REVIEWS
Review: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Doesn't Care About Real Life, Just Fantasy
During an interview in 2010, Queen guitarist Brian May announced that a film about the legendary British rock band was in the works. Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Brüno) was set to play Freddie Mercury, with Peter Morgan (The Queen and Frost/Nixon), writing the screenplay. In 2013, however, Cohen left the project due to creative differences. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that director Dexter Fletcher (Eddie the Eagle) would helm the biopic with Ben Wishaw as Mercury. That fell apart, too. Then in 2015, writer Anthony McCarten (The Theory of Everything, The Darkest Hour) signed on to the seemingly doomed project. The film was soon fast-tracked by 20th Century Fox, with director Bryan Singer and actor Rami Malek set to play Freddie. And now Bohemian Rhapsody, a paint-by-numbers biopic that feels less like a definitive telling of Queen's rise to fame and more like Oscar Bait Mamma Mia!™.
› Posted November 2 in Review | Comments
Review: Sandi Tan's Documentary 'Shirkers' is a Refreshing Revelation
"How could it have disappeared?" Holy moley this film is amazing!! I'm stunned. Sandi Tan's documentary Shirkers is one of the best documentaries of the year. Hands down, no question. All of the ingenuity. The honesty. The cats. The ghost story. The footage. The creativity. Just phenomenal. I seriously got the chills and was tearing up by the end. It's such a beautiful, breathtaking, refreshing film. It's so uniquely creative in the way it's structured, and is also complex in handling all the aspects of past and present. But Sandi has it all in her mind and she spent years putting it together and it's pretty much perfect. It's a total film nerd film in so many ways (they aspired to be the "Coen Sisters", to premiere at Cannes, and they despised cheesy Hollywood movies). It's invigorating, infuriating, fascinating, and inspiring. I loved every last second of it.
› Posted October 28 in Documentaries, Review | Comments
Review: David Gordon Green's 'Halloween' Deals in Tricks, Treats, and Trauma
After watching John Carpenter’s 1976 action-thriller Assault on Precinct 13 at the Milan Film Festival, film producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad put up the $300,000 budget for the young up-and-coming filmmaker to write, direct, and score a movie about a psychopath who stalks babysitters. Carpenter and his then-girlfriend Debra Hill began drafting a script for The Babysitter Murders, which was later renamed to Halloween after Yablans suggested setting the movie on Halloween night. And the rest is history. The 1978 independent film grossed $70 million at the worldwide box office and became the blueprint for every slasher flick since. Now, 40 years later, David Gordon Green (of George Washington, All the Real Girls) looks to capture some of the macabre magic of Carpenter's classic with his own Halloween — a direct sequel that ignores the seven sequels before it and resurrects the iconic characters of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers.
› Posted October 18 in Horror, Review | Comments
Sitges Review: Julius Avery's WWII Movie 'Overlord' is Loud & Intense
Play this movie as loud as you can. Turn the volume all the way up, strap in, and prepare for an extremely intense cinematic experience. I am a sucker for World War II movies, pretty much any/all of them, so I will happily admit I probably enjoyed this a bit more than most will, unless you're also a fan of WWII movies. With that said, it's an awesome movie anyway. Overlord is a WWII horror movie from Australian director Julius Avery, making his first big studio movie after Son of a Gun in 2014. This time he collaborated with Bad Robot and producer J.J. Abrams to deliver an intense, extra loud, uber violent, enrapturing WWII action movie spiced up with some gnarly horror. It hits real hard, right from the start, but never drags. You have to go see this movie in theaters - the big screen, big sound experience really, really makes a difference.
› Posted October 18 in Review, Sitges | Comments
Sitges Review: Krzykowski's 'The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then Bigfoot'
Not all heroes live a heroic life. Not all heroes get a big parade and go on talk shows and end up in history books. The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then The Bigfoot is one of most undefinable films of this year, no question. It's part drama, it's part action film, it's part horror, but at it's core it's really a character study about a lonely man at the end of his life looking back on everything. Sam Elliott plays Calvin Barr, indeed the very man who killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot. He spends his days drinking at a bar and relaxing with his adorable yellow lab dog, because no one knows that he killed Hitler. It was covered up by Germany and America, because there was more at stake. As he states in the film, he just killed a man that day, that's all. And he has had to spend his life dealing with the substantial feelings, as they slowly chip away at his psyche.
› Posted October 15 in Review, Sitges | Comments
Fantastic Fest Review: Ali Abbasi's Strange & Beautiful Fantasy 'Border'
The concept of strange love and finding the one person in the world meant for only you is a strong one when it comes to cinematic storytelling. These films are often tough to recommend outright, the weirder nature of some of the entries in this category being a little too outside the box for most mainstream moviegoers. For the cinephile, however, the results of these films are often magical. So, too, is the case with the Swedish film, Border (aka Gräns), a film that tells a story that is, you guessed it, full of strange, creative wonder and eye-opening reveals about our world. Co-written and directed by Ali Abbasi, Border is a film that not everyone will be able to wrap their expectations around, but one that comes with undeniable results for those who do.
› Posted October 15 in Fantastic Fest 18, Review | Comments
Review: Goddard's 'Bad Times at the El Royale' is Nothin' But a Good Time
American producer, screenwriter, and filmmaker Drew Goddard began his career as a writer on the hit television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, and Lost. He made his foray into film by writing the 2008 found-footage creature feature, Cloverfield. It wasn't until his directorial debut with 2012's The Cabin in the Woods, however, that Goddard's talent for creating strong characters and deconstructing genre conventions fully manifested. Now, after most recently producing Netflix's Daredevil series and writing the screenplay for Ridley Scott's 2015 space film, The Martian, for which he earned Oscar and WGA nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Goddard is back in the director's chair for Bad Times at the El Royale, a spirited, subversive thriller steeped in '60s nostalgia (and paranoia) with an incredible cast and a killer soundtrack.
› Posted October 11 in Review | Comments
Sitges Review: 'The Spy Gone North' is a Gripping Korean Spy Thriller
Not all spy movies are like every other spy movie. And not all spies are the same. The Spy Gone North is an impressive, riveting spy thriller from Korea, made by filmmaker Yoon Jong-bin (of The Unforgiven, Beastie Boys, Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, Kundo: Age of the Rampant). This first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in their Midnight category earlier this summer, but I just caught up with the film at the Sitges Film Festival. The more I think about, the more I love this film. It's such a slick, superb spy film that draws you into the story and keeps you intrigued with anticipation, on the edge of your seat the entire time. And there isn't much action, which works well for this fascinating story, yet it's thoroughly compelling from start to finish. This film really stands out above so many others - in the way of spy films and thrillers.
› Posted October 10 in Review, Sitges | Comments
Review: Bradley Cooper's 'A Star is Born' is Soulful Artistic Expression
Co-written and directed by actor Bradley Cooper, 2018's A Star is Born is the third remake of William A. Wellman's 1937 film, which earned seven Academy Award nominations at the time. George Cukor's 1954 adaptation, starring Judy Garland and James Mason, was nominated for six. And the 1976 version, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, earned four. Between the three films, only two Oscars were won: Best Writing (Original Story) in 1938 and Best Original Song in 1977. As producer, director, screenwriter, and star, Cooper is following in Streisand’s footsteps and, if history is any indication, his directorial debut will earn several award nominations, and deservedly so. Not only is Cooper's A Star is Born the premiere of a filmmaker with a unique voice but it solidifies Lady Gaga as the preeminent entertainer of the day.
Fantastic Fest Review: Shinichiro Ueda's Zombie Comedy 'One Cut of the Dead'
It's another year of horror movies, all ranging in subgenre and tone, and you know what that means. Bring on the zombies. Granted, the zombie subgenre has been running rampant for about 15 years straight now, the tropes and setups becoming increasingly banal as time goes by. There's a reason filmmakers continually go back to the zombie well. They keep coming up with new and innovative ways of handling the sub-genre. Take One Cut of the Dead, for instance. On the surface, it seems like another, stale attempt at breaking new ground with old equipment, but this film has something else hidden up its sleeve. One Cut of the Dead ends up being a sweet, funny, little magic trick of a movie that once again reinvents a been-there premise.
› Posted September 26 in Fantastic Fest 18, Horror, Review | Comments
Fantastic Fest Review: Luca Guadagnino's Intoxicating New 'Suspiria'
We've long-since moved past the belief that all remakes, horror remakes in particular, are inherently bad. From John Carpenter's The Thing to David Cronenberg's The Fly and even as recently as Fede Alvarez's take on The Evil Dead, the horror remake is wide open in terms of quality and sense of purpose. Even so, the thought of a filmmaker bringing a new vision to a classic tale of horror is met with trepidation regardless of the quality of that filmmaker's previous work. Now we have Luca Guadagnino taking on Dario Argento and his classic tale of a witch's coven at a dance academy, Suspiria. In a nutshell, Guadagnino's take on the story is transcendent, taking all the best elements of Argento's classic, reworking them for improvement, and even fleshing out the things that didn't work in the 1977 film. It is sure to leave you breathless.
› Posted September 24 in Fantastic Fest 18, Horror, Review | Comments
Fantastic Fest Review: Julius Avery's WWII Horror Thriller 'Overlord'
The horrors of war have rarely found their way into big-budget horror, even though it seems a natural fit to set genre pictures during the most horrendous moments in human history. These have often been relegated to lower-budget efforts often with unsuccessful results. Those days may be close to over, as Overlord, the latest from J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot production label, blasts its way onto screens. Set during the moments just before D-Day, the film offers an intense and explosive men-on-a-mission tale but with the added bonus of supernatural horrors. One side of the film's genre coin works much better than the other, but Overlord is through-and-through a thrilling action movie that should satiate action fans as well as horror fans alike.
› Posted September 23 in Fantastic Fest 18, Horror, Review | Comments
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