of this landmark.

2013-10-21

Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
Life out of balance is the translation proposed by the film from the title of the first chapter of the Qatsi trilogy.The shooting of the images began in 1975 and from time to time and with the new funding from IRE, director Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke assembled a ton load of film shot all around USA. This poetic visual documentary has only images and the mystical music by composer Philip Glass. The narrative is however very clear and the music juxtaposed to slow motion and time-lapsed (fast forward) photography makes a great deal of the wonders of nature, progress, and the mess made by mankind.

2013-10-19

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead (Zombi) (George A. Romero, 1978)
Let’s go  to the mall said Robin Sparkles, but here it is a question of survival that our four protagonists escape by helicopter and land on a mall in Pennsylvania. Two SWAT members Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), an helicopter pilot Stephen (David Emge) and his wife Francine (Gayleen Ross) take refuge in this suburban mall where they have food, ammunition's, and leisure to pass the time. However, the zombie infested lands of America isolate them from the rest of the world and zombies seem to be attracted by the shopping centre. Explaining why, the characters only summarize it by saying that it is their instinct of converging to a place that was important for them. As a consultant I have worked in a mall for two years straight at a client’s offices and I really enjoyed it and someone can almost never leave the place and live his whole life there. It wouldn’t be sane to do but most people may find it appealing. Even the central characters of the film go on a shopping spree and calculate how much the things they get costs.

2013-10-18

Mighty Aphrodite

Mighty Aphrodite (Woody Allen, 1995)
There are those directors that do nothing for you as a person and there are those who are a big deal for you because you can connect with them at a level that only a few are able to do. Amongst the vast variety of directors and filmmakers out there, Woody Allen could easily be the director that could write and direct my life. Not because I think that my life is like a Woody Allen movie or that I live a life like his, but it would be his touch and his color that I would like to have on my biography. The other possible directors are Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, and obviously Stanley Kubrick.

2013-10-17

Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

A young couple move into a new apartment, only to be surrounded by peculiar neighbors and occurrences. When the wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, paranoia over the safety of her unborn child begins controlling her life.

2013-10-16

The Palm Beach Story

The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
A couple in financial trouble decides to split apart so that the wife (Claudette Colbert) could find a wealthy new husband that could help her ex-husband (Joel McCrea) to get his company take off and make a profit.

2013-10-14

Histoire(s) du Cinéma

Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard)
This unique series of documentaries on the history or histor(ies), is a play on the fact that there are more than one history to tell a fact or a manifestation that happened. Godard began his career as a film critic, then a film director, an auteur, a philosopher, a Maoist, and he easily got his degree in History only with his own attempt at summarizing some of the most important moments of film History. To him, the Cinema is the greatest of all Arts. And by using History of Art, classical poetry, stills from hundreds of films, and his mastery of editing, Godard demonstrates how Film became to get the control of the universe.

2013-10-11

A Good Day to Die Hard

A Good Day to Die Hard (John Moore, 2013)
The first instalment of this franchise, Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis as New York policeman John McClane visiting his family for Christmas and getting struck in the Takami building in an hostage takeover by terrorists was original, fresh, a brilliant homage to John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, and a new twist on the Action genre. As the writer of those lines, I loved the first three movies of the Die Hard series, and even if this blog is more about classics, art house, and high brow cinema I can actually enjoy a good movie and appreciate many aspects even if it only involves explosions and gun fires. The action genre is not the kind of movies that bores most of people. Well, some people who elevates themselves over pedestrians and think they are better than the majority might contempt this kind of entertainment. It is their problem. For me if it’s entertaining in some way I’ll be entertained and I think that it success its main goal when we speak about movies. But I would have had a different speech if we were talking about films although.

2013-10-09

Broadway Danny Rose

Broadway Danny Rose (Woody Allen, 1984)
In my illness that is cinephilia I have to admit to have more than one vice. But the most vile of them all is the fact that I am a completist. I like to watch all the movies a director has made all along his career. Even if it is as expansive as Alfred Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman and even if it was shortened like Andrei Tarkovsky or Stanley Kubrick. When I like a director’s major films I tend to look to his underappreciated ones and watch them and most of the time like them. The same thing happens with Woody Allen a writer director who writes and direct at the pace of one movie per year since the early 1970’s has made easily more than forty films and seems to not even slowing down today.

2013-10-07

Hour of the Wolf

Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
When one gets into art house cinema masters, it is mandatory to step into Ingmar Bergman’s territory. With such landmarks as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Cries and Whispers, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander just to name a few. But once a cinephile has seen all the major films from Bergman there’s another level of films into his vast filmography. Into those titles you find interesting pictures that explore a concept, a sentiment, or a state of mind more clumsily than his aforementioned work, but still, very strong films. Lesser Bergman is still better than most of the mainstream film out there.

2013-10-05

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chboski, 2012)
After having issues in mid school, Charlie (Logan Lerman) is having problems making friends as a freshman. Reserved and mostly silent, he gets along with his English teacher Mr. Anderson (Paul Rudd), who becomes his guide or older advice. Until he meets Patrick (Ezra Miller) and Sam (Emma Watson), they are step siblings and immediately took Charlie under their wings.

2013-10-04

The Sacrifice (Offret)

The Sacrifice (Offret) (Andreï Tarkovsky, 1986)
The final film of Andreï Tarkovsky, Offret is his most obvious attempt at making a film like his idol : Ingmar Bergman. The comparison with the Swedish master will be aborded later in this review, but that fact diluate the value of the work of Tarkovsky in this film. His signature, of superb cinematography and philosophical plots of spirituality are present but so bergmanian in their execution that it fades his personality as a creator.

2013-10-02

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
Of all the comedies from writer-director Preston Sturges, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek might be one of the most appreciated. Maybe for its irreverent satire or the sheer fun this movie is all about. But the thing that hooked me was figuring how the censors of the Hays Code were waking up pregnant one morning never knew what happened to them just like its lead character Trudy (Betty Hutton). They did not knew what happened but they sure let one big rock fall into the middle of the creek.
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