Life Itself (2014)
Directed by Steve James
120 min.
It seems that if you’re a film critic, your opinion of Life Itself boils down to whatever your opinion is of Roger Ebert. Those who disliked him, and have accused him of dumbing down film criticism by chewing up the art form in order to make it digestible for mass audiences, have disliked the film. And those who loved him for his wit, knowledge, and simple yet elegant prose, have championed it.
Stuck is one of the best horror movies of the last decade, and one of the only ones to ever make me cringe. It’s not for the faint of heart—and I mean that on a things-happening-to-the-human-body level as well as a human-beings-being-awful-to-each-other level.
It’s based on the (unfortunately) true story of a woman named Chante Jawan Mallard who, while driving home under the influence, hit a homeless man with her car. She then continued home with the man stuck, still alive, in the front windshield of her car, and intentionally left him to die in her garage. She is currently serving a 50-year sentence in a Texas prison.
It’s a horrific story, and fittingly, the film does not play the scenario for laughs. Unfortunately, the trailer does just that:
Continue reading The Worst Horror Trailer And Poster Of All Time
Marshall McLuhan. That’s right, that guy in the movie theater line scene in Annie Hall. McLuhan was a philosopher, and his contributions are right up there with those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. His particular focus was on mediums, and how they influence our thinking. A person raised before the printing press is different, on a functional level, from a person raised with a television in their home in the 60s, or a person raised with Wikipedia constantly at their fingertips. Our very modes of thought are changed by the forms of information around us.
Continue reading That Guy From Annie Hall Influenced Star Wars
The Purge: Anarchy (2014)
Written & Directed by James DeMonaco
103 min.
I want to preface this review by saying that when I went to see The Purge: Anarchy, the girl in front of me on the line for the concession stand had a picture of Drake in her wallet. This has no bearing on the rest of my review or the film; it’s just something I had to tell the world.
On to the movie.
Continue reading ‘The Purge: Anarchy’ Gets It Right, On Some Level
This is our 250th post! Woo! That’s a hell of a lot of posts, and even if you’re a fan of the site, you probably haven’t read all of them. So, here’s a list of some posts that have slipped through the cracks and don’t have as many views as some others, but are great and certainly worth checking out:
Proposed Double Feature: ‘The 400 Blows’ & ‘The Creature Who Walks Among Us’ | by John D’Amico