Something killed Paranormal Activity. It wasn’t a demon or ghost but something much worse: The blogosphere. I write to you as a fledgling member of the blogging community and as one who is subject to the changing tides of opinion and analysis. I heard about Paranormal Activity the same way I suspect nearly everyone did. [...]
In 2006, I read about a film that was slightly different from anything I’d heard of before. Top directors such as the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant and Alfonso Cuaron were all making a series of shorts that would be threaded together into a feature. The short films all center around love in Paris. The [...]
John Krasinski, dare I say, has a pretty good eye for directing. His debut behind the camera, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, while not perfect, is visually well-crafted. The film is nothing if not dense. There is nary a wasted shot or line throughout the brisk 80-minute run time. In Brief Interviews, Krasinski not only [...]
I’ve only walked out of two movies in my entire life: Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and, last week, Post Grad. I’ve come close to walking out of others but something or someone always gets me to stay in my seat. I first saw the trailer for Post Grad when I went to see I [...]
Being a teenager is hard work. Growing up, and all the tribulations that come along with it, have been the subject of a great many films. The coming of age movie is tricky and, unfortunately, we recently lost John Hughes, one of the men who perfected the art of holding up a mirror to our [...]
Fragments, while it does have fleeting glimmers of hope, is a film that never realizes its full potential. The marketing for the film suggests that it bears some similarity to Paul Haggis’ Academy Award winning film Crash. The similarities are merely superficial. An ensemble cast united by a tragic event is about as close as [...]
The right car crash can make or break a movie. For this list, I’ve included any type of wreck, whether it is two cars hitting each other or a car hitting a person on foot. As some type of parameter, I tried to exclude any wrecks derived from a lengthy chase scene (The Matrix Reloaded [...]
A security camera reveals the interior of an empty supermarket. The grainy black and white image is shattered when a grizzly figure wearing a cut off muscle T and a greasy ponytail smashes the lens with the butt of a gun. Four thugs are robbing the supermarket with automatic weapons and they’re taking the cashiers [...]
To examine a film’s reflexive nature or to study the reflexivity of a given work is something that really only happens in film school or within the pages of scholarly film textbooks and journals. Simply put, when a film is reflexive it touches on the process of making a movie. Louis Psihoyos’ documentary, The Cove, [...]
The first time I saw a mumblecore film, I was at the Woodstock Film Festival’s venue in Rhinebeck, New York. The film I really wanted to see was Stuart Samuel’s documentary Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (an excellent film if you get a chance). The bus to Rhinebeck from Poughkeepsie was on [...]
Thank you Participant Media. The production company, founded in 2004 by original Ebay employee Jeff Skoll, is working overtime to finance and distribute films that are not only informative, but that also carry a heavy social relevance. After only 2 years in business (2004-2006), Participant Media’s films (then Participant Productions) were nominated for a total [...]
Is there really no escape from the living dead? Zombies have found their way to school curriculum (Max Brooks’ masterful novel World War Z can be found in the required reading section of your book store) and they have always been a part of mainstream cinema from The Night of the Living Dead right up [...]
