Are visceral reactions emotional pay dirt or a fast track to melodrama? The answer of course is: both! Thanks for having me here, Katie! Hi Liberty (love your name!) I agree, visceral reactions don’t need to be cliche. The same rule applies to this. Yesterday at 11:25 p.m. Insecure Recap: Sittin' In The Studio Issa's moment of infidelity in 'Shady As F**k' is downright shocking. Yesterday at 11:09 p.m. MTV's 2016 European Music Awards Honored Europe's Favorite Singing Canadians Drake, Justin Bieber, the. Only Yesterday Blu- ray. Only Yesterday (1. Only Yesterday Blu- ray delivers stunning video and audio in this exceptional Blu- ray release. Okajima Taeko, a 2. All her life, she's felt that something was missing, although she could never really figure out just what it was. Tired and bored with her current lifestyle, Taeko decides to take a ten- day vacation to her sister's husband's relatives' farm to help out with the safflower harvest. As she remembers more and more, Taeko begins to come to a realization of what she has become as a result of some philosophies she first adopted in fifth grade - - and eventually is faced with an important decision concerning what she can do to change. For more about Only Yesterday and the Only Yesterday Blu- ray release, see Only Yesterday Blu- ray Review published by Brian Orndorf on July 1. Blu- ray release scored 4. Director: Isao Takahata. Writers: Isao Takahata,Hotaru Okamoto,Yuuko Tone. Starring: Toshir. Better late than never. Gorgeously animated in the distinct Ghibli style, director Isao Takahata manages to understand the erratic flow of childhood impulses and curiosity, while pinpointing the moment when nostalgia transforms into personal need. Ready to clear her head and get away from her urban surroundings, Taeko elects to take a train to the country, with plans to join her extended family and help with the safflower harvest, getting back in touch with nature. During the long journey, Taeko works through memories of her life as a curious 5th grader, where mischief and frustration were part of her daily life. Welcomed by Toshio (Dev Patel), who escorts the visitor to her destination, Taeko begins to piece together the fragments of her early development, trying to reconnect with the child she once was and the woman she's meant to be. There's no grand build- up to the past, just thoughts that pass through her mind as she travels to a place that once held great wonder for the little girl, reawakening a year of maturity that altered the course of her life. Takahata gracefully builds these parallel stories, with Taeko experiencing a welcome party in the form of Toshio, a laid- back fellow who's also an organic farmer, passionate about his crops, sharing his interests with his temporary companion, who's especially sensitive to his presence, but can't quite piece together the clues. While the screenplay is episodic, it's endearingly so, appreciating the difficulties of life at this age, with Taeko struggling to make sense of math (a failing grade brings tremendous shame to the family), studying her first crush on a young baseball player, and highlighting her battle with a future of menstruation, making her a target for teasing from male classmates. The juvenile experience is exceptionally observed in . The whole picture feels frighteningly authentic, with effective sensitivity that brings Taeko's memories to life. She's a complicated kid and the production respects her evolution into womanhood, eventually straightened out by society and her own insecurities. Through it all, animation subtleties are significant, as Takahata orders up precise reactions and works through small moments of fantasy, keeping the spirit of the effort alive. It's amazing how easily the picture taps into primal feelings, helping to understand Taeko's mission as she files through a particular time, finding restoration in the strangest of places. Here, the concentration is on the human experience, with all its fragility and growth. Takahata constructs a cinematic time machine that's nearly impossible to resist. The 2. 5 best horror movies since 2. Club. Ask horror- movie buffs to name their favorite decade for the genre, and you. Classics take time to solidify, reputations take a minute to build, and hindsight is 2. Plus, you know, Uwe Boll. But looking over the 2. United States sometime before today and after January 1, 2. Perhaps more than any other genre, horror operates as a mirror of our anxieties. A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook Title: Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (1931) Author: Frederick Lewis Allen (1890-1954) eBook No.: 0500831h.html Edition: 1 Language: English Character set encoding: HTML--Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8. Directed by Pedro Almod. With Liberto Rabal, Francesca Neri, Javier Bardem, . After leaving jail, V Ask horror-movie buffs to name their favorite decade for the genre, and you’ll likely receive a variety of answers. The ’30s had several of Universal’s classic roster of monsters. The ’40s had Val Lewton. The ’70s had zombies, and giant sharks, and Texas chain saw. Team Instinct is, by most available metrics, the smallest of Pokemon Go’s three factions. They are, if nothing else, numerical underdogs. It’s a role many of its members have embraced. The reaction to Instinct’s recently revealed leader, Spark, is the latest chapter in the team’s come-from. The list below could easily double as a guide to the fears and phobias of modern life. Its eclecticism is a testament to just how many different ways we. These are not the scariest films of our new millennium, but simply the greatest that happen to occupy the horror genre. As such, we tried to be fairly strict with the definition; films that feel like horror but wouldn. What would your ballot look like? Did we miss anything crucial? Sound off in the comments below. There are those who find Pascal Laugier. But unlike other extreme horror that relies on shock value and repugnance for its notoriety (A Serbian Film, Human Centipede II), Martyrs isn. The film is almost two movies in one. Depicting a fragile young woman. But a late and unexpected turn in the story pushes things into utterly new territory, at which point the film becomes horrifying for wholly different reasons. And the ending is one for the ages. The genre can be very regressive in its gender politics, if not grotesque and loathsome in its sexism, but the sly Canadian horror- comedy Ginger Snaps cleverly subverts that tradition by positing lycanthropy as an allegory for a girl. The film is empowering in its depiction of a world where female sexuality is a potent, violent, and righteous force. And the film inspired a slew of feminist- leaning horror films that addressed gender forthrightly and smartly, including a memorable segment in the horror anthology Trick . The masked assailants trying to gain entry into the vacation home of an unhappy couple (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler) aren. No, what makes Bryan Bertino. The home becomes a sieve, a place where a threatening presence can intrude upon the frame from any angle. There are no fancy camera tricks or complicated plot twists, just a slowly building sense of dreadful inevitability. Always hanging back, Bertino lets his two leads stand exposed, the large open spaces behind them always promising to release more terrors. Going back to basics can reap petrifying rewards, too. Nicole Kidman gives one of her best performances as a widowed mother named Grace, who lives with her two sickly children in an elegant European country house in the mid- 1. WWII. The arrival of eccentric new servants coincides with the family. Writer- director Alejandro Amenabar teases out the mystery and uses old- fashioned effects to give viewers the creeps; but his best asset is Kidman, whose dawning awareness of what. Although most of the U. K. Frantic blasts of cannibalistic action set to squealing guitars generate adrenalized terror, though more chilling still is the overarching allegorical portrait of a United States failing to maintain control over a rabid, rampaging horde of infected- by- madness enemies. May (Angela Bettis) navigates her lonely world with her mother. But finding a friend is easier said than done for a mousy, awkward woman with a misaligned eye, an obsession with antique dolls, and too much enthusiasm for the bloodier aspects of her veterinary gig. By the time May takes her quest for human connection to gory extremes, writer- director Lucky Mc. Kee has already laid a sound foundation of empathy. May is a slasher flick with an inverted perspective, as if Friday The 1. Wolf Creek comes alarmingly close. One of a small handful of films to ever earn a straight . Unfairly lumped in with the likes of Saw and Hostel, this backwoods gauntlet owes its nightmarish power not just to the . This is the second of three contract killings that form the black heart of British director Ben Wheatley. But this chimera of a film. Paring down the exposition, Wheatley keeps the audience aligned with his in- the- dark hired guns, though every dread- filled frame cries that something. Lo and behold, it emerges that what they. In some respects, The Host is Bong. In lieu of the lumbering beasts familiar from Japanese monster movies, however, Bong and his effects team fashioned a slimy, fast- moving fish with legs, able to wreak havoc on a smaller, more thrilling scale. Come for the virtuosic mayhem, stay for the bitter political commentary. Here was an emerging auteur seemingly turning from a serene arthouse aesthetic to make a blood- soaked tale of quasi- cannibals in Paris. Trouble, however, fits neatly into Denis. She takes a honeymoon story and plunges it into depravity, uncannily capturing the beauty of dark corners. The film is at times appalling (an act of cuniligus turns carnivorous) but it. The discomfort that lingers at the end doesn? Set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War, the story ostensibly revolves around a young boy. But even without the specter of a drowned boy skulking the hallways, the whole movie is permeated with dread and the potential for violence. The orphanage is remote and isolated, appearing more as a mausoleum than a refuge. An arid wind blows through every scene, hinting at the inevitable arrival of the war. And despite the Catholic idols that dot the compound, none can overshadow the place. Del Toro continued his wartime exploration of the tension between fantasy and reality in Pan. But the intimacy and fatalistic sadness of The Devil. The Cabin In The Woods lands closer to the Scream end of the spectrum in that it. Director/co- writer Drew Goddard and co- writer Joss Whedon call out plenty of horror- movie tropes (threatened characters inexplicably splitting up; stereotypical teenagers; a creepy gas station attendant) without subjecting them to snide derision. The movie accumulates clich. As with a lot of Whedon. It does this via a beguiling ghost story in which a strange plague of supernatural misfortunes spread throughout Tokyo like a (computer) virus. Missing friends, mysterious rooms sealed with red duct tape, an ominous website that depicts fuzzy specters moving about their homes. Employing medium and long shots, extended takes, and disquieting silence, the director uses his genre material for a chilling investigation of modern disaffection and, specifically, the soul- crushing misery of a world devoid of person- to- person interactions. Avoiding jolt scares for an all- encompassing mood of apocalyptic estrangement, it. A woman, Laura, returns to the orphanage where she grew up, intending to transform bad memories into something positive by opening a home for disabled children there. Laura searches for answers in both directions, and in a particularly haunting scene, she plays a game in which she encourages a room full of ghost children to sneak up behind her. Of course, every trend produces an exception. With its urban- legend premise (watch a mysterious VHS tape, die within a week), perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest backdrop, and meticulously cold color scheme, Gore Verbinski. In lieu of gore, The Ring offers a careful balance of immediate and abstract threats. Four months later, on the night before Christmas, Sarah holes up in her home, waiting to deliver her baby the following morning. Far from it: A shadow figure cloaked in black (credited as . Dalle uses an arsenal of sharp objects. By the end of the movie, enough gore has accumulated to fill the elevator from The Shining, and CGI- assisted images of the baby writhing in pain will have sent squeamish viewers running for the door. Leading a wave of sensitive, intelligent Scandinavian horror movies that have become a subgenre in their own right, Tomas Alfredson. Re- imagining the seductive figure of the vampire as an odd little girl, this horror- romance hybrid focuses on the relationship between bullied 1. Oskar and his enigmatic new neighbor Eli, which grows more dangerous as the two misunderstood creatures grow closer. Unfolding in a chilly concrete apartment block in the suburbs of Stockholm, the film takes a quiet, restrained approach to a story punctuated by moments of bloody violence, building to a dark climax that could be read as wish fulfillment and a haunting final image. Drawing equally on serial killer procedurals, weird fiction, and Fritz Lang, Kurosawa. Ditching shock cuts and crescendos in favor of ambiguous ellipses and creepy wide shots, Cure teaches the viewer to fear empty spaces and unfamiliar gestures. Few movies are so purely scary. The Descent terrifies even the most hardened horror fans because they can relate to the characters, a sextet of fearless female spelunkers too hubristic to fear the unknown. They rappel into a subterranean cave system. Marshall builds the relationships and ratchets up the dread so effectively, it. By the time the pale, razor- toothed foes show up, Marshall is gilding the lily. Produced from a script he and his brother Ivan Raimi wrote in the early . The result is pure popcorn entertainment, a pulpy tale of Gypsy curses and demonic possession in sunny Southern California that highlights Raimi. Far from anti- Romero sacrilege, though, this creative choice shifts the undead metaphor from shuffling, decaying remnants of society to a raw, untamed rage, here the result of a fast- spreading virus, another tweak of the established zombie formula. The title comes from the amount of time elapsed between the virus. Appropriately, Boyle shot fast and furious with digital video to capture beautiful lo- fi visions of a post- apocalyptic London and beyond. Horror overtones echo throughout Boyle. That a world- class creep played by the world- class creepy Tom Noonan is the one giving her the curious gig is plenty of proof that spookery and evil deeds are afoot. But West does a brilliant job of drawing out suspense, infusing each scene and moment with a sense of creeping dread. From the font employed in the opening credits to the filmmakers. In many ways, he tops them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |