I decided to go to Lodi, New Jersey, birthplace of horror rock pioneers the Misfits. A number of former Misfits still live in Lodi, apparently, including guitarist Franché Coma. It would be a real scream to bump into one of them somewhere at the end of a barren New Jersey street. That would be right up there with a Bigfoot sighting. I am saddened to report I came across no Misfits nor evidence of any Misfits while hanging out in Lodi last night....
This was the first time I’d made the trek out to Jojo’s final resting place. I had this daydream in my head before I got there that I’d kneel down and spill out all my troubles to Joey. Then, a flash pot would go off a few feet away and there he’d be, my childhood hero, in all his spindly, awkward, blue ghostly glory. “Joey,” I’d respond with a gleam in my eye....
Can we just stop? I know these films don’t cost anything to make, and it doesn’t take a genius to say, “LOL, Harry Potter is old,” so writing them is as simple as getting a couple of jackasses together in a room with a case of beer and a stack of genre DVDs. The whole genre, after a break in the 90s, is getting a serious beating, and I think it’s time to let the horse rest (or at least cast Leslie Nielsen more often)....
For those unfamiliar with the magic of The Room, it is the epitome of B-movie cinema. A film so bad that fans around the world, including myself, gather for midnight screenings to witness its corny dialogue, wooden acting, red herrings, continuity issues, green screen disasters, characters disappearing and framed pictures of spoons, all wrapped in a tale of love, betrayal and loss. It is an excruciatingly painful but blissfully absurd education in bad movie making....
The book, however, is a nuanced piece and the lead teenagers are sensitive and meditative people; for example, the boy, Augustus (played with gusto by rubber-faced Ansel Elgort), constantly has an unlit cigarette drooping from his lips as a metaphor (“You put the thing that does the killing right between your teeth but you never give it the power to kill you”) and he supposedly fears oblivion. On screen it comes off as, perhaps, a little pretentious but director Josh Boone and (500) Days of Summer writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber keep with the original text strictly, never straying far from Green’s vision....
The Flash Season 4, Episode 6 The Flash is not known for pushing the progressive envelope, but it rarely shows the level of cultural tone deafness that is on display in “When Harry Met Harry.” Literally every storyline included sexist, racist, or ableist subtext — a distraction in any sociopolitical climate, but one you would hope could be avoided in the current one. Ralph has to learn how to prioritize preventing or alleviating someone’s pain over the glory of catching the bad guy....
2.2 For Joe That’s probably the strongest aspect of The Following in its second season. It figured out a tone that worked for the show, and it’s sticking with it. That tone is gleefully dumb nihilism. This is one of the most hateful, black, cruel shows on television, and it’s absolutely glorious. The violence is sudden and senseless and (typically) very brutal, especially given the way the Bateman Twins have taken to composing dioramas out of their corpse collections....
“It was a universe that was open but it wasn’t necessarily intended to be one movie,” Villeneuve said during a roundtable interview at San Diego Comic-Con. “The desire was there, and there was so much that happened with the first movie that it froze there, and [Ridley Scott] thought it was dead.” But it wasn’t dead; it was just in limbo thanks to complicated issues involving the rights. “The producers from Alcon were able to unfreeze the rights, which was like a master negotiation to get the rights back to life,” Villeneuve said....
Aside from Anderson’s obvious stature as a filmmaker, the possible reason such actors (and many more besides) queue up to appear in a film like The Grand Budapest Hotel is because he can make every character, large or small, leap out of the screen. Tilda Swinton shows up on the screen for a matter of seconds, but her extraordinary countenance is such that you can still recall exactly what she looks like when the end credits have rolled 100 or so minutes later....
The reason for the invasion into my artistic lack of routine was, sadly, not to enquire as to what exciting projects I am involved with for an exclusive ‘arts and entertainment’ feature in the publication, but to garner information concerning the fire, which was, I am lead to believe, a heady mix of arson and vandalism on my neighbour’s house. Now, bearing in mind that I don’t know them very well, if at all, and that they have a reputation for weird, if not actually exotic, behaviour, I at first took it as a prank....
I was experiencing a little brake fade that necessitated a slow pace and a lot of gear changing. Even so I arrived at the entrance to Oradour in the late afternoon. I was surprised to find the village deserted – not even a gatekeeper to answer questions. The 2nd Waffen-SS Division Das Reich had been ordered by Hitler to stay out of trouble in the south until the true aims of the invading forces in the north had been ascertained....
Note the accent: that’s Drácula, not Dracula. Not Bela Lugosi in the Tod Browning-directed vampire tale that provided the fang-feature blueprint and cast a cloaking shadow over all that followed, but the Spanish-language version produced in the same year by the same studio. Legend has it that studios used to simultaneously produce foreign-language versions of movies as standard, though few of these alternate reels still exist. The Dracula doppelgänger produced to appeal to the Mexican immigrant demographic is a rare surviving exception, though, and was shot with an alternative cast on the vacant sets at night by director George Melford, whilst Tod Browning’s Hollywood classic was completed during the day....
So why does this misconception exist? Before this summer’s healthy box office run, some might have pointed to last year’s more meager take. “What I think it is is searching for a narrative,” says Corcoran, “and one of the things that happened with the rise of the Internet and the rise of streaming, it’s become this monocausal way of explaining everything… That’s been an ongoing thing that we have to fight against: any bad news, any downturn in attendance or box office is a sign of some sort of decline in the industry, and any good news is like, ‘Well, that was a good movie....
3.9 The Prize As the series and show starts to wrap up, no matter what’s come before, no matter the quality of acting, direction or writing there’s always going to be one simple question – will it stick the landing? As it looks like Episodes 9 and 10 are to be almost a two-parter, I would say that The Prize lines up very nicely for that final approach. This week it’s all about two deaths....
What’s more impressive is that it took a central concept that has been plundered many times over in comedies – the dinner party – and managed to sidestep the bulk of the pitfalls, and delivered an episode that was akin to welcoming a bloody funny old friend back into your front room. But this is an episode about the increasingly one-sided relationship between Jan and Michael. So we find out that Michael has little say what goes on in their home, doesn’t get to sleep in the main bed (did you catch the video camera pointing at it though?...
2.8 The Brothers That Care Forgot Yes, this episode contained the long-awaited return of the blondest Mikaelson with baby Hope in tow, and it was a reminder of just how much The Originals lost when she drove away from town last season. There were plenty of great characters to pick up the slack, and Hayley’s personality certainly benefitted from the requirement to be a new female lead, but there’s something Claire Holt gives to that character that just can’t be replaced....
However, the work is good enough to get Kemp a job with the San Juan Star, an English-language paper in Puerto Rico catering mostly to tourists and staffed by a motley assortment of flotsam and jetsam. After all, editor in chief E.J. Lotterman (Richard Jenkins) has no better options, and Kemp is young and +fiery enough to add a little spirit to a dispirited news room which features a heavy-drinking photographer named Sala (Michael Rispoli) and the deranged Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi) among many other colorful characters....
As a fanatical Simpsons fan, I sat down in the cinema hoping for good things, but painfully aware that a 22 minute TV show would struggle to stretch to 80 minutes, and that after 18 seasons, the show has changed massively and evolved into a more political, more issues-based comedy show, that isn’t as good as its original humour best. Back to the film, and the scene for the next 82 minutes is set as soon as the 20th Century Fox logo appears, complete with Ralph Wiggum standing inside the 0 of 20th making the noises of the Fox jingle....
The Simpsons: Season 29 Episode 19 The Simpsons season 29, episode 19, “Left Behind” is a righteous episode about a left-handed Samaritan whose head Homer has wanted to bash in with a pipe for years. Date night isn’t really a thing, until Marge makes it a thing. It’s a real Crotch 22. But it looks like Ned Flanders’ occupation isn’t a thing anymore either. The Leftorium, Ned’s left-handed item mall store that was downgraded to a kiosk, to which Ned was relegated to a co-renter, gets exorcized from the Springfield Mall....
