(This review contains spoilers.)
What Lies Beneath (2000) isn’t a great film. Heck, it isn’t even a particularly good film by most people’s standards, given the 47% Rotten Tomatoes score.
It is however one of my favorite films, and it’s not a guilty-pleasure thing or a so-bad-it’s-good thing; I love this film for what it could have been: a masterpiece.
Continue reading
Eve: “Yasmine. She’s Lebanese. I’m sure she’ll be very famous.”
Adam: “God, I hope not. She’s way too good for that.”
An elite indifference lurks at the heart of Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Jim Jarmusch’s anti-love story between an unlikely pair of ancient vampires Adam and Eve, played by a criminally underfed Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton.
(Spoilers below.)
We can thank Rosemary’s Baby and Alien for dragging childbirth into modern horror. “I know your secret,” mutters The Void’s bad guy Dr. Powell as he teases the protagonist for his relief at his wife’s recent miscarriage. The instinct to resist impregnation (or even multiplication) is at the heart of Ripley’s first encounter with a xenomorph. Hell, eggs themselves were used to warn audiences in 1979 that it was probably already too late, that the reproductive wheels had been turning since before they were in line for popcorn.
[Update: I re-watched Willy Wonka three years after writing this post and have a few more thoughts. I don’t know why I assumed it took place in England; it must have been the Dickensian last names that threw me, along with the quintessentially English schoolteacher. But none of the other kids (or Charlie’s family members for that matter) have English accents. I can’t pin down exactly where the story is supposed to take place, but I guess it must be somewhere in America, which makes Wonka’s nationality less intrusive. (I understand it was filmed in Germany, but that doesn’t help explain the plethora of American accents.)
I’m the first to admit that I adore conspiracy theories, even stupendously implausible ones. Actually, the more howl-at-the-moon ridiculous, the better. They are fascinating windows into our culture and our psyche. So here’s one about a movie that I’d memorized every frame of by the ag e of 12: The Shining.
I fell in love with movies like Session 9 and the 1999 remake of House On Haunted Hill quite accidentally. I didn’t realize that my love of this horror sub-genre was even alive in me. I think up until the point when I saw Session 9 in 2007, had I been pressed, I would have said that my favorite flavor of horror movies was really anything with a priest.
(There are no spoilers in this review.)
So I finally broke down and purchased a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. My love of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder prompted me to scour the internet for “mind bending literature,” the results of which invariably pointed me in one direction.
Jason Herrboldt 