Children of Men is about a miracle. Children of Men is, itself, a miracle. It’s a movie that can single-handedly remove the scales of cynicism from your eyes, reminding you of what wonders cinema is capable. It’s a movie that rejects the two modern directions of the screen – a shrinking to TV size for … Continue reading
***Update***Dave is still gone, but I’m thinking about re-running his ‘Dave’s Underground’ pieces in January. My wife was playing the Christmas mix-CD he made a few years ago and it reminded me just how much it stinks that he bid us adieu. It’s a slow time a year and a 2007 without him sucks just … Continue reading
Jesus Christ, Rocky Balboa WORKS. Not always, and certainly not consistently, but more often than not Rocky Balboa is a movie that grabs and exhilarates the audience – and that’s despite huge problems like a bizarre structure, rampantly flat acting and sloppy editing. This film just shouldn’t be this enjoyable, and that’s part of its … Continue reading
The world is changing for documentaries. In the past, not only would the ten best documentaries of any given year have been dry and probably quite boring, most of the people who read CHUD would have no chance to see them. Now docs have gone mainstream – they play all over the country, and DVDs … Continue reading
The films I didn’t see that are sure to be dire are many, but it’s hard to berate them having not seen them. Face-crushing efforts I chose to not see this year include: Ice Age: The Meltdown, Click, Scary Movie 4, Failure to Launch, The Pink Panther, The Santa Clause 3, Saw III, Naco Libre, … Continue reading
Even moreso than “Best of” lists, “Worst of” lists are highly subjective. Some people would expect a “Worst of” list to contain something like The Marine, but why would it? It seems to me that the worst movies of the year aren’t the ones that were never intended to be any good, but rather the … Continue reading
If you’re looking to kill some time over the holidays, two genre-cuddling websites are up and ready for your chronosticidal tendencies. First, Tony Stark has finally ponied up the capital to establish a URL for Iron Man. The official site, www.ironmanmovie.com is up… but not so operational. As is the case for most film sites … Continue reading
What is this? Every single day of the week (almost), a new "Graboid", a single moment grabbed from a random movie, appears on this site for you to guess the name of the film, share with your officemates, or discuss on our message boards. Sometimes the Graboid will be very easy and sometimes it’ll be … Continue reading
I walked out of Letters From Iwo Jima thinking that we could have saved a lot of American lives in the Pacific Theater of WWII if we had just let the Japanese alone for a bit to kill themselves. Clint Eastwood’s companion piece to the dud-ish Flags of Our Fathers is soaked in suicide, with … Continue reading
I have developed a reputation with some of the studio publicists I work with as someone who is very interested in talking to writers and directors moreso than actors. It’s true – I find that I’m fascinated by the thought behind the creation of a good movie more than the famous faces that populate it. … Continue reading