I didn’t start the month planning on discovering obscure silent era films based on literary masterpieces, but between this and the previously considered 1915 ALICE IN WONDERLAND… well… here we are.
Continue reading ‘johnlink ranks L’INFERNO (DANTE’S INFERNO) (1911)’
When you say something is brought to you buy the guy who made LEGION and PRIEST you aren’t exactly starting off on the right foot. Fortunately, I didn’t know that going in or I may have avoided DARK SKIES altogether.
I don’t think I have really LIKED a Roland Emmerich film since INDEPENDENCE DAY, and that is a movie I have carefully avoided for fear that my adult brain will reject what my teenage brain loved. I’ll see Emmerich’s films. They are usually somewhat funny, mostly entertaining, mind-numbing, popcorn-assaulting, blunderbusses. It is in this spirit that I finally saw WHITE HOUSE DOWN.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a sucker for thrillers. Promise me some suspense and some intrigue and I am in, even if I’m pretty sure those promises are empty. I watched GONE even though I heard it was not very good.
I was looking for a nice short feature and found that an HD BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was on demand. I realized it was nearly fifteen years since its initial release (to see how far movie planning has come in the past decade and a half: this small indie film was a July release). I’ve watched plenty of found footage since, both good and bad. But how does the original hold up?
Continue reading ‘johnlink ranks THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)’
I’m a Wes Anderson fan, but not a good Wes Anderson fan. I still haven’t gotten around to MOONRISE KINGDOM or DARJEELING LIMITED. So it’s hard to say you are a fan of a guy when you haven’t seen two of the four movies he has done over the past seven years. But I am saying it anyway. Regardless, I finally got to the theater to see GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL.
Continue reading ‘johnlink ranks GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)’
When selecting a movie for the night, one never really expects to end up on a forgotten Charles Bronson action movie. But, then, life is full of surprises. Three minutes before I saw MESSENGER OF DEATH I had never even heard of it. Now, I’ve seen it, written an article on it, and you are reading this. We live in a marvelous age.
The critically panned KILLING SEASON brought together John Travolta and Robert De Niro to hunt each other in the woods. The critics may have hated it, but my brother really enjoyed it. I figured it was worth a shot.
Last night I needed something irreverent, thoughtless, and fun. DEATH RACE 2000 popped up in my On Demand, and I thought it sounded like it fit that bill. I was surprised at how clean and pristine the HD print of this thing looked. I was expecting low-fi and would have been fine with that. I’ll certainly take a beautiful remastering though!
Stumbled across this 1915 version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND which, even though I may not be a math expert, is 99 years old by my calculations. It was a feature for its time, at 52 minutes (the film is even split into Part 1 and Part 2). But this was a brief enough length to see what a century old ALICE looked like.
Continue reading ‘johnlink ranks ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1915)’
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