I don't normally read io9 (mostly a time constraint), but a friend linked me to a piece where the title tells it: Why We Can’t Have Great Movies. Two words: risk aversion.
[There's more! See the original entry here]

“Incoherent” is the nicest thing that can be said about Zack Snyder’s ode to the confines of his own overheated imagination. Or: A failed experiment, emphasis on failed. What starts as a poor-little-Gothic-girl horror story (girl is institutionalized by mean...
[There's more! See the original entry here]

In my book, Shinya Tsukamoto can never completely stink. This is the man who gave us the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a film so deranged the first time I watched it I thought it was gonna melt inside my VCR all on its spontaneous own. But this is the third time he's been over this particular territory, which makes that ... what? First time ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I haven't done this in a while, so here are some recent Blu-ray issues that grabbed my attention. Some will end up on my own shelf by year's end or so....
[There's more! See the original entry here]

The New York Times has a profile of Steve Jobs that features the following quote: "His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct."

This stands in marked contrast with the current state of the entertainment ( Read more... )

Hollywood’s messy love affair with science fiction is documented beautifully in this overview of SF movies which either made it to the screen only after great developmental strife (Dune, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four) or never made it at all (The Tourist, The Stars My Destination, The Six Million Dollar Man). Hughes did his homework for every ( Read more... )

An animated adaptation of a Serbian graphic novel, very much in the mold of Moebius and Enki Bilal, with plenty of acerbic humor and wit that for a lack of a better word is strongly Eastern European in flavor. Set some decades hence, young Edit resorts to biotechnology to cheat on one of her exams and finds herself becoming a host for an artificial ( Read more... )

Gaspar (Irreversible) Noé’s death-trip film is a visually stupendous execution of, well, not much at all. American-born Tokyo slacker Oscar smokes DMT and hallucinates while his sister bumps and grinds for salarymen in a stripclub. When Oscar’s drug-dealing buddy sells him out to the cops, he's gunned down in a filthy toilet stall, and spends the ( Read more... )

Before Ringo Lam ended up in Hollywood grinding out sleepwalker, Van Damme’d action titles like Maximum Risk and Replicant, he was one of Hong Kong’s better action directors; his City on Fire was one of the many sources Quentin Tarantino freely lifted from for Reservoir Dogs. Burning Paradise, from 1994, had cult status amongst bootleggers due to ( Read more... )