Matt's Over / Under Column Discontinued

You should be seeing an Over / Under article here on Running Scared (pictured above) today. However, we have officially decided to discontinue Matt Goldberg's retrospective series indefinitely. Due primarily to numerous complaints and other internal decisions, we have decided that the Over / Under articles are not suited for FirstShowing.net and thus will no longer appear on the site. I know a lot of people were not too fond of Matt's writing anyway, but I want to make it clear that we truly appreciated his contributions and his opinion and it was simply an internal decision that we made for the betterment of the site and the consideration of our loyal readers.

Over / Under: The Boondock Saints

For an introduction to this weekly retrospective column titled Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

The Boondock Saints is a cult movie for people that crowd around crappy movies. It's like they passed by all the good cult movies and staked out a claim on a piss-poor imitation that should have been forgotten in the dust-bin of Tarantino imitators. When people mention Pulp Fiction-wannabees, Boondock Saints should be Exhibit A. And yes, it came out in 1999, but it was actually picked up in 1997 by, who else, Miramax. There's hardly anything that isn't derivative, sloppy, and half-baked in Troy Duffy's first and only film.

Over / Under: Down with Love

For an introduction to this weekly retrospective column titled Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

At first glance, Down with Love may seem like nothing more than a lighthearted spoof of the Doris Day/Rock Hudson screwball romantic comedies like Lover Come Back, Pillow Talk, and Send Me No Flowers; and it's certainly invoking those classic films. But Down with Love is also a strange but wonderful amalgam of parody, tribute, and farce.

Over / Under: American Beauty

For an introduction to this weekly retrospective column titled Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

When I saw American Beauty in 1999, I thought it was one of the greatest films ever made and wholly deserving of its Best Picture Oscar. Granted, I hadn't seen Fight Club or any of the other great films that came out in '99. Also, I was only 15. What's your excuse?

Looking back on American Beauty, I can still say that two aspects hold up very well: Conrad Hall's gorgeous cinematography and Kevin Spacey's performance. Oh, and Allison Janney's performance is probably the most over-looked greatness in the film.

Over / Under: BASEketball

For an introduction to this weekly retrospective column titled Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

After last week's overwhelmingly positive response to my column on Forrest Gump, I am so pleased to actually recommend a film rather than just trash one you love for no good reason.

BASEketball is a spoof from the genius that was David Zucker. Zucker was responsible the greatest spoof of all time, Airplane!, before deciding to embrace the anti-renaissance of spoof films that were Parts 3 and 4 of the Scary Movie franchise. But BASEketball was something different.

Over / Under: Forrest Gump

For an introduction to this weekly retrospective column titled Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

"Stupid is as stupid does."

This oft-repeated rhetorical comeback could not be truer when applied to the film Forrest Gump. I've made enemies out of friends and feuds from family when trying to explain that not only is this film sentimental garbage, but it's a complete misunderstanding of its source material which instead comes to an unnerving conclusion.

Over / Under: Dangerous Liaisons

For an introduction to the weekly retrospective column Over / Under written by Matt Goldberg, please visit the first post in the series.

I doubt I'll get a lot of hate mail on this one, but I have to share my shock when I started looking up the awards tally for Stephen Frears' 1988 period-piece Dangerous Liaisons. I was surprised that while the film was shown a lot of love in most categories, there was hardly any love for John Malkovich who, looking over his body of work, gave one of the best performances of his career in this film.

The year is Rococo, France. I'm not sure when that is exactly, but there's clearly no television and so the aristocracy, who don't have anything to occupy their time, decide to play cruel games of manipulation and soul-crushing. The two featured players are the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close) and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont (Malkovich).

Over / Under: James and the Giant Peach

Over / Under is a new weekly column that looks back at films of the not-too-distant past and sees how time has treated them. Which films are over-rated and which are under-rated? What's mandatory viewing that isn't so mandatory? What cinema cult should you join or which should you avoid? I'm sure this column will piss a lot of people off so before that happens, I'd like to start with a positive review…

Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (yes, Tim Burton's stamp is unmistakable, but he didn't direct it) is deemed a classic and rightly so. The songs are fantastic, the design is sublime, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. But the best aspect is the stop-motion animation.

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: Contact

Around this time ten years ago, Men in Black was getting the most of the attention from moviegoers and became the biggest hit of the summer. Considering how funny, stylish, entertaining and (most importantly) crowd pleasing MIB is, the film's immense popularity wasn't surprising. Yet, Robert Zemeckis' Contact, a film that carried twice the hype, appeared a few weeks later and became one of the year's most discussed works.

Film Retrospect: The Lost Boys

If all had gone as planned, The Lost Boys may have ended up a very different film. As most die hard, Honorary Frog Brothers know, Richard Donner was originally going to direct this film. Coming off the success of The Goonies, Donner was fashioning The Lost Boys as a thematically similar, kid-friendly adventure, pitting child vampires against The Frog Brothers (one of the few characters that survived the first draft and made it into the final version). The pre-production went on too long and Donner decided to jump ship and make Lethal Weapon instead. Rather than junk Lost Boys, it ended up in the hands of a promising new director named Joel Schumacher and Donner became the producer instead. With his noted eye for style, Schumacher re-imagined the piece as a sexy, scary teen thriller, flush with comic elements and an MTV-ready style. A new screenplay was prepared, filming took place mostly in Santa Cruz, California and the summer of 1987 saw the release of a genre classic.

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: Speed 2: Cruise Control

The problem with failed sequels is that a) they kill a potentially lucrative franchise and end a successful run for their studios and, most importantly, b) they hinder your fond memories of the original. Many critics griped about the sequels to Chinatown, Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show, saying that they (being The Two Jakes, The Evening Star and Texasville respectfully) came too late, weren't as good as the originals and were uninspired. I liked all three films for very different reasons, but the criticisms made toward them were valid and their disastrous runs at the box office hurt audiences overall view of them. With Speed 2: Cruise Control, things looked odd from the get go.

Film Retrospect: Joe Dante's Innerspace

Die-hard film buffs know the name Joe Dante well. This is a man who loves movies, comes from the legandary Roger Corman school of B-movie know-how (the same as James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson, among others), gleefully ads sly in-jokes in every one of his movies and always has a part for B-movie Grandmaster Thespian Dick Miller in everything he directs. This is a filmmaker whose joy in front of the camera matches the fun he creates in front of the lens and the fact that he remains underrated and underappreciated by Hollywood is a mystery and a shame.

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: Breakdown

About four years ago, I lost my wife. You read that right - I couldn't find her. At all. We were engaged at the time and had set a date for the movies (Secret Window was the film we chose to see together that night, I recall). We had set up a place to meet after work, only at 5:00, she didn't show. Neither of us had cell phones at the time, but I had a pocket full of quarters, so I called her at work - "she already left", someone told me. I called a few of her friends and they didn't know where she was either. I drove over to her parent's house - they hadn't seen her and thought she was with me. I smiled and politely thanked them, masking my growing feelings of unease. I drove back to the place we were designated to meet… not there. I began to wonder if she ran an errand or simply forgot. About 30 minutes after we were supposed to hook up, she was still a no-show (this was highly unlike her) and some truly paranoid musings began to take hold of me. I wondered if she was hurt, or trapped somewhere or, most likely, kidnapped.

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy

Die hard fans of the so-called View Askew universe have been with filmmaker Kevin Smith every step of the way and established themselves as stone cold devotees from Clerks to Mallrats. I was not one of those people, thank you very much. Honestly, I thought Clerks, while clever for what it is, was hugely overrated and I, like a lot of American critics, was a total snob to Mallrats and thought Smith's days were over. Ten years ago (in 1997), he made a film that not only demolished expectations of every critic (including this one) who had completely written him off, but was one of the best films of the year - Chasing Amy.

Film Retrospect: Masters of the Universe

Think you're geeking out over Transformers opening up in July? Try being a 10-year old and learning that they made a live-action movie based on one of the coolest cartoons in all of filmation! Truly, you've earned your geek badge if you can recall your after-school afternoons, basking in the land of Eternia, followed by He-Man's cousin, "She-Ra, Princess of Power", a round of "G.I. Joe", then "The Transformers", then the rip-off, "Go-Bots", and 30-minutes of "Rambo" in PG-rated adventures, where he'd put his bandana on in a montage… even though he was always wearing one already! Sorry, I just had a violent 80's flashback, set to the tune of Bananarama. Okay, back to the subject at hand.

Here is some hardcore geek info (if you already knew this, then consider yourself a personal friend of mine): the He-Man toys were created when Mattel developed a spin-off line of action figures for the movie Conan the Barbarian! The line was cancelled when it was decided the R-rated film wouldn't sell action figures to children effectively, but instead of destroying the already established figures, they were re-painted! Thus, "Conan" became "He-Man", the line was re-distributed and the rest is history! Okay, I'll cover my back and state that this is a popular urban legend that Mattel neither confirmed nor ever denied, but still, aren't you glad you know this?!

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: The Fifth Element

It's been ten years since Luc Besson's beloved sci-fi fantasy, The Fifth Element, has graced theaters, almost as hard to believe that the film was made at all. Even with Besson's considerable reputation (he is known as "The French Steven Spielberg", mostly due to The Professional, The Big Blue and La Femme Nikita), the film must have been a tough pitch, as the story was not only a cause for massive secrecy in pre and post-production, but because of its origin. Besson has openly admitted that he first came up with the idea for the film in school… when he was 13. It makes sense if you think about it: in the distant future, a cab driver discovers that the key to the salvation of the world is a hot, female, red-headed alien (embodied on film by a Milla Jovovich). Truly, if flying cars, psychopathic villains, the end of the world and an attractive heroine who barely wears any clothing doesn't sound like the product of a teenage boy's active imagination, then what does? Somehow, Besson financed his lavish, elaborate and top-secret film, which is arguably his most personal and it made an enormous impression worldwide.

Film Retrospect: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

In somewhat honor of Spider-Man 3 being a third film in a massive franchise, today's film retrospect looks back at another third film in a rather successful series. The release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors 20 years ago was something of a milestone for the horror genre. Not only did it introduce one of the longest titles to ever grace a marquee (before Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), it brought a radical new direction to the enormously successful series that other genre films followed as well.

Film Retrospect - Summer of '97: The Lost World - Jurassic Park

As the Summer of 2007 movie season is heard roaring in the distance, creeping ever so slowly towards the cineplexes, multiplexes and quadroplexes (the latter being a theater full of geeks watching movies on their ipods as the film plays on the silver screen), I'll continue to reflect on the summer movies that graced audiences from the previous ten and twenty years. As I think back to the summer of 1997, I automatically go to a film that was the most anticipated of the summer, a gargantuan hit and honestly, wasn't very good. Truly I will get around to examining some of the actual great films from this year (as well as from 1987), but for now let's look at The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Film Retrospect: The Devil's Own

In our new feature Film Retrospect, we'll be looking back at films from 10 to 20 years ago, exploring their achievements and faults, how they affected audiences (if at all) and looking at their overall place in film history. We'll start with a film that was initially one of the most anticipated releases of 1996, until production troubles delayed the film to March of 1997.

The Devil's Own was a big, prestigious, adult-drama, Oscar-bait character study about an IRA soldier (Brad Pitt) who comes to America to gather weapons for "the cause" and, while in the States, rooms with an Irish-American cop (played by Harrison Ford) who discovers that his tenant is a terrorist. Directed by Alan J. Pakula (who not only helmed All the President's Men and The Pelican Brief but the Ford-starring Presumed Innocent), the film was a highly touted political drama and was positioned for a winter of '96 release.