This is the Robert Downey Jr./Zach Galifianakis black comedy which has the former trying to cross the country with no money or identification in time for his child’s birth. The latter tags along, mostly ruining every situation they encounter. I will see any Downey Jr. film I can. Galifianakis, though his shtick can grow tiresome, has won me over with his quality work in the HBO sitcom BORED TO DEATH. I was excited to see this, to be sure.
This is a movie which, as much as any, is single-handedly responsible for the number of low grade horror flicks that I watch. The first act of this movie scared the shit out of me as a high school student, and I found the film’s mania to be note perfect up through the 35 minute mark. That the last act unravels a bit into convention drives me to find those rare low budget horror flicks that CAN achieve perfection. This is a haunted town story, much like SILENT HILL, and is in many ways a precursor to that more sophisticated film (did I just call SILENT HILL sophisticated? Shit. I did). Furthermore, PHANTOMS is responsible for one of the best lines in any Kevin Smith movie, ever. Some SPOILERS below…
Watched my second Connery/Bond flick in the past couple of weeks, the first being DR. NO. In that review, I mentioned that I really remember liking GOLDFINGER, but that DR. NO may have been even better. It’s been several years since I saw GOLDFINGER, so I was curious how it stood up.
It has been far too long since I’ve watched a 70’s Slow movie. ’70s Slow’ being the idiom I coined for films which aren’t afraid to take their time as they slowly peel back the layers of a story, rather than hacking and slashing its way through a landscape with fast edits, unnecessary exposition, and direction targeted at the dumbest four people in the audience. No doubt this style of filmmaking has always been around, but for me it reached its peak in the 70s with films like CUCKOO’S NEST and CHINATOWN.
I’ve been wanting to see THE AMERICAN since it hit theaters (heck even its poster is 70s inspired), so I’m very glad it came across HBOHD this past month.
I remember seeing the cover art for this years ago and thinking it must be a wonderfully cheesy film. Kevin Costner stars as a Washington intelligence hopeful who is having a love affair with the mistress of Gene Hackman (as the Sec. of Defense), played by Sean Young. All I could hope was for it to be more suspense, and less cheese. SOME LIGHT SPOILERS FOLLOW.
Setting aside my affinity for the SILENT HILL flick, video games have been easily the worst source material for movies over the last decade. IFC was running ALONE IN THE DARK, and I thought it couldn’t be completely terrible if IFC found it worth airing. I’m not sure why I believed this possible despite the trifecta of A) Being a video game movie, B) starring Tara Reid, and C) being directed by Uwe Boll (who butchered such films as HOUSE OF THE DEAD, IN THE NAME OF THE KING, and BLOODRAYNE).
At the beginning of the year, I mentioned that I would probably re-rank films I had written about in the past two years. It took me until the end of October to watch something I had seen that recently. So here it is, my first re-ranking. When I do these, I plan to read my original article, but not look at the scores I gave it. I don’t want to repeat myself in the article, but I don’t want my previous numbers to effect my decision on what to score the title. SPOILERS below, so see my first article for a spoiler free ranking.
Depending on where you see this, it is either called INFECTION or INVASION. This is not the Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig film from 2007, this is a found-footage indie flick from ’05. Hey, it is almost Halloween. I had to watch at least one ultra low-budget horror movie on Fear Net before the end of the month.
I like to think of myself as a moderate Bond fan, but have admittedly only seen roughly half of the Bond flicks. DR. NO, the first in the series (not counting the Peter Sellers comedy), is one that I have seen. But I wanted to check it out again. GOLDFINGER is one I have vivid memories of, but DR. NO is a feature which time has eroded.
Many action films exist outside our own sense of reality. Some do this well (MR. AND MRS SMITH) and some do this poorly (LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD). Much of the success of this genre has to do with how true a film is to its own world. RED is the type of action flick which starts on all cylinders, informing you it does not intend to take place in the real world. So how does it hold up?
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