Roland Emmerich has destroyed the world so many times by now that it’s become blasé.

In Independence Day (1996), the writer/director had aliens raze the world’s major cities. In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), he flooded then froze the northern hemisphere. (By those standards, Emmerich’s destruction of New York City in Godzilla (1998) seems like such small potatoes.)

In his latest big-screen apocalyptic spectacle, 2012, Emmerich breaks apart the earth’s crust, rending the very continents themselves. But while Emmerich offers plenty of eye candy, his movie lacks any real “wow” moments. The end of the world never looked so cartoonish. Full Story »

There are three mainstays in today’s Hollywood:  sex, violence and special effects.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

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Horror of the “gothic” variety that occupied so much of the conversation between Byron and the Shelleys (these would be the conversations that ultimately gave rise to Frankenstein) has traditionally traded in some easily recognizable tropes. Among the most common are your haunted places. Swamps and moors are always a little scary. Graveyards and crypts, of course. Transylvania.

And then there’s haunted houses. Dark mansions, castles on top of hills. Abandoned homes where terrible things once happened. Subdivisions built on top of Indian burial grounds. And so on. Full Story »

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too. Full Story »

When most of us think of Halloween movies, we tend to think of horror flicks, psychological thrillers, or bizarre mind-benders. The Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, or What Lies Beneath, or 12 Monkeys. But since 1993, a stop-motion animation musical has become as much a part of American Halloween culture as any horror franchise.

Boys and girls of every age
wouldn’t you like to see something strange
Come with us and you will see,
this our town of Halloween

So begins the opening song of what is perhaps the most misunderstood Christmas movie of all time, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Yes, I’m serious. For all the references to pumpkins, death, trick-or-treating, and the Boogie Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually a Christmas movie. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last 16 years and are unfamiliar with the plot, here’s the basics (spoiler warning). Full Story »

October 30 is Frankenstein Friday.

Like a lot of kids, I could not get enough of monster movies. On Saturday afternoons, I would hunker down on my living room couch to watch Creature Double-Feature on our small black-and-white TV.

I loved Godzilla, Gorgo, the giant ants of Them!, War of the Worlds, and those delightful shock-fests from England’s Hammer Studios with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But none were better than Universal’s classics: The Creature from the Black Lagoon; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man; and of course, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Watching Colin Clive scream, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” remains one of the most thrilling moments of movie magic ever filmed.

Those movies were so creepy because, unlike today’s horror films, they left almost everything to my imagination—and my imagination can be a whole lot scarier than anything Hollywood can dish out. It’s no wonder audiences back then found those classic monster movies shocking and truly scary.

But the beauty of a story like Frankenstein is that it succeeds on so many levels. Full Story »

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting. Full Story »

Basic cable is known for running even more commercials than network TV does. Its shows are best watched after recording them with DVR or TiVo to eliminate the need to sit through the ads. But some of us can’t wait and watch our favorite shows in real time. Cursing the commercials, we vow never again to watch without recording first.

Premium cable shows like The Sopranos and The Wire have won critical acclaim and millions of dedicated fans. Basic-cable series seldom, if ever, inspire that kind of reaction and, judging by production quality alone, perhaps they don’t deserve it. But, in recent years, basic-cable series have hired actors just as good as premium cable, not to mention network TV, which may have written them off as too old. Full Story »

I’m not someone who demands scientific authenticity in my movies. I’m far more concerned with whether or not the movie is good entertainment than I am with whether the science is right. For example, Deep Impact and Armageddon both came out in 1998. Deep Impact is by far the more scientifically accurate of the two. Armageddon, however, is a more entertaining movie. And Armageddon has enough details accurate, or at least plausible, that the geeks among us are generally satisfied and can maintain our suspension of disbelief.

Unfortunately, some movies get it so bad that you just can’t take them seriously. The husband of a friend of mine noticed a serious oversight during the freeway scene in Matrix: Reloaded that destroyed his suspension of disbelief: at least one of the computer generated cars was missing the drivetrain entirely. I didn’t notice, so I found the movie fine. He did notice, and from that point on wasn’t able to take Reloaded seriously.

I just finished a movie that I couldn’t take seriously, even as mindless entertainment, because the director got the science so wrong it was laughable. I just watched The Day After Tomorrow, directed by Roland Emmerich. Full Story »

David Carradine is dead at 73.

Thanks for the memories…

by Josh Catone

This past weekend saw the online release of the first non-spoof, fan-created film set in the Lord of the Rings universe. That by itself is fairly unremarkable, but a number of things set The Hunt for Gollum apart from your standard fan created fare. It’s long (about 40 minutes), it has better than average acting and writing (think direct-to-DVD caliber), it features incredibly high production values despite a meager £3,000 budget, and it is based on canon. That last bit especially, had some wondering if Gollum would run afoul of rights holders at Tolkien Enterprises.

Where most fan art uses original characters and story lines, The Hunt for Gollum’s writer and director Chris Bouchard based the script on appendices to Tolkien’s original work. That the film uses Tolkien’s actual story could have spelled trouble for the entire production. There are two understood rules in the world of fan art: don’t use official material (like logos, music, and to a lesser extent known characters), and don’t try to make money off your creations. Full Story »

Myth serves as an individual path into the collective unconscious.  It is a means to attain at-one-ment with the greater forces that affect the individual life.  That is, it informs life by putting it into context.  We often disdain myth because it generally portrays less than perfect gods (and goddesses), whereas what we call religion rests on an assumption of divine perfection.  How quaint it is to see the Springeresque antics of Zeus chasing women and Hera chasing Zeus, no wonder the Olympians fell out of favor to be replaced by a single, all-seeing, all-knowing God of perfection.  But which set of beliefs would do an individual more psychological good when faced with infidelity?

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Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full Story »

As I watched the Oscars last night – or perhaps “endured” is a better word, because Huge Ackman prancing around with his nipples all stiff over the return of The Musical! (come on, just try to say it without Jazz Hands) is more than I can take without a cabinetful of medication – I noted that again Meryl Streep got nominated. (And by the way, now I hear that Beyonce might play Ginger in a Gilligan’s Island movie, which means you won’t even be able escape her ubiquitosity by getting stranded on a goddamned deserted island.)

Back to Meryl, though. Full Story »

Stage and film star Claire Bloom and author Philip Roth took no prisoners when their 17-year relationship ended in a firestorm.

When one of the partners in a marriage is a man who’s been called “a gleeful misogynist” –- in a complimentary article, no less –- it comes as no surprise when their union is torn asunder.

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth became a couple in 1976. She was not only a classically trained actress, but her beauty rivaled that of fellow English-woman Elizabeth Taylor (who she actually beat to Richard Burton, with whom she had an affair). He, of course is the American novelist whose career ebbed and flowed, until, after bypass surgery in 1989, he devoted his whole being to writing and was been on a tear ever since. Full Story »

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times? Full Story »

“I’m interested in what motivates you, and how you understand the world.” He glanced sideways at her. “Rausch tells me you’ve written about music.”

“Sixties garage bands. I started writing about them when I was still in the Curfew.”"Were they an inspiration?”

She was watching a fourteen-inch display on the Maybach’s dash, the red cursor that was the car proceeding along the green line that was Sunset. She looked up at him. “Not in any linear way, musically. They were my favorite bands. Are,” she corrected herself.

He nodded.

- William Gibson, Spook Country

I’ve always been intrigued by the curious dynamic of influence. Full Story »

Last night we watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner again, and if you don’t have this package I can’t recommend it highly enough. 25 years on, Ridley Scott was able to finally re-craft the film as he wanted it originally, and the result is a stunning achievement. Scott has been one of our greatest directors for a very long time, but this may be his finest moment to date.

This viewing (probably my 35th or 40th – I lost count a long time ago) got me to thinking, all over again, about how little the film was acknowledged at the time of its release. Full Story »

by Earl Brandt

When it comes to films by great filmmakers, especially those by living filmmakers, I try not to read reviews, criticism, or even summaries prior to seeing the films for myself.  One of life’s great pleasures, for me, is the anticipation and ultimate enjoyment of the work of an artist I have come to know as a great – someone interesting, vital, who’s work is both timeless and immediate in its relevance, and who is in control of a craft and powers of creation.  Best, I reason, if I can encounter the work free of bias other than what is mostly my own.  (I do enjoy trailers – good ones are a pleasant tease.  While constructed, they are composed mostly of the work itself.) Full Story »

The Battle of Gettysburg certainly ranks as one of America’s great stories—but how it became such a great story is a story unto itself.

That’s the focus of Thomas Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory.

Does the world need one more book about the battle of Gettysburg? (Well, there will always be a market for one, so maybe that’s a moot question.) In the case of These Honored Dead, published in 2003, the answer was—and is—yes. Desjardin’s book is a must-have for anyone who seriously considers him/herself a Civil War buff. But perhaps more important, it’s an indispensable case-study for anyone interested in understanding the forces that shape public opinion as it evolves into historical record.

And with everything that’s gone on in the last eight or so years, that kind of insight could be particularly useful. Full Story »