If you’ve had a rough week and you feel like you’re free-floating through life, let me pull you back down to Earth with a brand-new collection of freshly-released trailers– starting with Upside Down, a movie which I’m equally resistant to on intellectual and gastrointestinal grounds. Seriously, watch this clip and tell me it didn’t make you at least a little queasy; then consider that you watched it on your computer or random mobile device instead of a multiplex screen. Maybe the physical space of the theater will acclimate me to the topsy turviness inherent in the film’s conceit, or maybe I’ll throw up all over myself. The cogent point here is…
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G-S-T Review…John Dies At the End
Soy sauce, TV psychics, magical Jamaicans, sentient organic computers, meat monsters, Paul Giamatti, and the constant threat of apocalypse: that’s John Dies at the End in a nutshell. Or maybe it’s Don Coscarelli in a nutshell. Of course, John Dies at the End isn’t pure Coscarelli– the cult film legend’s latest adapts the novel of the same name by one Jason Pargin, who initially had his book published back in 2007. But there’s a nagging sense of kismet that permeates the experience of watching the movie, as though Pargin wrote his story knowing that someday Coscarelli would end up translating it into cinema using his own brand of rampant comic-horror…
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Last Stands and Bittersweet Lives: Getting to Know Ji-Woon Kim
January 18th came and went without much critical or commercial fanfare for Ji-woon Kim, the first of three South Korean directors to break into the American studio system this year*; that’s sort of a king bummer, at least in part because The Last Stand, his half self-aware, half self-serious, respectably actiony Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, deserves to be more of a hit than its paltry $7.7 million box office take will allow. (You may recall that we had a lot of fun with the film ourselves.) But mostly this is sour news because Kim’s a great filmmaker, and nothing would be more disappointing than seeing him shunned out of the States…