I’m not sure how I missed the news back in December, but Gerry Anderson died on the day after Christmas. Although he eventually did several live action series and one live action theatrical feature, Anderson was inextricably associated with the string of television fantasy projects he produced using puppets and elaborate miniature effects throughout the […]
A friend who I often disagree with about movies recently surprised me with a recommendation. His opinions are often very stringent, yet here he was telling me that Roy Del Ruth’s The Alligator People was worth seeing. Del Ruth had a long and prolific career, but his filmography seems fairly undistinguished – just one more […]
I’ve been a fan of Don Coscarelli’s work since the first time I saw Phantasm in 1979. Made when he was just 24, that film followed two “family” features – Jim, The World’s Greatest (1976, co-directed with Craig Mitchell), about a boy dealing with his alcoholic father; and Kenny & Company (1976), about a week […]
Death Race 3: Inferno, director Roel Reine’s follow-up to his Death Race 2, itself a prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race (2008), picks up where the previous movie ended and ends where the original begins. Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) has been “rebuilt” after his apparent death in a fiery crash, transformed into the masked […]
Pardon me for a moment while I put on my old fogey hat (once again!). This past week, I saw two old ’50s movies – one, a prestige studio production screened digitally on a big multiplex screen; the other a modest studio B production shown from a 35mm print on the smaller Cinematheque screen. And […]
I recently came across a comment (can’t recall where) that it’s wrong to binge on TV series now that we can get whole seasons on disk. The art form is designed to be watched and appreciated in installments and watching many episodes back to back prevents absorbing each one individually. I do see the point, […]
At the risk of losing credibility, I have to say that I was disappointed by Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution, which opened theatrically today. Anderson is a frustrating figure because he’s capable of excellent genre filmmaking, but also regularly shackles himself to video-game-based projects. This began immediately after he left England in the mid-’90s […]
Flying to England a few weeks ago for my nephew’s wedding, my experience of airline entertainment was even less satisfying than on my trip to Beijing last year. As before, the wide selection of movie choices was undeniably eclectic – in the “avant garde” section, for instance, we were offered Morgan Spurlock’s Comic Con Episode […]
Jim McBride was one of the most interesting and accomplished filmmakers to emerge in New York City in the ’60s, debuting with the remarkably assured and inventive David Holzman’s Diary in 1967. One of the earliest, and finest, examples of faux documentary, it fooled many people with its convincing portrayal of a filmmaker (L.M. Kit […]
I was surprised to read over the weekend of the death of Kurt Maetzig. He was 101. Maetzig began his career in film in the ’30s with work on film technologies and animation. After the rise of the Nazis his work permit was revoked because of his mother’s Jewish heritage, and he spent the war […]