Moment of truth: I’ve never been the biggest Bryan Singer fan. Sorry X-Men enthusiasts, but not even the few moments of greatness in X2 can save what I consider to be a messy, character jammed superhero orgy. This description seems to sum up my biggest problem with Singer – he focuses on too many characters, making each one appealing but not necessarily desirable or memorable. Other Singer productions such as The Usual Suspects and Superman Returns suffer from similar issues, with characters being personalities and plot-movers when they should be our emotional connection to the events at hand, no matter how fantastical and unreal. It’s for this reason that Jack The Giant Slayer could’ve been a Singer game-changer – it’s a fairytale and, therefore, should have personality-defined characters that stay in their arch-types and move the story along, and yet Singer drops the ball, unable to figure out if he…
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Hitchcock famously said, “Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders,” and Stoker does this quite literally. During an intense moment that depicts a character coming to terms with an act of sexual violence, we see just how emotionally distraught the event has made her, only for the camera to slowly zoom out and reveal the character to be violently masturbating. It’s disturbing, sickening, and widely uncomfortable and the rest of Stoker plays exactly like this, with director Park Chan-wook subverting our emotional expectations and providing heavy dosses of psychological twistedness. In his first English language film, Chan-wook – who previously dazzled with 2003’s Oldboy – takes many tips from the Hitchcock handbook, crafting a spiraling thriller that’s part intriguing family drama and part wacked out horror. Is it good? Is it bad? I’m still not even sure I can answer that but, surprisingly, that…
As I covered the 2012 awards season, I found it impossible to ignore the fact we were witnessing the birth of legendary actresses in the form of Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain. All season long, these two powerhouse females were in a neck-and-neck race to claim the Best Actress prize, with Lawrence sizzling in Silver Linings Playbook and Chastain internally boiling in Zero Dark Thirty. Though Lawrence prevailed, becoming the second youngest actress to ever win the award at age 22, the two are poised to meet again, and I would even argue that this is probably the first of many times we see Lawrence go up against Chastain for Best Actress. Why? Well, its simple, these two are modern legends – their beauty attracts us to the screen and their immense talents keep us glued and keep us talking for days, months, even years after we see them turn…
The awards season is always a funny thing. From September to the end of February, we spend day after day watching movies, speculating on what films and performances stand a chance, picking frontrunners, following critic and guild ceremonies, debating nominees, obsessing over snubs, arguing why certain films should win, and guessing which nominees will be honored with a prestigious award. Then the Oscars come and 3½ hours later, it’s all over. Plain. Simple. Done. This year, we were fortunate enough to have a pretty competitive season, jam packed with tons of ambitious films that not only entertained but that also pushed the boundaries and limits of filmmaking. At last night’s 85th Academy Awards, all eyes were on Argo – could it win Best Picture without a Best Director nomination? Of course it could and of course it did! While acting frontrunners Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Lawrence, and Anne Hathaway also…
With the 85th Annual Academy Awards keeping movie lovers occupied and out of the theater, the final weekend in February was somewhat of a drag, putting to end another slow month at the box office. Unlike last February, which saw both The Vow and Denzel Washington’s Safe House become unexpected smash hits, this month, and this year as a whole so far, has failed to produce any real breakout success stories; while young adult adaptation Warm Bodies, Valentine’s Day romance Safe Haven, and R-rated comedy Identity Thief all preformed a lot better than expectations, only Thief has really been a box office silver lining this year, though one hit out of countless duds is nothing to cheer about. Click below for a full box report:
If there’s one thing producer Jasom Blum loves, it’s horror. Though he served as co-executive producer on films such as the Oscar-nomianted The Reader and last summer’s Prohibition-set Lawless, Blum’s main passion has always been horror, and his production company, Blumhouse Prudctions, founded in 2000, has thrived in recent years by making well-made horror films with reasonably low budgets. The first film to truly breakout under Blum’s method was 2007’s Paranormal Activity, which reignited the found footage genre and grossed a gargantuan $193 million opposite a $15,000 budget, making it one of the most profitable films of all time. Blum continued this method with each of the three subsequent Paranormal Activity films as well as other horror films like 2010’s Insidious ($97 million gross opposite a $1.9 million budget) and last year’s Halloween hit, Sinister ($87 million gross opposite a $3 million budget). Clearly, Blum has found an…
SHARF @ THE MOVIES 