I’ll be honest: even after reading official press releases and early (albeit potentially untrustworthy) reactions, part of me still didn’t totally believe that somebody, somewhere, had actually funded a remake of Oldboy with Spike Lee positioned at the helm and Josh Brolin, Sharlto Copley, and Elizabeth Olsen installed in the principal roles. Yesterday, though, the first trailer – of the red band persuasion, no less- for the film hit the web, so I can kiss that delusion goodbye and just accept that my favorite all-time film is being repackaged for an American audience and will kick off its theatrical run this fall. Of course, the above is nothing more than…
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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…
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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,…
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Sweet Trailer…'Willow Creek'
Bobcat Goldthwait’s latest film, Willow Creek, still doesn’t have a theatrical release date yet, but it has received its very first trailer. We’ve seen the official poster, and my review from IFFBoston went up shortly after I caught the film at its world premiere (I really liked it), so suffice to say that it’s exciting to have the opportunity to show off some Willow Creek footage to people after talking it up for so long. Check it out below: Smartly, the trailer tries to show off what makes Willow Creek truly great: the relationship dynamics between Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) and Jim (Bryce Johnson) and the guest appearances by real-life Bigfoot fanatics and experts.…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Sweet Trailer…'300: Rise of an Empire'
Eight years after Zack Snyder’s 300 hit theaters and rapidly became a joke through a relentless parade of Internet memes, we’re finally getting the sequel-prequel-recap that nobody wanted. Fortunately, the first trailer for 300: Rise of an Empire makes Noam Murro’s contribution to the story of Sparta’s war with Xerxes look pretty good; if the film didn’t really need to be made in the first place, at the very least it may have the muscles needed to justify its own existence. I can’t honestly go back and watch 300 without laughing anymore, but maybe this will be just new enough for me to take it seriously: The film reportedly unfolds before,…
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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…
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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…
