From behind the iron-barred basement windows of a faceless tenement building nestled alongside so many others that look just like it, a man frantically cries out for aid. His words echo fruitlessly, bouncing between alleyways and sidewalks as they’re smothered by the brick facade of the structures surrounding him; his pleas goes unanswered, leaving him utterly trapped, robbed of his freedom and with no means of alerting his family or his friends – hours away in Saratoga – of his plight. But he continues to make appeals to the deserted street, and as he does, the camera pans up, revealing that this heartbreaking display of hopelessness and isolation is unfolding…
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G-S-T Review…Charlie Countryman
Nobody can fault Charlie Countryman for a lack of trying, that’s for certain. They can, of course, fault it for being a schizophrenic and ultimately useless piece of cinema, but as I cringed at the lesser merits of Fredrik Bond’s debut film, I also found myself yearning to give the whole production an “A” for effort; for every one of Charlie Countryman‘s myriad failures, there’s a palpable sense that Bond and his cast – particularly leading man Shia LaBeouf, grown up and shockingly greasy from his stint as Neurotic Human Protagonist in the Transformers series – are striving for something in every scene. Exactly what they’re striving for could remain in contention for a good…
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Sweet Trailer…'Divergent'
Imagine this: it’s the distant future, and society has been divided into five separate factions, each of which represents one of humanity’s best traits. You’re born into either Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, or Erudite, and from that point on, you’re the embodiment of that one characteristic – until your sixteenth birthday, when you take an apparently government-mandated aptitude test that identifies which faction you fit into the best. Now imagine that the test fails, and you could fit into any number of factions. And that this particular quality – known as divergence – makes you a danger in the eyes of the powers that be. That’s the basic gist of…
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G-S-T TV: American Horror Story: Coven (3.2 – 3.5)
Let’s play catch-up with Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, shall we? In just a scant four episodes (maybe not so scant if Coven measures to the same length as its forebears in American Horror Story canon), Ryan Murphy has treated us to nearly as much weird sex, regional creepiness, and explicit gore as what Asylum offered viewers; this isn’t a season that’s had to struggle much to find any footing, even if the most recent episode felt a tad unfulfilling (Zoe’s delightful chainsaw rampage notwithstanding). That’s just what happens when you give your season a sense of balance instead of yanking it every which-way possible. So where are we, five weeks after…
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G-S-T Review…Diana
As a young lad, my measure of acquaintance with Diana, Princess of Wales started and stopped with the following details: she was British, beautiful, and a hair’s breadth from sainthood. Her death in 1997 meant little to me as a sheltered American boy, and only signified that the people I saw on television weren’t immune to harm or free from danger. The vulturous ethics of the paparazzi culture that was so thoroughly alien to my thirteen year old self, of course, has become much more familiar to me since, so today, at the very least, I can appreciate the cultural significance of her demise more than a decade and a…
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Sweet 2nd Trailer…'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'
If you’re among those campaigning for studios to cut shorter trailers for their tentpole releases, then the newest trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug may cut harshly across your grain. At the same time, three minutes feels almost appropriate; Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth opuses never last less than two and a half hours, so perhaps there’s a sense of obligation to make promo footage for the picture feel proportionately epic in scope. Look at it this way, though – it only takes them less than a third of that time to work the title of the film into the mix! That’s probably small consolation. At any rate, The Hobbit: Hobbit…
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G-S-T Review…Ender's Game
We’re living in a time when the phrase “unfilmable novel” can no longer serve as an excuse for poor page-to-screen adaptations of quintessential stories on the receiving end of the Hollywood treatment. Over a decade ago, Peter Jackson shouldered the burden of that challenge by taking J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and turning them into a trilogy of three hour and change films (or one ten hour film, depending on your perspective) whose joint success led to criminal cultural misuse of the word “epic”; nobody can so cavalierly write off their inept filmmaking based on a text’s inclination toward being transposed onto celluloid. It’s a blatant cop-out. Which…
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G-S-T Review…About Time
About Time‘s central romance doesn’t involve Rachel “Mean Girls” McAdams or Domhnall “Son of Brendan” Gleeson; the real lovers here are Richard Curtis and the tricky notion of time travel. How else to punch up a story that’s all about the rich existential rewards we reap from living a boring, ordinary life? Curtis employed the deceptive pleasures of coincidence to achieve the same effect in 2003’s Love Actually, though admittedly there’s nothing humdrum about the personal relationships of Prime Ministers and rock gods (or divine intervention, even if that never made the final cut). Here, he overturns a similar stone by using a far more incredible narrative tool for his…
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CONTEST CLOSED – Win A Copy of ‘The Conjuring’ On Blu-Ray
Attention: CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED. All winners have been notified. Thanks for your interest in The Conjuring.—————————————————————————————————————————— We may have missed talking about The Conjuring back when James Wan’s well-received horror gem enjoyed its theatrical run, but that’s not going to stop us from giving away a copy of the film on Blu-Ray following its release on home video last week. After all, it’s October! This is the perfect time of year to hunker down in front of your TV and willfully spook the daylights out of yourself (and your friends), so consider us your Halloween fright enablers with this contest. The Conjuring is based on the true exploits of Ed…
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Sweet Trailer…'Captain America: The Winter Soldier'
When it comes to the first Captain America film (well, the first one in Marvel’s slate of movies leading into 2012’s The Avengers), I tend to feel like I’m in the minority of people who dug its pulpy pleasures. I’m calling it right now and predicting that reaction won’t be quite so split for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which frankly stands to be the best Marvel production to date. Maybe this is just a case of trailer shock, but I don’t think so – watch the above two minutes and forty seconds’ worth of footage to see for yourself. Now that’s more like it, Marvel. Now that Phase One…
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A 3D Movie In Any Other Format Would Be As Great…
“Great movies are the ones that stay great no matter where you watch them.” Seventy three characters never read so compellingly. This little nugget popped up in my Twitter feed Friday afternoon on October 4th, a direct result of the mid-afternoon jamboree that took place on the opening day for Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. You may be familiar with this film by now; it’s the one where Sandra Bullock and George Clooney spin aimlessly through space for roughly ninety minutes in the long, unbroken shots that serve as Cuarón’s calling card (and have done since 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También). According to the Internet, you should probably – probably – make a…
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G-S-T Review…The Fifth Estate
Here’s the big question hanging over the head of The Fifth Estate: do we contextualize it based on content or structure? Bill Condon’s first post-Twilight film bites off more than it can chew, but it’s difficult to say whether that’s because of the subject matter – being the origins and rise of both Wikileaks and its controversial founder, Julian Assange – or because of the production’s unavoidable biopic bent; even at the tender age of only seven (which amounts to light years on the web), Wikileaks can already claim a rich, storied, complex history, so much so that two hours feels scarcely enough to scratch the surface of its conception…
