|
|
|
| OLD |
"The Night Is No Longer Young"
Peter Sobczynski says... "After a period of dormancy that allowed some to think that it had gone away forever and that we would be spared from its horrors, that most terrifying of entities once again returned a few days ago to infect otherwise sensible souls in a manner that made them seem as if they had gone well and truly mad. I am, of course, speaking of The Discourse—specifically, the thing that pops up on the Internet every once in a while where some mad soul attempts to convince others that the films of M. Night Shyamalan are not only not utter gibberish but are actually—I kid you not—good. Now I am not an unreasonable person and so when The Discourse sticks to the likes of “The Sixth Sense” (a film that I didn’t much care for but which I will concede is well-made and worked for most people more than it did for me), “Unbreakable” (to my mind, the one film of his that comes closest to greatness) or “Signs” (which is undeniably spellbinding until those damned last ten minutes), I am willing to allow it. However, when the rot sets in so deeply that The Discourse turns to offering up defenses of such lunacies as “The Village,” “The Happening” or “After Earth,” that is where I have to draw the line. On the bright side, at least the discourse has not, to my knowledge, tried to make a case for the likes of “The Lady in the Water” or “The Last Airbender” as of yet—a lucky thing because such a thing would be the auteurist equivalent of a “Do Not Resuscitate” order in the minds of most sane people. Although The Discourse can be cruel and insidious in the way that it forces once-dignified people attempt to explain just how truly powerful and moving “The Village” really is, the bright side to it is that it usually only crops up when Shyamalan has a new movie coming out and tends to peter out soon after it hits theaters and moviegoers discover that they have been ripped off by his nonsense once again." (more)
|
|
| SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY |
"Another Terrible Decision From LeBron"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Even though I have been a passionate fan of the old Warner Brothers cartoons for as long as I have been watching movies (my earliest conscious memory involves my very first movie screening, led off by a Road Runner cartoon) and lived in Chicago during the era when Michael Jordan ascended from basketball phenom to global superstar, I absolutely hated “Space Jam” when it came out in 1996 and my view of it has not mellowed with time. I found it to be a lazy and soulless piece of corporate greed run amok that demonstrated that no one at the studio at that point evidently had any interest in the history or legacy of their animated creations—as the great Chuck Jones himself pointed out at the time, the classic Bugs Bunny would not have required the services of Michael Jordan in order to triumph at anything, even a basketball game—and the nostalgic attitude that people have developed towards it in the quarter-century since its debut only serves as yet another argument backing up the notion that people are idiots. Therefore, when it turned out that I was unable to attend the press screening for the long-gestating semi-sequel “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” I must confess that I was not exactly devastated over the notion of missing it. However, when the early reviews began coming out that seemed to suggest that it was somehow louder, dumber cruder and more contemptuous of its own legacy than the original, the sad and twisted part of my soul that is not only willing to sit through overwhelmingly terrible movies but makes a point of seeking them out (you know anyone else who has pre-ordered the Blu-Ray of “Moment by Moment”?) became more than a little curious. Was it possible that the makers of this film took one of the abominations of contemporary American cinema and somehow made it worse?" (more)
|
|
| OUT OF DEATH |
"The Willis In The Woods (Occasionally)"
Peter Sobczynski says... "At this point, it seems that every few weeks brings along yet another cheaply crapfest in which Bruce Willis inexplicably squanders what remains of his still-considerable star power as he tuns up for a few lazily performed scenes in exchange for what I can only presume to be a substantial percentage of the film’s budget. With his latest effort (if that is the word), “Out of Death,” it appears that he has finally hit the career nadir that he has been heading towards—an astonishingly lethargic and empty-headed action-thriller (if those are the words) in which he not only shot his entire role in a single day (the whole production evidently took only nine days) but, based on the on-screen evidence, apparently managed to squeeze in a brief round of embalming that morning before arriving on the set." (more)
|
|
| PIG (2021) |
"That'll Do, Nic."
Peter Sobczynski says... "When it was announced that Nicolas Cage was planning to star in a film that would have him playing a reclusive truffle hunter who leaves his cabin in the Oregon wilderness for the streets of Portland to track down his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped, Twitter practically exploded with delight at the possibility of another bizarro Cage film along the lines of—well, approximately 85% of all the films that he has done over the last couple of decades. When the trailer came out several weeks ago, you could practically hear film geeks salivating over the memes, gifs and YouTube highlight reels that they would soon be putting together. You cannot really blame them for anticipating that it was going to be yet another one of those seemingly inexplicable cinematic endeavors that Cage tends to select for reasons that perhaps not even he could adequately explain to anyone’s satisfaction. Hell, compared to likes of something like “Willy’s Wonderland,” in which he played a silent drifter dragooned into working overnight as a janitor in a condemned amusement park who ends up doing battle with an army of demonically possessed animatronic creatures, a movie in which he goes off in dogged pursuit of his beloved truffle pig sounds positively staid." (more)
|
|
|
Articles 
