While this loving tribute to the works of fantasy/horror author H.P. Lovecraft boasts excellent production values, it offers little in the way of actual humor. The premise assumes that Lovecraft’s tales of the tentacled alien Cthulhu are real and on our earth, all explained via a nifty animated sequence. For years, the Lovecraft lineage has […]
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Shopping
That’s why the guiding hand of the “Resident Evil” franchise is regarded among fanboys as one of the most-hated directors working today, although I generally, unapologetically like his brand of motion-picture wares. It’s a style in which visuals are everything, in which music cues are given more forethought than plot points, but at least it’s […]
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Mesrine: Killer Instinct
But in the films he makes back home in his native France, he can be such a bad-ass, perhaps never more so than in the title role of “Mesrine: Killer Instinct,” the first in a pair of biopics on French gangster Jacques Mesrine, who died in 1979. (The sequel, “Mesrine: Public Enemy #1,” follows in […]
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Diary of a Madman
Tame then and tame now, they nonetheless primed me for the cathartic thrills of the genre. Up until its recent DVD debut, 1963’s “Diary Of A Madman” eluded me. Like the excellent series of Edgar Allan Poe films Price churned out under producer Roger Corman, this chiller, too, takes its inspiration from another classic author […]
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Due Date
Practically anything Phillips did would be seen as disappointing. Here’s the thing, however: Don’t expect another “Hangover,” and “Due Date” is just fine. It may not be as funny as that film, despite sharing Zach Galifianakis, but it’s plenty funny enough. It still has more laughs than most of what passes for studio comedies — […]
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Freakonomics: The Movie
But I remembered nearly everything I’d read five years ago in “Freakonomics” when I watched its lively documentary adaptation, now on DVD. The invented word concerns the study of human behavior, primarily via incentives, and if it were offered as a real degree program in the hallowed halls of higher ed, I might even go […]
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The 7th Dawn
This vehicle for William Holden takes place in Malaysia — shot on location, even — as World War II comes to an end. He’s Maj. Ferris, while the character played by Susannah York (read: Superman’s Kryptonian mom) is named Trumpey, which will make any “MST3K” fan snicker in delight each time it’s spoken. Together, they […]
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Inspector Bellamy
Welcome to un film de Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave director who famously idolized Alfred Hitchcock. You can see that influence even in this picture, his final bow before passing away last year. It is this case of the automobile “accident” that Inspector Bellamy of Paris (Gérard Depardieu) informally investigates, despite being on vacation […]
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One Week Job
The British Columbia native sought to work 52 jobs, one each week for an entire year, to find his true calling. The results can be see in the DIY documentary “One Week Job.” At the risk of sounding like my father, I expected to hate this Aiken guy and, therefore, the film, because this blond-haired […]
Posted inMusic
Such great Heights
JT Woodruff, lead singer of Hawthorne Heights, loves Bruce Springsteen’s work. And not just the anthem-laden albums, which would make sense, as Hawthorne Heights have been playing their own soaring, pounding rock songs for 10 years. Nope, he’s a fan of The Boss’ “The Promise,” a 2010 collection of B-sides from the “Darkness at the […]