Films can be considered offensive or obscene for a variety of reasons, whether it be extreme violence, or controversial subject matter, and while most films in this vein are exploitative, a select few are evocative. Obscenity is merely a way of communicating to the audience, much like sight gags or witty dialogue, and the films […]
Month: October 2014
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Filmmaker Retrospective: The Fantastic Cinema of Guillermo Del Toro
From the dawn of mankind, human beings have used art, myth, and nightmare to challenge fears and to express them. This is the world of myth, fantasy, and horror that Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro works from. Del Toro takes the monsters that haunt our psyches and makes them terrifying and misunderstood. The monster is […]
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20 Best Kung Fu Movies That Are Worth Your Time
For decades, serious film snobs looked down on kung fu movies as cultural trash, a kind of mindless detritus imported from the Pacific Rim to clutter grindhouse movie theaters and fill out the programming line-up on late night TV. This was an odd position to take—if ever there was a genre that embodied the highest […]
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Filmmaker Retrospective: The Bizarre Cinema of Terry Gilliam
In the early 1980s, German filmmaker Werner Herzog shot a film named ‘Fitzcarraldo’ in the jungles of South America, battling against forces of nature as formidable as hostile tribes, and an egomaniacal actor. In that film a 340 ton steamship is moved up and over a hill without the aid of special effects. This ostensibly […]
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The 30 Greatest Character Actresses Of All Time
The job of a character actress is to add spice and flavor to a movie so that audiences won’t notice that they have eaten this same meal a thousand times before. They may be comic actresses, or British, or old, or they might look just look too normal. Otherwise they are too iconoclastic, too weird: […]
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Filmmaker Retrospective: The Iconic Teen Movies of John Hughes
Writer/Director John Hughes (1950-2009) was, without a doubt, one of the leading lights in cinema in relation to his depiction of teenage life. From the 1955 Nicholas Ray film “Rebel Without A Cause” onwards, the plight of being young and trying to find your way in the world has been a constant in cinema. Hughes […]