I was expecting a fairly paint-by-numbers Alien wanna-be with Life, the new sci-fi horror film directed by Daniel Espinosa (Easy Money, Safe House, Child 44). But writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool) actually manage to give Life a few notable differences that keep the film from being a waste of time and film stock.…
After a decidedly long and stressful time away, I’m back with some mind-occupying and fascinating stories of goings-on in the film arena! In this week’s “Tetsuo returns” story, Get Out director, Jordan Peele, i son the list of directors being eyed for the long-in-planning Akira remake. Warner Bros. is courting Peele for the job aggressively,…
Rupert Sanders’ adaptation of the manga/anime/TV/web series franchise Ghost In the Shell is almost shockingly strange, disquieting, melancholic, creepy, and sad. For a big-studio, extremely expensive, bus-stop-and-billboard-advertised piece of mainstream entertainment, it feels astonishingly personal, authentic, and artsy; it doesn’t smell mainstream at all. Sanders has gotten away with sneaking personality into Hollywood product before, with 2012’s Snow White and…
Perhaps trying to be edgy, alternative, hip, cool – anything other than Oscar-winning for singing a brutally beautiful song in Les Miserables – Anne Hathaway has made a spectacularly misguided career decision in agreeing to star in Colossal, a rampaging misfire of a movie. What may have seemed like a deliriously different project on paper, emerges on screen as…
Talk about getting the band back together! T2: Trainspotting (the title, according to director Danny Boyle, evolved out of speculation about what the characters themselves would want the film to be called) is a thoroughly justifiable “late” sequel that honours the original impeccably. I got way more than I was expecting; indeed, half a day…
Pound for pound, minute for minute, per capita, or however you want to say it, I’d suggest the French are making the best horror films in the world at the moment and have been (on and off) for at least a decade. The US and Australian output, while sometimes great, is marred by an enormous…
Kong: Skull Island comes from a coalition of companies with a focus on large-scale, easy-to-digest big-screen entertainment designed to sell loads of cinema tickets in both China and The Rest Of The World. Legendary Entertainment, the primary company involved (who recently gave us The Great Wall), is a based in Burbank, is a subsidiary of Chinese mega-corp Wanda…
50 Shades Darker: A Feminist Perspective I went toe-to-toe with Chris Mancini re: “50 Shades” on the CFN podcast yesterday. I disagreed here and there, but held back as I had yet to see this film specifically. Though I felt I could speak to it generally since I’d seen the first movie, read the books,…
Oh, here we are again! I wonder what sort of happenings there are to discover this week? Let’s find out! In this week’s “Sadly inescapable” story, we have lost yet another icon, legend, uber talent. The incredible Mary Tyler Moore died this week at the age of 80. Sadly, this seems like it will be…
Here we are in another week of weird and fascinating events in the world of film AND STUFF! In this week’s “Yay, more Neil Gaiman!” story, Amazon Studios is going to adapt Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet’s novel Good Omens and turn it into a six-episode limited series. Yay! And what even better is that…