When you think of David Cronenberg, you’re likely to see fusion: Brundlefly, a living typewriter, a gun made of bones. All of those are the work of Carol Spier, Cronenberg’s art director (from Fast Company through Videodrome) and production designer (from The Dead Zone forward, with the exception of Spider).
I’m guessing that reading about Speed Racer is a hell of a lot more fun than seeing it, but I’ll never have the movie experience.
I’m late to the party as usual, but this bellyache looks like it’s going to stick around for a while: Paid movie critics are a dying breed! The horror! The horror! I can’t get worked up too much.
The Orphanage has one indelible image, and that’s plenty. It also has a sly current of grief and healing that hits home mostly on reflection, after cold recognitions and resonances sink in.
So the 2008 summer-movie season begins the way the last ended: with a perfect score. Iron Man became the first movie since The Bourne Ultimatum in August to top all four of the Box Office Power Rankings criteria.
At the Too Many Projects Film Club, Jeremy Bushnell will host the Production Design Blog-a-thon from May 19 through 25.
It’s a fantastic idea.
Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved. But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you’re not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there’s plenty left to come.
In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend.
Welcome to summer movie season, now officially begun on the first weekend of May thanks to our friends at Iron Man. That blockbuster wannabe will be followed in short order by Speed Racer, Narnia’s second installment, and Indiana Jones before Memorial Day. Closing out the ever-modest spring movie season, Forgetting Sarah Marshall notched one outright victory and one shared victory in our Box Office Power Rankings, scoring a mild upset by tying Baby Mama in last weekend’s rankings.
The turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing. It’s not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn’t begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn’t go off the rails. Instead, things start to get muddled.
