The scene: Ogden Marsh, a peaceful Midwestern town of ~1,000 where everyone knows everyone and it is safe to keep the doors unlocked and windows open at night. Certainly not the place one would ever imagine a neighbor ruthlessly killing another. And that is what makes The Crazies all the more creepy. When a plane…
The opening shot of a Boston ferry emerging from an impenetrable veil of fog as it makes it way toward a hostile, gothic-looking island proves to be an apt visual metaphor for what transpires in Shutter Island. From the moment the ferry appears and we hear the first strains of music, the audience is cued…
Even with the much publicized production upheavals (directorial changes, reshoots and pretty much everything else that could be altered at the most inopportune moment) plaguing The Wolfman, is it too much to ask to ask for a movie that, while drawing inspiration from its 1941 source, retools — in inventive ways, mind you — the…
Pitch to Hollywood studio stooge: “You see, I’ve got this idea to do a film about a real life event, except the film will only feature about ten minutes of the real life event, as a sort of ‘in’ to get the suckers to come and drop ten bucks. Meanwhile, what we’ll do is make…
For those of you who, with bated breath, have been waiting years for Mel Gibson’s triumphant return to the movies, your wait has come to an end. He’s back, post 2006’s drunken anti-semantic rants, in the new crime thriller Edge of Darkness. For those of you who wished he would have just stayed in his…
Via my forced high school readings of a novel or two and landing on a movie during a bored late night channel surf, I’m not surprised I remember very little of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes. Literally, the only things that come to mind are: He was a condescending bastard who smoked a…
Legion is the second movie in so many weeks with a theme riddled with supposed religious overtones (The Book of Eli being the other). Instead, however, of delving into the way spiritual power can lift the hopes of the downtrodden, first time director Scott Stewart’s vehicle delves into how the power of God can be…
