Last week, I introduced you all to the best so-bad-it’s-good movie you’ve never seen. The above video is a compilation of my favorite parts, and here is my full review I promised:
Continue reading My Streets: The Best Parts & Full Review
Category: Reviews
As I Lay Dying: Filming the ‘Unfilmable’
As I Lay Dying (2013)
Directed by James Franco
Screenplay by James Franco and Matt Rager
Based on the novel by William Faulkner
Spoiler-free.
As I Lay Dying is James Franco’s seventh feature-length film as a director, but only his second to receive much of a release. The first was The Broken Tower, a biography of the poet Hart Crane, which was completed as his MFA thesis for NYU. Despite the fact that Focus picked it up and it starred Franco and Michael Shannon, that film felt like a student film through and through, and Franco received the critical berating he earned. Two years later, he’s back with another difficult work of American Modernism.
James Franco kind of stepped into a minefield with this one. The literary crowd is unimpressed with his famoused-my-way-into-a-book-deal poetry and prose, and his more mainstream fans are turned off by his occasional excursions into ‘pretentious shit’. Here, then, is a way to alienate two distinct fan bases at once.
I must just be a contrarian, because these are the sorts of films that interest me most.
Continue reading As I Lay Dying: Filming the ‘Unfilmable’
Ender’s Game: Hollywood, Please Let Me Re-Edit It
Ender’s Game (2013)
Written and Directed by Gavin Hood
114 min.
Very minor spoilers ahead.
I read Ender’s Game a week before seeing the movie, and now I almost wish I hadn’t, because the book is fucking great. I don’t know whether I would have liked the movie more, or less, if I hadn’t read the book first, but I do know that I won’t be able to talk about the movie without talking about the book.
Don’t worry, though—I’m not going to make a checklist of everything the book did right that the movie did wrong. In fact, I’ll say up front that I don’t think that movie adaptations of books have any business being ‘faithful’. Or rather, I think they should be faithful in specific ways, and not in others. For instance, it’s important that an adaptation captures the themes, character arcs, and, whenever possible, the tone of its source. It’s not important that it hits every plot beat, or revisits every location, or namedrops every side character. That sort of keeping faith does little beyond providing little jolts of recognition to fans of the source material. A movie can get bogged down in superfluous details, or tripped up in its pacing, if it just methodically ticks off a checklist of things that happened to have happened in the book. And this, unfortunately, is what happened with Ender’s Game.
Continue reading Ender’s Game: Hollywood, Please Let Me Re-Edit It
Smug Film At The Movies #1: Escape From Tomorrow
Escape From Tomorrow (2013)
Written and Directed by Randy Moore
90 min.
Last Friday, Smug Film critics Cody Clarke and Jenna Ipcar went to see Escape from Tomorrow at the IFC Center. Here are their respective spoiler-free takes on it.
Continue reading Smug Film At The Movies #1: Escape From Tomorrow
A Journey Through The Nightmare on Elm Streets
A great behind-the-scenes shot of Patricia Arquette from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
This month, Amazon had the blu-ray set of all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies on sale for like $23. I’d never seen any of them before, and at that price, I figured now would be a pretty good time to do so. Even though the series is quite uneven, it’s an interesting one. Here are my thoughts on each, with very mild spoilers, if any:
Continue reading A Journey Through The Nightmare on Elm Streets