I saw three movies last night:

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
A big dumb action movie in which a group of high school physics dropouts display their knowledge of Star Trek characters and demonstrate how little they care about plot. They lost me at the "cold fusion" bomb, but, in a reversal of the experiences of my of my friends, I liked it more a ( Read more... )

I arrived in New Zealand at some ungodly hour this morning, having managed some sleep, and also a few movies:

• When I saw the trailers for Ted (2012) it looked fun in a purile way, but it was surprisingly smart; very reminiscent of Family Guy but without the random asides.
  
• I was definitely right to watch the original of Total Recall before the ( Read more... )

I watched Cabin in the Woods on the flight back. Despite starting a Kiwi actress, this film inexplicably went straight to DVD in NZ and Australia (except for a couple of film festival showings). I'm not a big fan of the horror genre, but I recognise enough to the tropes to appreciate what Joss Whedon did with this one. It was also great to see so ( Read more... )

I'm a big fan of Film Crit Hulk. As a film professional he views and discusses cinema in a different manner than I approach narrative forms as a classicist-slash-historian. Last week he had a series of articles in EW about Comic-Con. The one I found most interesting was on the phenomena that is Comic-Con panels (THE ANATOMY OF A COMIC-CON PANEL, ( Read more... )

I've seen a number of excellent movies in the last couple of weeks.

First was the excellently fucked-up Old Boy (2003). I was put on to this Korean revenge movie most recently by discussion of the cinematography of the scene in which Oh Dae-Su, armed with a hammer, fights a crowd of goons in a hallway. That's a fantastic and memorable scene, one ( Read more... )

This post and the linked articles contain spoilers. Exercise discretion.

I watched The Hunger Games last week and I came out of the film eager to read the books. Today I read a couple of articles discussing the character of Katniss in interesting ways.


( Read more... )

As usual, my trans-pacific flight was a chance to watch a bunch o the movies I've missed recently. It had been a while since I've flown Qantas and they haven't really kept up with in-flight entertainment game, at least on this 777. Compared to Virgin, their screens are smaller, selection much more restricted, and interface clunkier and more ( Read more... )

One of the last things I did in the week before my Christmas escape from L.A. was attend a double-feature at the New Beverly. This time it was part of the third Wright Stuff series for which Edgar Wright had selected movies that he had never seen. This particular double-feature was White Heat (1949) and Throne of Blood (1957); a pair of classics, ( Read more... )

A while ago some of my local film-making friends were tweeting this videographic breakdown of the chase scene in The Dark Knight (2008). If you're interested in the visual logic of action scenes, it's worth a look.


In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

I had heard pretty mediocre things about the new Jason Statham/Clive Owen/Robert De Niro move Killer Elite (2011), but I felt like watching Jason Statham beat some dudes up, so I caught a matinee yesterday ( Read more... )