Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Daybreakers
In Daybreakers, vampires are truly mainstream. They make up the bulk of the population, and have for 10 years. Humans who haven’t assimilated to this change in demographics hang on meat hooks; the vampires mine their veins, and squirt the blood into their morning coffee. (This is a clever touch, though the analogy seems a [...]
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Thursday, September 24th, 2009
District 9
In Alive in Joburg, a film that was only six-and-a-half minutes in length, Neill Blomkamp toyed with an ingenious idea. Aliens are marooned in South Africa, and come seemingly in peace; but when they start moving into human neighborhoods, the authoritarian apartheid government locks them away in concentration camps. They’re treated as subhuman and forced [...]
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Friday, July 4th, 2008
WALL-E
WALL-E, the new Pixar animated film, is as much revered as, or perhaps more revered than, any of its predecessors. It has components of classical “family entertainment”—breezy, (somewhat) optimistic spectacle with charming, hand-holding lovers, skillful importation of elements from more “grown-up” sources, and, of course, a “wholesome” message—and uses them in a way that’s seldom [...]
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Monday, March 3rd, 2008
No Country for Old Men
[Now that No Country for Old Men is last year’s Best Picture, I felt I should post the review I wrote way back in pre-Oscar times. Warning, there’s a spoiler.]
Until the end credits, there isn’t one bar of music in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. In fact, the bulk of the first [...]