A Nightmare on Elm Street may not be the best horror movie of the 80’s, but it’s probably the most fun. This marks the high point of Wes Craven’s career, and it is as scary as it is innovative. The whole movie feels like it shouldn’t really work. Some of the performances are a little creaky and campy, and there are a handful of purely dramatic scenes that feel a tad amateurish. However, Craven truly delivers when it comes to the scares, and he makes good on the promise of the genuinely terrifying premise.  And the villain is one for the ages. 

Released during the early 80’s surge of teenage horror movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street soon became one that stood out from the crowd. While horror has always remained a financially successful genre, it has had its ups and downs in popularity throughout the decades, and there are definite trends that come out of movies that strike gold. For example, when Wes Craven’s Scream opened in 1996 and went on to make over 100 million dollars, we saw a new five-year span of the same kind of horror movie. While 80’s horror was all about blood and guts and boobies, 90’s horror became more about in jokes and loud musical cues. They were fun while they lasted, but movies like (more…)

The best of the Universal Monster movies, Bride of Frankenstein marks the highlights for the careers of Boris Karloff and James Whale. It’s amazing to think that it might not have even happened without the original’s director. Released a whopping four years after the original, the film was attempted to be made by the producers much earlier, and director Whales was asked to participate again and again. He finally agreed (and probably wasn’t too happy, I bet) to do the sequel, and instead of doing a retread of the original, he continues the storyline in the most enjoyable of manners, adding energy and imagination to a rich and moving screenplay.

Bride of Frankenstein opens soon just moments after the events of the original (following an unusual and fascinating prologue that features The Bride’s Ella Lanchaster as Mary Shelley herself), with The Monster (Karloff) having survived the burning of the mill. He wanders the woods to be screamed at and attack again and again by village dwellers not understanding his dislike for violence and yearning for acceptance. Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive), meanwhile, has decided to abandon his God-like experiments and move on with his life, when another mad scientiest (Ernes Thesiger), an old mentor of his, shows up to persuade him to collaborate on a new experiment.

While the film as a whole works beautifully, there are two sequences that raise the film from a great piece of work to an enduring classic. After receiving nothing but fear and hatred from everyone he turns to, The Monster hears a violin playing in a small little cottage in the forest. He goes inside to find a lonely man who is in desperate need for a friend. The Monster is afraid upon entering, thinking that he will be just like everyone else, but there is something unusual about the man. He is blind. The old man takes him in as an equal, and the two bond together and form a friendship.

This section of the movie is so joyous that it’s hard to imagine (more…)

It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced awe in watching a movie, but I did have my moments in viewing this brand new version of Brave Runner at the Landmark Theatres, the only theatre that was showing Blade Runner on the west coast (its run now is unfortunately over). I’d only seen the film once before, back in freshman year at LMU, for a philosophy class. Back then, I talked about the positives and negatives of having artificial friends, since artificiality is a major theme in Blade Runner, with the replicant creatures. An excerpt from my essay…

“The problem that arises with a real friend, however, is that a person can be subjugated to having a friend who can become a terrible person, one who lacks sincere feelings and instead focuses on feelings of hate, jealousy, and greed. A real person is capable of ridiculing his friend whenever and wherever he feels the need to, and the friend merely has to accept the reality that there is no sure-fire way to guarantee his friend will always be there for him. A real person has the ability to act like a companion when all he really wants to do is maybe further his career or become more popular so that he can pursue more handsome, educated, and wealthy friends.”

Wow, what insight! And what’s bad about artificial friends? (more…)

Another week, another disappointment. It’s not that I expected something tremendous from Ben Affleck’s directorial debut. Here’s a guy who’s done nothing but dreck in the last four years, and now he’s directed his first film. Now, it must be said, Gone Baby Gone is actually pretty impressive given that Affleck was behind it all, co-writing as well as directing. Some of the performances, and a lot of material near the end, work very well. There is definite promise for Affleck in the directing field, and I for one would love to see him stick behind the camera (at least for a few years). His acting breakthrough recently was his performance in the underwhelming Hollywoodland, and now, with this film, he has definitely taken if not a leap, a step forward. But I can honestly say the last film I saw him that I enjoyed was the excellent film Changing Lanes, released way back in April 2002, over five years ago!

But anyway, this isn’t a review of Ben Affleck, this is a review of his film. It’s a decent, flawed, sometimes too slow-moving, sometimes surprising, sometimes excellent, most of the time so-what, kind of a police procedural movie (more…)

Take a look at this new 2-minute short I made for an online filmmaking contest. The topic given was “The Clinic” and we had complete creative freedom. Thanks to Kevin Andrews and Will Hyler for helping me out! Look for the other short I made for this contest in coming weeks.

What it is about George Clooney that bores me to death? He’s considered one of the most accomplished, A-list movie stars of the last few years. I actually like the guy a lot when it comes to his wise-cracking real life persona. And I admire the attention he gives to films that probably couldn’t be made without his participation. Yet all of this doesn’t exactly translate to my particular enjoyment of his movies. To this day, my favorite George Clooney movie is From Dusk Til Dawn, the first movie he made after becoming a star on ER. It’s the only purely entertaining film I’ve seen him in (this side of Batman and Robin, of course). There have been other films of his that I’ve liked, including Ocean’s Eleven, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Out of Sight. But in the last five years, he hasn’t done anything I’ve really cared about. I wanted to love Syriana (hated it). I wanted to love Good Night and Good Luck (was apathetic). And I wanted to love his new universally acclaimed drama thriller Michael Clayton. But I didn’t. Michael Clayton is the best (more…)

What happened here? Rendition should’ve been one of the best movies of the year. It has a timely subject matter, a tremendously talented director Gavin Hood (whose film Tsotsi won the Best Foreign Film award a couple years ago), and three of my favorite actors (Reese Witherspoon, Peter Saarsgard, and Meryl Streep). A disappointment here would’ve been just a good, not great, movie. But Rendition is worse. This is a blase, mostly pointless film that doesn’t offer any new insight into its subject matter and even less in other areas that should be nothing but competent. It’s watchable, but come on, this should’ve been an amazing, gripping piece of work.

Director Hood tries to pack way too much into the fairly short 2-hour runtime. It feels as if he wanted to focus on the minor characters’ storylines (i.e. not the stars), but the studio execs made him also cram in a handful of characters not really pertinent to the majority of this story but are suddenly the main focus. This is true mostly in the Reese Witherspoon storyline. Her husband has been kidnapped and taken overseas to be tortured and investigated, and the husband’s scenes, while flawed, provide a lot of the tension to the movie. Witherspoon, in her worst and most forgettable performance ever, is (more…)

Stephen King is one of the most skilled and successful horror novelists ever to have lived, but the film adaptations of his books have generally ranged from the mediocre to the really, really bad. Such great books as Firestarter, Needful Things, and The Dark Half have been turned into such disasters that it’s a wonder that King still allows Hollywood to mess with his work. However, for every string of terrible films, there is typically an exception. While there have been some solid films based on King’s horror novels, including Carrie and The Shining, there is one that from beginning to end is a brilliant, well-acted, terrifying masterpiece—that film is Rob Reiner’s Misery.

Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is a popular novelist, famous for a book series about a character named Misery, and he has a near-fatal car accident after driving into a massive blizzard. A nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) saves his life and brings him back to her home in a secluded cabin, where she sets him up in a comfortable bed. Paul awakens to find himself seemingly in good hands, but unfortunately for Paul, Annie is his number one fan, as she has the entire Misery series and is looking forward to his newest novel Misery’s Child. Much to Annie’s dismay, the character of Misery is killed off at the end of the book, upsetting her to the point of keeping Paul imprisoned and not letting him go. It’s up to Paul to figure a way out of his own misery, as Annie becomes more and more violent and insane.

Misery is a film that on first glance would seem to be nothing special (more…)

Here’s one of the oldest screwball romantic comedies ever made (and certainly the oldest that I have seen), yet it seems just as fresh over 70 years later as it did in the day. It Happened One Night is noted by trivia buffs as the first movie to win all five major Academy Awards–Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay–and would be the only to do so until One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. Now after finally seeing the film, I can understand why. This is an effortless movie that rides completely on its entertaining storyline, brisky pace, and sensational chemistry between the two leads.

The movie tells of Ellie, a woman married to a wealthy King who, tired of her father’s control, runs away and meets with Peter, an eccentric reporter, on a bus going toward New York. All Peter wants is a great story to write, and Ellie needs his help, since it clearly has been a long time since she’s been on her own. Together they make an oddly matched couple at first, but over the course of a few days, their journey together leads to a romance that neither of them could have suspected. It’s the classic scenario of two people who clearly don’t belong together in the beginning, but who are literally forced to fall in love with each other due to their differences.

Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Frank Capra. I’m not tremendously familiar with any of these three, but I knew that it would literally be (more…)

It’s amazing how far this series has come. What began as sort of a bouncy, special-effects-laden kids movie with the first one six years ago has culminated into one of the darkest blockbuster mainstream movies in recent memory. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a horror film, drenched in menace, filled with dread. There is very little action in the movie until the big finale. The set-up is slow, the movie takes awhile to pick up the pace, and some familiar characters, like Snape and Hagrid, aren’t even seen until the second half. These are all compliments–Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a brilliant movie, maybe the best one yet, and it’s a promise of more great things to come with this series with the final two installments.

Most of you probably know the story, but here’s the gist. Harry is having a rough summer back at home with the Dursleys. He is having nightmares and is clearly disturbed by the recent death of Cedric Diggory and the return of Voldemort. Of course, no one back at Hogwarts truly believes that Voldemort has returned except for Dumbledore and Harry’s close friends Ron and Hermione. The ministry has appointed a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge, who’s the nastiest teacher on the planet–her appearance is jovial but her implications are devilish. Harry takes it upon himself to teach his fellow students how to defend themselves with the possibility of attacks looming, and he has to prepare himself for the big fight that is to come. But this time, his friends are there to help him.

One of the great film series of our time, the Harry Potter films (more…)