• Editorials,  Features

    Halftime Report: G-S-T’s 10 Best Movies Of 2013 (So Far!)

    What’s good in 2013? If you’d asked me the same question three months ago, I’d have had very few titles worth recommending. This year has been marked by a glacial start, with decent B-movie pulp- Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, The Last Stand– appearing sporadically from January onward, but it took March for 2013 to really start showing off the gems waiting patiently on its release slate. From Stoker to Beyond the Hills to Ginger & Rosa, March showed a turnaround in quality for this cinematic season, and things have picked up from there considerably. Where we’ll end up in December is another question entirely, but if the remainder of the ride…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Off the Shelf

    Off the Shelf…’The Ghastly Love of Johnny X’

    Where do you start with a charmingly bizarre Frankenstein’s monster like The Ghastly Love of Johnny X? There needs to be a better word for “weird” only because films like this exist, and at the end of the day that’s the best word to describe them, even if it’s a bit limiting. “Weird”, in the case of Johnny X, is good; Paul Bunnell’s off-kilter creation calls on a number of references and influences ranging from Flash Gordon to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and despite the clear connection to the B-movie cult icons of decades past, it winds up playing very much like its own (occasionally uneven) beast. That’s something of an achievement on its own,…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…World War Z

    Good news for fans of World War Z, Max Brooks’ brilliantly crafted mock-oral history detailing the events and aftermath of a worldwide zombie holocaust: Brad Pitt and Marc Forster have made their adaptation of the text in name only. World War Z, Pitt’s misguided attempt at building his very own action franchise through his very own production company, borrows little and less from the source, cherry picking only a handful of moments from a very short list of its innumerable perspectives and locations; readers will immediately recognize the material that made the cut, though the film veers such a sharp left from the book that they may also be left…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Off the Shelf

    Off the Netflix Queue…’Upstream Color’

    Shane Carruth makes double-edged films. They’re the sort of art-oriented enterprises that utterly thrill me on spiritual, emotional, and intellectual levels, movies that confound, enlighten, dazzle, and bewilder all in equal turn; they’re also frequently cryptic to the point that articulating my feelings on them proves excessively difficult. Put more simply, Carruth’s cinema wows me and I can’t easily convey why, which puts me in a difficult position as somebody whose purpose is to distill his feelings on the movies he watches into precise essays measuring between eight to nine paragraphs in length. As a cinephile, filmmakers like Carruth validate my love for the medium; as a writer and critic,…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…Man of Steel

    Well, now, here’s a fine how do you do: Zack Snyder made a good movie. Granted, he’s made good movies before, but it’s been so long since he released his hyper-muscular remake of Dawn of the Dead that seeing him output something that’s actually watchable from start to finish comes off as something of a shock. In the intervening years, he’s made films containing individual sequences worthy of the praise they rightfully receive but which lack a top-to-bottom sense of cohesion; Sucker Punch inadvertently celebrates the male gaze it tries to critique, and Watchmen is at its best in its first twenty minutes, after which the story begins and the…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Off the Shelf

    Off the Shelf…’Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’

    From the outside, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters looks an awful lot like the cousin of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and its vulturous novelized kin. But Tommy Wirkola isn’t trying to mine wit out of genre trash based off of pillars of classic literature or the travails of American history; he just wants to make Sam Raimi flicks. Admittedly, the two transgressions are more or less the same thing- cribbing is cribbing- but watching the unabashed stupidity of Hansel & Gretel unfold feels akin to the experience of watching an eight-year-old in the full throes of a massive sugar rush as they haphazardly recreate scenes from their favorite movie using whatever…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Trailers

    Sweet Trailer…'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'

    It feels like we were reviewing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey only yesterday, and yet here we are, staring down the first full trailer for the next installment of Peter Jackson’s intentionally, gloriously obtuse adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Audiences and critics drew some pretty significant dividing lines in their reactions to An Unexpected Journey (opinion was split even on this very site), but I have a feeling that The Desolation of Smaug will be more universally pleasing; with the set-up out of the way, the film should just be nothing but pure adventure, and if nothing else, the trailer seems to confirm that suspicion. Check it out below: Dwarves in barrels, spider attacks, orcs and…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…The Prey

    The Prey can be best described as puzzling. That’s not to say that the film is complex; it’s actually remarkably simple and woefully boilerplate, so much so that every so often as you watch it, you may feel as though you’ve watched it already. The real mystery here is how the film managed to avoid being released straight on home video despite being just at the level of DTV quality. If The Prey does one thing well, it’s meet the physical demands of its numerous action scenes handsomely- you won’t be completely bored even while you experience deja vu- but it doesn’t have an original or intelligent thought in its…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…What Maisie Knew

    How does a child endure the trauma of a volatile custody battle? What Maisie Knew, loosely based on Henry James’ 1897 novel of the same name, answers that question by putting central emphasis on the titular character, a precocious young girl caught between her two warring parents in the final days of their poisonous marriage. Sometimes, Maisie (Onata Aprile), is nothing more than a bargaining chip alternately used by her father, art dealer Beale (Steve Coogan, affecting his finely-tuned persona of self-absorption), and her mother, has-been rocker Susanna (Julianne Moore), in their legal and social skirmishes; at others, she’s a silent witness to the selfishness of grown-ups and, to a…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Trailers

    G-S-T Trailer Roundup: Alien Conformity, Hot Guidos, & Psychotic Hobbits

    So many trailers, so little time. Truthfully, enough teasers and preview clips have dropped this week that I could fill out three different roundups and still have some leftovers; sometimes, studios just want to inundate the web with their collective chunks of promo footage. Marketing’s gotta market, after all. The good news is that there’s so much to choose from that sheer variety alone makes the effort of gathering and watching each spot worthwhile (and if there’s one thing we appreciate here at Go, See, Talk!, it’s variety). Comic book flicks, retro sci-fi throwbacks, gruesome horror remakes; even a concert movie made the cut here, and that’s saying something, since…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…Stories We Tell

    Seven years after Sara Polley’s directorial debut, Away From Her, and only two in the wake of her follow-up, 2011’s Take This Waltz, the actress-filmmaker’s latest offering feels like something of a capstone at this juncture of her career. Limited as her body of work may be, Stories We Tell explains, or rather clarifies, her efforts as a narrator; it’s the film that elucidates her pursuits as an artist and even allows us to view them anew through a fresh lens. If her forays behind the camera raised any questions about the thematic drives and interests of her cinema, then Stories We Tell, both gracefully and bravely introspective at the…

  • Movies/Entertainment,  Reviews

    G-S-T Review…Star Trek Into Darkness

    There are two layers to Star Trek Into Darkness. One exists at the surface level and involves everything that we see, hear, and experience while watching it in a theater, and the other involves the efforts that occurred below the line, prior to the film’s arrival at the multiplex. Just like its 2009 predecessor, the former layer proves to be the sequel’s saving grace and the latter holds it back from being truly great; the marriage between star-making, charismatic, invested performances and ham-handed, hackish screenwriting ultimately yields the same results J.J. Abrams got with his last venture into Gene Roddenberry’s beloved sci-fi iconography, a movie that works in the moment as blockbusting…