I had a much older trombone-playing friend growing up named Stan. He was someone I rarely interacted with outside of music, but I grew into an adult playing my upright bass right alongside him in my temple’s intergenerational klezmer band. Pointing to my now comically small quarter-sized bass, he always used to say, “I remember […]
Kids of the Rocket Siren
Kids of the Rocket Siren is a short documentary that offers a personal look at the town of Sderot, a small town on the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip. In an community where schools, bus stops, and playgrounds are built to withstand the rockets fired daily over the border, the children who live […]
20 Feet from Stardom
The poster for 20 Feet from Stardom features impassioned back-up artist Judith Hill singing into a microphone. Below her is the title of the film in large pink and white text. Underneath the title, where one might expect to see the names of other back-up legends like Lisa Fischer, Merry Clayton, The Waters, Claudia Lennear, […]
This Is The End
In a world where simple gross-out humor just isn’t enough to push the boundaries of funny, only people like Seth Rogen and his longtime writing partner, Evan Goldberg, seem to be able to surprise audiences enough to inspire fits of uncontrollable laughter. Some may lament that Hollywood filmmakers have forgone the sweet, vaudevillian humor of […]
Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City Blurs Media, Genre and Style
For this essay, my professor asked us to find a film and talk about how it uses elements from different media, genres and styles to create something entirely new. I chose to talk about Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. A black and white hand-drawn frame from the Sin City graphic novel appears on the screen as the Blu-ray […]
Peter Dukes, Writer/Director of Little Reaper and The Beast
“When I get inspired to do something, it’s kind of like a rocket taking off,” says Peter Dukes, laughing. “You’re not going to stop it.” Armed with a passion for originality and an enterprising spirit, filmmaker Peter Dukes has uniquely positioned himself in the industry. Starting from scratch, he has built himself a legacy of […]
Tom Ciaburri, Director of Ironing Board Sam’s Tenth
It’s probably safe to assume that you haven’t heard of Ironing Board Sam. An old Blues musician whose gold suit and predilection for ironing boards have shaped his show-stopping performances for the past fifty years, Sammie Moore is still writing, composing and performing at the ripe age of 74. But despite having played with some […]
Chris Bishop, Co-Writer of Award-Winning Animated Short Caldera
The flowing figure of an enigmatic young woman floats down through sapphire blue water pierced by rays of faint sunlight. The young woman’s black hair streams behind her as she leans forward to touch the looming form of a giant, peaceful turtle. A quietly haunting tune compliments the scene as it accentuates the flood of […]
Film Icons Step Into the Limelight for 2013
2012 was a landmark year in many ways. With the release of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man, the industry saw the true power of the superhero genre as it established itself as the new Hollywood mainstay. Indie comedies like Safety Not Guaranteed and Your Sister’s Sister ruled the underground, while […]
For the Love of the Romantic Tragedy
For this essay, I picked a movie that was still in theaters and analyzed it in terms of genre. Specifically, I determined how I would classify the film, and why exactly I came to that conclusion. I chose to write about Michael Haneke’s Amour. A week before going into Amour, I had the opportunity to speak […]
Roger Ebert Changed My Life With Butter and Salt
I was in the midst of learning to run an enzyme-linked immuno sorbent assay (ELISA) when I heard the news about Roger Ebert’s passing. And if I am being completely honest, it shattered me. The nation had lost one of its best writers, the industry had lost a giant, and I had lost my North Star. […]
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
It has been a long time since Jim Carrey has been funny. For the past decade or so, the iconic 90s comedy superstar has been stretching the limits of his acting ability with critical darlings Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I Love You, Philip Morris. Meanwhile, films like Fun With Dick and Jane, while […]
Tim Burton’s Career Reaches Incestuous Peak
It looks like Tim Burton finally bit the bullet. His newest film, tentatively titled “Johnny Depp,” will tell the story of the American-born actor and his rise to international fame. From his humble beginnings in Owensboro, Ky., to his multi-million dollar career as a movie star, the sprawling epic will run for over three hours, […]
Stanley Kubrick: Iconographic King
An elevator door opens to reveal a river of blood. A bone tossed into the sky by a monkey becomes a space station. A young droog kicks and beats an old man to the tune of Singin’ in the Rain. A crazed aircraft commander rides a nuclear bomb like a rodeo cowboy. An over-the-top drill […]
Quartet
Quartet is a quiet drama-comedy that tells the story of four older men and women living at Beecham House, a home for retired musicians, and their struggle to maintain their identities as they reach old age. Well-known as a prolific and successful actor, Dustin Hoffman decided to step behind the camera for Quartet, his first […]
Søren and J’s Oscarcast 2013
If you were following us on Twitter (and you should be), you’ve already seen bits and pieces of thoughts from the Movie Fail staff on this year’s Oscars ceremony this past Sunday. In this podcast, Josh and I cover everything from the Rhythm and Hues protests to Seth MacFarlane as we discuss the event. Give […]
Elza (Le bonheur d’Elza)
Directed and co-written by Mariette Monpierre, Elza (also known as Le bounheur d’Elza) is notable for being the first narrative film by a female Guadeloupean director. The film is a semi-autobiographical independent drama about a young French woman and her search to find her estranged father in Guadaloupe. However, despite the promise of a highly personal, beautifully shot […]
The Big Sleep And Genre: Neither Here Noir There
Howard Hawks’ seminal classic The Big Sleep is difficult to categorize. The first instinct for many film writers and scholars has been to categorize it immediately as so-called “film noir,” lumping the movie together with other classic films like John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. However, it is difficult to be […]
On Abrams, Star Wars and Episode VII
After rumors started really picking up about the next director of the Star Wars franchise, Disney released a statement officially confirming that J.J. Abrams, director of the 2009 reboot of Star Trek and the more recent Super 8, will head up Episode VII. So the guy who successfully resurrected an old science fiction show has been assigned to another […]
The Beast and The New World
Director Peter Dukes has been making budget short films since 1999. In this piece, Tim and I review two of his more recent efforts. The first is a horror/fantasy werewolf film entitled The Beast starring Bill Oberst, Jr. The other is an award-winning fantasy/science fiction short entitled The New World starring Katy Townsend. The Beast One criterion on […]
Carrey and Daniels Onboard for Dumb and Dumber To
According to a Reddit AMA thread, director Peter Farrelly has confirmed that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are going to “totally redeem themselves” in Dumb and Dumber To: “Yes. Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels are in.” If, like me, Dumb and Dumber shaped your childhood, this news is a dream come true. Farrelly goes on to mention some side […]
Not Fade Away
While I am an avid HBO original series enthusiast (Rome, Deadwood, etc.), I admit never got acquainted with David Chase’s The Sopranos. I remember the show’s rise and its subsequent immense popularity, but I was too young at the time to start watching and I haven’t found the time to since. In any case, the […]
Five Movie Fails for 2012
Sometimes movies are just plain bad, as we well know. But in this author’s humble opinion, seeing the films that we wanted so badly to like crash and burn is much, much worse. Here’s a list of five films that were nowhere near as good as they should have been, making them the biggest disappointments […]
Discontinuity Editing Elicits Emotion in Eisenstein’s Strike
An academic paper I wrote on how early Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein uses discontinuous editing in his film Strike to encourage his audience to empathize with his protagonists. Strike is a piece of propaganda made in 1925 about the worker’s revolutions at the turn of the century in order to remind citizens of the Soviet Union why […]
Django Unchained
2012 has been a year of surprises for me. I’m known to be pretty anti-Nolan, and yet I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises. Likewise, and I know this sounds like heresy, it has been a long time – probably since Pulp Fiction – since I walked out of a Tarantino film content with what I had just seen. Nevertheless, just […]
Get the Right Message
An academic paper I wrote on how Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Tony Kaye’s American History X deliver very ambiguous messages about race. Like Tony Kaye’s American History X which hit the big screen some nine years later, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is a sprawling commentary on race and race relations that follows a community living in constant […]
Searching for Sugar Man
My father is a white South African who moved to the United States around 20 years ago. Because of him, I grew up listening to Sixto Rodriguez’s album Cold Fact on loop for most of my childhood. While most of the artist’s very adult metaphors were lost on me as a kid, I was nevertheless […]
Should You See The Hobbit at 48 FPS?
I had the good fortune to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at the midnight premiere in 48 frames per second. So as a follow-up to Ari’s review of the 2D 24 frames per second version of the film, and to my post from earlier this year about the negative CinemaCon reaction the first screening of the footage, here is a […]
Lincoln
Lincoln could have been a terrible film. Steven Spielberg has little left to prove at this point, having directed some of the very best genre films ever made. As if to confirm my fears about the film, the first trailer for Lincoln sported cheesy melodramatic dialogue hammed up by a boring stock orchestral track. Sitting down at […]
Skyfall with Tim, Søren, and Todd
Tim’s Review Though it contains many of the high-energy action sequences and traditions that we’ve come to expect from Bond flicks, Sam Mendes’s movie plays more like a thriller/art-film, than an action movie, exploring death, resurrection, and an underlying theme of old versus new. Despite the obviousness of these themes, I never felt like I […]
The Big Picture
“You can hide from your past, but you can never erase it.” With that simple tagline, it becomes clear that The Big Picture is a movie we’ve seen before: a successful man does something unspeakable, and spends a good deal of time trying to bury his transgression. It is unfortunate that director Eric Lartigau, who […]
Chungking Express In The Framework of Classical Hollywood Structure
Here is an academic piece I wrote on how Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express fits into film expert David Bordwell’s definition of classical Hollywood structure. For reference, here is his direct quote from p. 74 of Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction: Hollywood plots consist of clear chains of causes and effects, […]
Argo
Ben Affleck has had a strange career. As far back as his early films with Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), he’s taken a lot of flack for his acting. But the moment he got behind the camera with Gone Baby Gone, audiences and critics put away their complaints as they […]
Who Is The Master?
I have heard several different evaluations from my peers of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent film, The Master; from staunch support to outright dismissal, opinions certainly seem divided. But as someone who was not anticipating The Master with any great excitement, I came away pleasantly surprised. Because of this, I feel that I should illustrate why the film deserves a […]
Looper
I feel it is only fair to warn you that there are very light spoilers for Looper in the review below. I have seen the movie and can assure you they are absolutely far from important given how complex the film is, but if you’re one of those people who wants to go into the movie completely fresh, I […]
Seven Psychopaths
The McDonagh family has some serious talent. Both Martin, the writer/director of In Bruges, and his brother John Michael McDonagh, writer/director of The Guard, have produced two of the best dark comedies of the 21st century. Martin in particular feels in many ways like a subtler, more poignant Tarantino, combining morbid violence with ingenious dialogue and meaningful emotion. […]
The Master
Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who thrives on being pensive. This, unfortunately, tends to clash with his directorial style. His stories often feel like twigs strewn across a body of water, loosely tied together by vague ideas and tangential connections. Sometimes that underlying body of water is a puddle, shallow and superficial, while at […]
Movie Fail is Moving On Up
Hello all, You may have noticed that Movie Fail Reviews was down today for some temporary maintenance. There’s a reason for that: we have officially made the jump from moviefail.wordpress.com to moviefail.com. According to our calculations, this means you will be typing 10 less characters per URL entry – leaving you with just enough time […]
Dredd
I confess that I am not intimately familiar with John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Dredd comics, nor did I have the privilege of experiencing the so-bad-it’s-good Judge Dredd starring Sly Stallone that came out in 1995. Because of this, I was completely ambivalent about the fact that Judge Dredd was getting a reboot. And yet, even as […]
Nausicaä of the Desert of the Real
This piece examines the thematic relationship between Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and the Wachowski siblings’ The Matrix. Needles to say, beware of spoilers. In 1984, one year before the founding of the legendary Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s first major directorial effort was released. Nausicaä of the Valley of […]
Premium Rush
When I first saw the trailer for Premium Rush, I was somewhat taken aback. Here were Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon – two phenomenal, top-of-the line actors who have thrived both in independent and Hollywood films – both choosing to star in what looked like a cliché chase film for the hipster generation. But while […]
The Midlife Crisis of 1999
If you ask someone what American Beauty, Fight Club, The Matrix, Office Space, The Boondock Saints, and Being John Malkovich have in common, they’ll probably either say they have no idea, or they’ll stare at you for a moment before walking off in a daze. Given some time to think, though, it becomes clear that […]
The Intouchables
Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s latest film is a fascinating character study that approaches many of the themes handled in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And while it doesn’t quite match the dramatic depth or raw honesty of that film, The Intouchables largely succeeds in its marriage of emotion and humor. As a sylistic, feel-good flick with strong individual elements, […]
The Bourne Legacy with Mike and Søren
Here’s how our Dueling Reviews format works: each contributor writes an independent, abbreviated, spoiler-free review of the film. Then, the contributors come together in a podcast and discuss the movie in depth. Mike’s Review A week after I saw The Bourne Legacy, a friend called me up telling me that he was going to see it that […]
The Dark Knight Rises with Søren and Stuart
Here’s how our Dueling Reviews format works: each contributor writes an independent, abbreviated, spoiler-free review of the film. Then, the contributors come together in a podcast and discuss the movie in depth. Søren’s Review At this point, I think that most people are aware that I just plain old didn’t like The Dark Knight. The film won endless […]
Superheroes Don’t Need to be Antiheroes
I once again find myself at odds with one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Omer Mozaffar recently wrote an article entitled “The Dark Knight Rises, an American genre falls,” which you can read here. I wrote this piece in direct response to Mr. Mozaffar. This was a very astute assessment of the Dark Knight trilogy – Mr. Mozaffar succinctly summarized the […]
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Each time the Sundance Film Festival rolls around, there are two categories of film which make the news: those that are so far off of the deep end that people become visibly upset by what they see on-screen, and those that people view as possible Oscar contenders for Best Picture. Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film depicting […]
The Amazing Spider-Man
It has been a long, long decade since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man debuted in 2002. The comic book film universe has been on a roller coaster of highs and lows, producing everything from drivel like Ang Lee’s Hulk and Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand to blockbuster hits like Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and Christopher Nolan’s […]
To Rome with Love
Coming off of his fourth Academy Award for the wonderful Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen attempts once again to catch that European lightning in a bottle with To Rome with Love. Unfortunately for him, comparisons to his last film are inevitable, making the fact that To Rome doesn’t measure up to the quality of the writing, story, dialogue, or […]
SDCC 2012
Some very exciting news has come out of San Diego Comic-Con 2012. For all your folks whose psychic powers weren’t in effect last year when we had the [very brief] opportunity to buy tickets, we’ve decided to outline the very juiciest tidbits out of SDCC. And so without further ado… Godzilla First up we have Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla […]
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