Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite throws a lot of information at us in less than an hour and a half, and it’s all crucial to making sense of the narrative she follows in her searing, heartbreaking, somber film. The good news is that she’s an ace filmmaker, and she knows how to convey everything that we need to know effectively, efficiently, and with clarity, but that knowledge must be served with a simple caveat: you can’t unlearn what Blackfish teaches, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. Cowperthwaite’s picture documents inhuman abuses inflicted upon non-human creatures in stunning enough detail to turn even the most dedicated SeaWorld fanatic into an outraged protester. In…
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G-S-T Review…The To Do List
Someone needs to start a Kickstarter campaign to get Aubrey Plaza some acting lessons. That comment sounds infinitely more cruel than intended; Plaza has long been a pivotal, hilarious supporting figure on NBC’s fantastic sitcom Parks and Recreation, and just last year she took a solid starring turn alongside Mark Duplass in Safety Not Guaranteed, but the numerous delights of her work in both underscore the limits of her range as a performer. There’s nothing wrong with having a niche, of course, but her schtick – “deadpan, apathetic, couldn’t-care-less twenty-something” – is not only specific in the extreme but also incapable of sustaining a feature-length picture for its total running…
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G-S-T Review…Pacific Rim
Let’s begin this review on the bluntest note possible: Pacific Rim is the summer’s best blockbuster by several leagues. That may read as grotesquely biased coming from someone who grew up on Ultraman, Ray Harryhausen, and Toho films and discovered mecha anime titles in his college years; it probably doesn’t help my case that Guillermo del Toro happens to be one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, either. But if my loyalty to del Toro and my passion for the kaiju films he has modeled so much of Pacific Rim after give me a clear dog in the seasonal fight for popcorn supremacy, my sentiment about his latest film remains as…
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Sweet Red-Band Trailer…'Oldboy'
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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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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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…
