No poster could ever effectively convey the fury and madness of Brian De Palma’s Iraq War indictment, Redacted, but there’s something kind of… imprecise about this key art. I like the idea of blotted out information revealing the face of a panic-stricken child, but the way it’s framed by the barricade recalls a number of … Continue reading
Last week, in overly excited response to the rumor that the gi-normous government warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark had been recreated on the Downey Studios lot, I made the following offer: "While there’s no way in hell you’ll be able to get past the throng of security guarding this set to snap a … Continue reading
You’ve gotta be doing something right if Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson hire you to head up their massively anticipated, motion-capture rendition of Hergé’s beloved Tintin tales. Of course, I said close to the same thing when George Lucas handed Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz the reins for Howard the Duck. And you know what? … Continue reading
Last Thursday, Paul Thomas Anderson had the audacity to debut his 160-minute prestige season behemoth, There Will Be Blood (based on the equally hulking and shamelessly exclamatory* novel by Upton Sinclair), at the 2007 Fantastic Fest (described on its website as "a week-long festival featuring the best in new science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation, crime, Asian, … Continue reading
Somehow, I think Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes are overthinking their long-in-development remake of Friday the 13th. For whatever reason, the same company that rushed through slipshod redos of The Amityville Horror and The Hitcher – I could throw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in there, but I kinda liked Marcus Nispel’s visceral variation on … Continue reading
Before we all have yet another laugh at Wesley Snipes’s expense, let’s first look back to the early 1990s when he was an boundlessly talented young actor knocking it out the box in movies like New Jack City, King of New York, Mo’ Better Blues and Neal Jimenez’s excellent (and inexplicably ignored) The Waterdance. It’s … Continue reading
Mimi Leder was already a seasoned, Emmy Award-winning director when Steven Spielberg tapped her to helm Dreamworks SKG’s first feature film, The Peacemaker. Some honor that proved to be. Gushing that "her camera has wings" (based on two seasons of work for the moderately groundbreaking ER), Spielberg essentially set Leder up to fail by stranding … Continue reading
Somewhere on a Downey Studios soundstage, you can actually see this. Or a scaled-down version at least. But why? AICN‘s Moriarty seems to be indicating that he has at least a partial answer for this, but after the tragedy of Tyler Nelson and the Violated Non-Disclosure Agreement, he’s understandably reticent to share his info. All … Continue reading
There’s little less surprising nowadays than learning that David Goyer has been attached to a comic book adaptation in some capacity. After playing an integral role in kicking off the nearly ten-year-old comic book boom, the screenwriter of Blade has been the go-to guy for studios who know they want to capitalize on the superhero … Continue reading
Half fish-out-of-water procedural, half revenge film, Peter Berg’s The Kingdom is essentially a glowering remake of Beverly Hills Cop that works quite well whenever it’s de-emphasizing theme in favor of narrative convention. Exploiting Western/Saudi hostility for investigative suspense and one prolonged, expertly staged action sequence that ably blends the ground-level ferociousness of a Michael Mann … Continue reading