What is the obsession many Hollywood writers have with bathroom humor? Have American standards of comedy sunk so far that the only way to illicit a laugh nowadays is to resort to the lowest possible denominator? Have the Three Stooges (once the lowest of lowbrow comedy) become the gold standard of guffaws? I ask these…
It’s surprising that The Roommate wasn’t entitled Single White Female: The College Years, since this flick is pretty much just a Single White Female redux for which the filmmakers trimmed a few years off the cast and, just to be safe, also trimmed down characterizations, logic, etc. Simply put, The Roommate is unbearable and uncreative,…
A friend of mine once argued about the redundancy behind DC Comics; its name, he claimed, originally stood for Detective Comics, thus by adding an extra ‘comics’ at the end, one is left with the awkwardly titled Detective Comics Comics. Though, despite the discrepancy behind the publisher’s name, it has remained a powerhouse in the…
What you expect from a film really paints what you will feel about the film afterward. Whether you are partial to or despise the director or one of the actors, if you’ve heard good or bad reviews from friends, or if you’ve been sucked in or led astray by marketing will already start you with…
Filmmakers Carlo Ledesma, Enzo Tedeschi & Julian Harvey clearly took heed of the philosophies and techniques of renowned scare-meister Alfred Hitchcock for 2011’s The Tunnel, namely his mantra that less is more: It is not always what you see that scares you, but what you imagine. A low-budget horror pic filmed in 14 days and…
The mental institution is a great location for nearly all movie types, but none more so than the horror or thriller genre. Isolation, deeply disturbed patients and or a sadistic doctor are several cornerstones that can be explored. And using some of these staples, John Carpenter, emerging from a ten year hiatus from movie making,…
It is no secret that the last decade has not been kind to the great filmmaker, Woody Allen. Whether is it a loss of touch or focus, one could argue that Allen hasn’t made a particularly good film since 1989’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” — while he has had minor successes in the past decade, there…
