Let’s clear the air about Taylor Swift and who she is, what she is and her legitimacy as a pop music force. First off, the young singer (now 20, soon to be 21 in December) hit the scene as a country music artist whose popularity grew in a grass roots sort of way. She was the anti-Britney Spears – someone vulnerable, sincere and innocent even if her lyrics proved to be biting and bitter at times.
It’s hard to believe, but nearly a decade after J.K. Rowling’s massively successful fantasy series made the leap from page to screen with the 2001 release of HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, we are finally reaching the end of one of the most popular movie sagas in cinema history. HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 is already in theaters, with PART 2 – the conclusion – on its way early next year. And then we’ll have only memories … and books and DVDs and countless other bits of ephemera. As with all book-to-film adaptations, especially with a […]Read On »
Dancing can be dangerous, and not just physically. The canon of ballet narratives is full of tales of people (mostly women) who dance themselves to death. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s seminal 1948 THE RED SHOES famously turned a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale into a fable set in the world of ballet. Now director Darren Aronofsky uses the classic SWAN LAKE as the backdrop and catalyst for the potential implosion of his heroine.
If THE X-FILES had decided to do a Christmas episode for the R.L. Stine set, it might have been something like RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE. Made and set in Finland, general vicinity where the mythical Santa supposedly dwells, RARE is a horror movie pitched at kids, with bits of gore (dead animals, a bitten ear) but mostly a sense of menace and black comedy.
To clear up one possible area of confusion at the outset, I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS is not about someone who has fallen for the tobacco company of that name. Instead, it is the fact-based story of Steven Russell, a con artist who managed to non-violently escape from jail on four different occasions and for awhile pulled off a number of astonishing cons, many of them to assist the love of his life, Phillip Morris.
Doug Liman could be dubbed the “spy guy” of producer/directors. True, his first feature film as a director was SWINGERS and he’s delved into other genres with GO and JUMPER, but his helming of THE BOURNE IDENTITY and MR. AND MRS. SMITH indicate a predilection for the world of people pretending to be what they’re not. Currently, Liman’s latest feature as director/ producer is in theatres. FAIR GAME tells the story of real-life CIA agent Valerie Plame, played by Naomi Watts, whose cover was blown by American government officials to punish her diplomat husband Joseph Wilson, played by Sean Penn, […]Read On »
I blame AVATAR for this whole thing. AVATAR, you owe the world an apology. You came out last year with the most amazing 3-D and now every crapsterpiece movie that comes out is in 3-D. Sure, there were movies that did 3-D before AVATAR, and some of them did it well (CORALINE). But ever since AVATAR the movie studios have started releasing even more movies in 3-D hoping to capture some of those unobtainum dollars. But, really, none of those movies put in the time, effort and money to look as great as the 3-D in AVATAR did. Don’t believe […]Read On »
It’s ironic that two of the coolest wild west scores to arrive in years both hail from Down Under, as Dmitri Golovko’s RED HILL joins Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ THE PROPOSITION as prime examples of how to give an old musical warhorse a shot of ferocious outlaw energy. But where PROPOSITION’s nerve-jangling percussion brought modern experimentalism to a blood-soaked period piece, RED HILL shoots its raw, old-school acoustic sound into a contemporary western- in this case playing the last stand outback sheriff standing against a recently released villain out for some biblical payback. There’s very little that’s Aussie here […]Read On »
It’s finally time to snatch a pebble out of Film Score Monthly’s hand with this soundtrack two-fer, which combines music from two poetically different scores for men seeking their way in the American outback. The first traveler just happens to be everyone’s favorite Shaolin fugitive monk Cain, whose mystical tête-à-têtes with his teachers are front and center through much of KUNG FU. Though designed as a concept album in 1973 by composer Jim Helms, some score purists might take umbrage to so much dialogue on an FSM release. Yet it’s almost hard to imagine Helms’ harmonies without the Confucianisms, the […]Read On »
I’ve been getting on a 1980s movie kick as of late, not doubt aided by the constant influx of DVD and Blu-ray releases of classic (and no so classic) films from that era. The Blu-ray of William Lustig’s 1983 revenge fantasy flick VIGILANTE finally hits Blu-ray and it’s another forgotten cult classic. Starring Robert Forster and badass Fred Williamson, this is surprisingly one of those films I missed over the years (don’t remember it from cable, nor video stores).
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