After the success of their last film, the sweet and hilariously witty horror-movie homage ParaNorman, LAIKA and Focus Features have started work on their third project together. It was just announced by LAIKA President & CEO Travis Knight that the two companies behind the current Academy Award-nominated animated feature have begun production on The Boxtrolls. Based on Alan Snow’s bestseller Here Be Monsters, the project has already assembled a stunningly high-caliber voice cast that includes Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Toni Collette, Jared Harris, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade and Tracy Morgan. The Portland-based animation studio’s 2014 release of The Boxtrolls is a 3D stop-motion and CG hybrid animated feature which will be directed…
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G-S-T Review…Side Effects
Medication and depression these days go hand-in-hand. However, it wasn’t always this way. If you were unhappy, you often put on a brave face and dealt with it. If you were over a certain age, you couldn’t sit and pout. Nowadays, medication has taken away the fear, anxiety, and depression from everyday life for a lot of people. Are we better off with being in a medically-induced euphoria? At one point a character in Stephen Soderbergh’s latest—and possible last—film, Side Effects, tells their patient that these drugs simply allow us to be our real selves. That’s a tricky idea to grapple with. What is our true selves? The one aided by a pill to be more…
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G-S-T Review…Identity Thief
Despite a decent trailer that manages to deliver a few laughs, Identity Thief in its entirety fails to live up to it’s potential. Finding comic relief in stories about stolen identities is far from an original concept, one that’s managed to work fabulously well in films like the Coen Brothers’ 90’s classic, The Big Lebowski, but left in the hands of Director Seth Gordon, whose other comedic ventures include comedies Horrible Bosses and Four Christmases, the familiar comedy of errors scenario is nothing but a chaotic mess. The film opens with accountant Sandy Patterson, played by Jason Bateman, who is duped by Melissa McCarthy’s Diana – con woman and said…
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G-S-T Review…A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
There’s no good way to approach A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (henceforth referred to as Charles Swan for brevity’s sake). In large part, that’s a byproduct of the film being a complete disaster, but an alluring, charming sort of disaster, and this is where Charles Swan becomes a complicated beast. I’m not sure what else could reasonably be expected about a Roman Coppola film starring Charlie Sheen that’s so firmly about Charlie Sheen; at best that’s a recipe for rampant weirdness, and at worst for catastrophic cinematic failure. Somehow Coppola’s aim lands Charles Swan squarely in between, and what we’re left with is a bizarre Sheen…