An Evening with Kevin Smith Some people think he helped make independent movies relevant again. Others firmly believe that mentioning his name among the likes of Tarantino, Linklater, and Soderbergh is akin to sacrilege. Don’t even ask those same people about his writing skills, which at times can make an Aaron Sorkin project look like […]
eXistenZ The story is straight outta modern/near-future pop culture: Using a “bioport,” you can jack your body and mind into an immersive game world a world served up by a handheld bio-engineered creature called a “game pod” that is essentially a blood-pulsing Nintendo. There are no computers in the film just the mutated organisms that
Easy Rider Some films captivate the zeitgeist of the American imagination so completely that they become instant cult favorites. But few such films prove potent enough to retain the favor of audiences in perpetuity. So the fact that, 35 years after the film’s release, audiences around the world are still captivated by the raw vision
Elmer Gantry Burt Lancaster shines as the titular Elmer Gantry, a revival preacher with a questionable past and uncertain motives, in the epic film that won Oscars for Lancaster, Shirley Jones (as a hooker from Gantry’s past), and the script by Richard Brooks. Written with an assured bite, Gantry skewers “that old time religion” with
Enemies of Laughter Yet another entry into a genre popularized in the late 1990s: The Hollywood romantic comedy about the successful man who just can’t make romance work. (Later this would evolve into the woman who just can’t make romance work genre, followed by the lesbian who just can’t make romance work genre). Saddled with
Dummy Just before Adrien Brody delivered his Oscar winning performance as an isolated and frightened Holocaust survivor in The Pianist, he played a whole different kind of isolated and frightened. As Steven, a lonely underachiever in Greg Pritikin’s fantastic indie comedy Dummy, Brody finds solace not in piano music, but in the twisted art of
Duplex I feel for you. I thought the same thing. But it’s only a few short minutes into Duplex when you realize just how wrong you were. Two things clue you in to the lackluster experience to come. First is an animated pre-credits sequence that shows a cartoon Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore haplessly looking
Dungeons & Dragons You know you’re in big trouble when halfway through a movie you ask yourself, “What would be better? Sitting through the rest of this garbage or receiving a scratch to the retina?” Ultimately, the question is moot, since both are examples of ocular mayhem. The impulse as you sit through Dungeons &
The Hulk Months before The Hulk director Ang Lee announced he’d rely solely on CGI to create his colossal star, fanboys from Portland to Poughkeepsie worried about how the not so jolly green giant would look on screen. Early trailers fuelled speculation that Hulk would resemble Shrek, which made dedicated Hulk a maniacs very angry.
Human Nature If nothing else, writer Charlie Kaufman has created a style of comedy all his own. He is one of the very few screenwriters able to distinctly stamp his unmistakable personality on a film. Much like his previous Being John Malkovich, Kaufman again has his script brought to the big screen by a music
