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5 articles from 2009

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The Box (Film Review)

6 November 2009 4:22 AM, PST | Fangoria | See recent Fangoria news »

To answer the most obvious question right away: No, sadly, Richard Kelly’s The Box is not a return to the absorbingly strange glories of his knockout debut feature Donnie Darko. But nor is it as frustratingly out of control as his follow-up film Southland Tales either. In fact, it’s kind of a combination of both: opening and closing reels of compelling and dark personal drama surrounding more expansive, elaborate plotting that loses its grip.

Based on Richard Matheson’s 1970 short story “Button, Button,” The Box relocates the action to Virginia in 1976, where Arthur Lewis (James Marsden) is a Nasa technician and his wife Norma (Cameron Diaz, with a fetching drawl) teaches at the private school attended by their preteen son Walter (Sam Oz Stone). They’re a loving couple, and Arthur is even taking advantage of his skills and facility to create a prosthesis for Norma’s disfigured »

- no-reply@fangoria.com (Michael Gingold)

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Take "The Parallax Test"

27 October 2009 1:08 PM, PDT | The Hollywood Interview | See recent The Hollywood Interview news »

Alan J. Pakula's 1974 masterpiece The Parallax View is a film that just gets better with age, and is correctly regarded by film scholars, critics and cinefiles alike as the greatest paranoid political thriller ever made.

Warren Beatty plays a washed-up reporter from a third-rate Oregon newspaper who stumbles upon the story of the century: all the high-profile political assassinations of years past have been masterminded by the shadowy Parallax Corporation, headhunters, if you will, for sociopaths, societal deviants and misguided idealists, all of whom are equipped with the perfect psychological baggage to be killers-for-hire.

This sequence, the one that is still talked about 35 years later, is a montage of images that comprise the Parallax Corp's "test" for potential candidates. As reporter Beatty infiltrates the Parallax HQ in downtown L.A., we the audience get to take the test with him. It's one of the greatest montages in film history, »

- The Hollywood Interview.com

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Meet the New Oscar Recipients: Gordon Willis

14 September 2009 9:50 AM, PDT | The Wrap | See recent The Wrap news »

By Steve Pond

Notes on the honorary Oscar recipients, part four:

 

For many years, Gordon Willis was the guy who was thanked from the stage of the Oscar show, but overlooked in the nominations.

 

As a cinematographer who started making movies in 1970, he shot films whose looks were iconic: “The Godfather,” “All the President’s Men,” “Klute,” “The Parallax View,” “The Godfather Part II,” “All the President’s Men,” “Annie Hall,” “Interiors,” “Manhattan&rdqu... »

- Steve Pond

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Retro Cafe: 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three'

4 June 2009 9:50 PM, PDT | CinemaSpy | See recent CinemaSpy news »

Modern thrillers, and action films to an extent, seem to me to take themselves pretty seriously. I love the 'Bourne' films, which are probably the new benchmark of modern thriller filmmaking, but there seems very little time taken in contemporary thrillers to give the audience little respites of humor, even in the relationships between characters.

Action-thrillers from the 1970s seem to me to have a much greater sense of fun and levity to them. A film like The French Connection, doubtless as gritty and downright thrilling as any film you will ever see, has a huge number of terrific lines and moments between the lead characters that bring them down to earth and away from Superman-like invincibility.

Then there's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Not forgotten by any means, but there’s no doubt that it has been overtaken in the public's collective memory by the more revolutionary »

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Classic Status

19 May 2009 2:39 AM, PDT | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

The critical work on the American New Wave, it seems, has only just begun -- Robert Altman still gets a free skate (who thinks "M*A*S*H" is worthwhile anymore?), Hal Ashby has been sanctified, but Alan J. Pakula has not, and Robert Aldrich's contributions to the decade are forgotten, while the proper canonization of the films of Monte Hellman and Barbara Loden's "Wanda" is paperwork still waiting to be filed, and the few fascinating films Peter Fonda directed are still cinema non grata. The era's propensity for desperate road travel, dusty realism and pitiless narrative makes it the match for the meaning of film noir, but as yet it seems more critical and academic thought has been devoted, generally, to "Blade Runner" and "E.T.", to the least of Hitchcock's films and to the oeuvre of David Fincher. There's still so much that's left out of the discussion -- for example, »

- Michael Atkinson

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2009 | 2008 | 2003 | 1999

5 articles from 2009

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