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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
31213 |
| Total Ratings: |
247500 |
| Total Reviews: |
27812 |
![[164314146 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?164314146)
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| CLAIRE'S CAMERA |
"Doesn't entirely point its camera inward, and so finds a bit of life."
Jay Seaver says... "Cannes has become so associated with its film festival that just setting a movie there seems to warp perception of it and the people involved; it becomes part of this insular world that means something to filmmakers and influential critics who perhaps don't realize how many people it can leave on the outside. "Claire's Camera" mostly avoids that - it's set in that world and in many ways about it, but not so much so that it loses its basic charm." (more)
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| LET THE CORPSES TAN |
"Prettier than the typical action movie - and louder!"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL XX: "Let the Corpses Tan" isn't the same sort of ultra-violence as high art as other films you might describe that way - it's more about the striking image than the impeccable choreography, the sort of thing that you can screen-capture and show to someone who doesn't necessarily go for big action rather than the clips you dissect looking for cuts and doubling. Fortunately, it's in the hands of some of the best in the business at creating striking images and just enough to stitch them together, and they're happy to dispense with subtlety." (more)
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| RAMPAGE (2018) |
"Where Is Bert I. Gordon When You Need Him?"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Although the credits for “Rampage” remind you that the film is at least technically based on the popular arcade game that ate up many a loose quarter back in the Eighties, any film fan with a basic working knowledge of films involving giant monsters stomping familiar cities into rubble while square-jawed heroes try to figure out a way to save the day in the ta-daa nick of time will recognize it as being more of an antecedent of the 1957 schlock movie classic, for lack of a better word, “Beginning of the End.” In that film, for those of you whose childhoods were filled with fresh air and the like, scientific experiments into making things really big have the detrimental side effect of making a swarm of grasshoppers grow to enormous size and inspire a wave of destruction that eventually culminates with them attacking Chicago. In terms of quality, let it be said that it more than earned its placement in the pantheon of B movies that found themselves being skewered on “Mystery Science Theater 3000”—the story was preposterous, the dialogue more so, the acting was more wooden than the sets and the visual effects were not so much “special” as “deeply dubious.” (The aforementioned attack on Chicago, for example, was staged by getting some regular-sized grasshoppers and filming them walking on top of photos of notable landmarks like the Wrigley Building—a gimmick that might have worked were it not for the moment when a grasshopper steps off the building and seems to hang there in thin air.) However, for all of its faults, the film does still have a certain junky charm to it, especially for anyone living in Chicago, and as bad as it is, people still remember it more than 60 years after its first release while so many other titles from that era have slipped from the cultural consciousness. “Rampage” essentially takes the formula established by that film, adds untold millions to the production budget and comes up with something that matches “Beginning of the End” in virtually all the particulars I cited above—except, alas, for the stuff about the junky charm and being memorable." (more)
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| YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE |
"Hey Joe, Where You Going With That Ball-Peen Hammer In Your Hand?"
Peter Sobczynski says... "When future generations of film scholars and people killing time in bars before trivia night sit down to compose lists of the most grimly depressing movies ever made, Lynne Ramsey’s “You Were Never Really Here” is sure to have a place of high honor on all of them. This is not a criticism, mind you, as much as it is a simple observation for this is a film that is simply jam-packed with dread, misery and moments of physical and emotional violence that are so overwhelming in their brutality that even those moviegoers with a high threshold for such things may find themselves turning away in a futile effort to escape the horrors up on the screen. That said, it has been made with a great deal of style and skill and contains a effective central performance from Joaquin Phoenix at its bruised center. However, when it comes to supplying some kind of perceptible point to all of the ugliness that it presents, it comes up short—I genuinely cannot quite figure out what the movie is ultimately trying to say and I am not so sure that she knows either. Then again, it could be argued that this is also less a criticism than it is an observation as well." (more)
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| QUIET PLACE, A |
"Be Vewy Vewy Quiet--Seriously. . ."
Peter Sobczynski says... "Does it strike anyone as especially odd that nearly all of the films released this year by Paramount Pictures have dealt with encounters with alien life form with potentially catastrophic results for mankind as a whole? First off was “The Cloverfield Paradox,” the deeply disappointing sold-to-Netflix continuation of the “Cloverfield” franchise in which a space station crew’s mucking about with the time-space continuum ends up being the cause of the original film’s creature invasion. Next up was ‘Annihilation,” Alex Garland’s trip and visionary tale of a group of scientists off to investigate a mysterious force field of alien origin and encounter the kind of things destined to fuel think pieces and academic treatises for years to come. Now comes “A Quiet Place” and yet another narrative based around the threat of humanity going the way of the laserdisc thanks to visitors from another world and on a spectrum in which “The Cloverfield Paradox” and “Annihilation” sit at opposite ends, it lands pretty much smack in the middle—while never close to being as achingly stupid as the former, it is also never quite as smart and clever as the latter was or as it clearly thinks it is." (more)
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| BLOCKERS |
"Girls Just Wanna Have Agency. . ."
Peter Sobczynski says... "Ah spring, the time when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love and cantankerous critics turn to a slew of films centered on prom night and a group of young ones who are either trying to find true romance or lose their virginities, depending on the rating and the age of the target audience. The raunchy new comedy “Blockers” is definitely of the latter category as it follows three lifelong friends who make a pact to lose their virginities on the night of their senior prom a la “American Pie.”" (more)
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| MY NAME IS MYEISHA |
"Tries to stretch a few minutes into a movie, and can you blame it?"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL XX: It's a challenge to build a feature-length film around a specific, brief incident; the options generally seem to be providing enough background to lead up to it (and risk swallowing the important moment) and pointedly attacking it from different perspectives in a way that risks making the audience numb to the moment. "My Name Is Myeisha" tries to do a little of both, and there's no doubt that, by the end, the audience can feel the filmmakers stretching, although many will find themselves not exactly begrudging it that extension." (more)
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| PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING |
"All of the Robots and Monsters, None of the Fun"
alejandroariera says... "I think I owe Guillermo del Toro an apology after having seen "Pacific Rim: Uprising." Yes, Guillermo, I was way too harsh on my original review of "Pacific Rim." Yes, I found the dialogue in "Pacific Rim" goofy and dumb and I missed the lyrical touches of your best films. But, man, your film was still fun! Today, whenever I stumble upon it while flipping through channels at home, I can’t help but stop and watch it for at least ten minutes regardless of the scene I stumble into, whether it’s that glorious shot of the Jaeger dragging a cargo ship to later use it as baseball bat on one of your Lovecraftian Kaijus or that equally beautiful shot of the very young Mako Kori standing alone, in the debris-filled streets of her city, staring upwards at the Jaeger piloted by Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). You may be the producer of "Pacific Rim: Uprising" but what director Steven S. De Knight (better known for his work on the Starz series "Spartacus") and his three co-writers –Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T.S. Nowlin– have done to your original vision is more than shameful." (more)
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SHORT STUFF: THE 2017 OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARY SHORTS
by Jay Seaver |
| "It's a perennial observation, but there's probably no other category in the Academy Awards whose definition dictates the form of the film that gets made, as three of the five nominees are within a minute or two of the maximum length of a short film, leading one to wonder how many of them were cut down from something not quite feature-length and how many arrived at that length and pace naturally." (more) |
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'THIN. PRETTY. BIG TITS. YOUR BASIC NIGHTMARE.'
- Marie, When Harry Met Sally
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