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…Gravity
The written word is a poor medium for articulating Gravity‘s many wondrous qualities neatly and efficiently; more than any other film released in 2013, this one – hailing from virtuoso Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron seven years after the monumental Children of Men – may be best described as an experience. That’s a pretty way of saying that Gravity demands to be seen in a properly calibrated theater, which is itself a passive aggressive, mildly pleading clarion call for all bored moviegoers to bum rush their local multiplexes and ruthlessly run box offices out of tickets stubs for the picture. More so than other mainstream contemporary spectacles, the film must be…
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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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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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Sweet Trailer…'Ender's Game'
There’s a lot to like about the first trailer for Ender’s Game, Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s beloved, iconic, and utterly important science fiction novel; it’s big, it’s grand, and it looks to appropriately capture the gravity of the narrative’s scope. Maybe the most awe-inspiring note here isn’t in the footage itself, but from the story surrounding the project. It’s hard to believe that after years of being told that Card’s book- which focuses on gifted children being trained by the military to combat an alien menace- is unfilmable, audiences of both fans and the uninitiated alike are finally going to get to see his vision on the big…
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Cuarón to Strand Bullock, Clooney in Space This October
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, one of G-S-T’s most anticipated releases of the year, has been a long time coming after delays kept it from seeing release in the fall of 2012. I’ll admit that I held some fears about its chances of seeing the light of day this year in reserve– who holds onto a movie driven by two major Academy darlings for this long?– but those fears have been put to rest: the film now has officially been given an October 4th release date. We know precious few details about Gravity beyond Cuarón’s position at the steering wheel, Clooney’s and Bullock’s starring roles, and what the synopsis tells us, but I…
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Spielberg Uncancels the Robopocalypse
Earlier this week The Hollywood Reporter acted as the bearer of some pretty disappointing news, announcing that Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Lincoln— an adaptation of Daniel H. Wilson’s science fiction novel Robopocalypse— is being put on ice for an indeterminate period of time. That’s a king bummer of a bulletin if I’ve ever seen one; Spielberg and genre, particularly sci-fi, go together like peanut butter and jelly, the film had him working with Anne Hathaway and Chris Hemsworth in lead roles and Drew Goddard in a screenwriting capacity, and the book (so I’m told) happens to be pretty great. It’s a shame to hear about a project like that grinding…
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G-S-T Review…Cloud Atlas
Following Cloud Atlas, viewers will invariably find themselves armed with a variety of useful adjectives to describe the film in a single word: grand, towering, epic, inspiring, heartbreaking, heartwarming, hodgepodge. But in adapting David Mitchell’s 2004 novel of the same name, siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer have created a singular, unique work that majestically shrugs off attempts at quick, careless classification. Cloud Atlas is a cinematic medley of narratives connected together through time and space, driven by a sense of enterprise and purpose, and defined by its advocacy of basic, simple morality and human compassion; fitting the film into traditional categories would not be unlike forcing a square…
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The Gun in Your Hand: Looper's Cycles of Violence
(Foreword: Looper began its theatrical run last Friday, and at this point I presume most of you have seen it or are going to see it. That said, if you have not seen the film, steer clear of this essay; it is spoiler-heavy by the third paragraph. I also don’t rehash plot points in detail. Read at your own risk if you want to see the film blind.) Like many other films of its kind, Rian Johnson’s Looper is a time travel yarn that isn’t actually at all about time travel. One might argue that Johnson’s just letting himself off the hook by leaving the mechanics of such technology go unexplained, but truthfully the decision…
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G-S-T Review…Looper
At a glance, Looper almost feels like an outlier in Rian Johnson’s minute body of work. Unlike Johnson’s flawless debut, Brick, or his disappointing sophomore effort, The Brothers Bloom, Looper operates within a grand, wide-spanning scope that reaches across time; the central story here is intimate, just as in his other films, but it’s set against a backdrop of classical science fiction world-building and the machinations of time travel. We’re not in high school, Montenegro, or Prague anymore, but rather a dystopic vision of the future which we experience at two very different points in history, both populated with hover bikes, mafia button men, rampant poverty, and telekinetic mutations. Robbed…
