The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…
No human has left near-Earth orbit since 1972, we’re reminded in Europa Report, a smartly marketed space-horror quickie that purports to be the one-giant-leap for found-footage scares — and also maybe Serious Space-Travel Movies themselves, which have failed to soar past our atmosphere almost as long as NASA has. To…
On September 17, 2011, 1,000 protesters set up tents in Manhattan’s financial district and dubbed themselves Occupy Wall Street. Four days later, Lionsgate purchased You’re Next — a home-invasion slasher that slices up a family of useless 1 percenters — and should have released it immediately. Instead, the studio sat…
Hong Kong genre film volcano Johnnie To rocks crime thrillers like it was still 1999, and in so many ways that’s a blessing — the pulpy textures of the HK gangster-policier are evergreen, and To always focuses his down-to-earth Sino-neo-noirs more on classical story beats rather than outrageous sensation. (In…
An average episode of the 1989-1999 cable show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and his robot buddies heckle bad movies, runs about 90 minutes. The 1955 film This Island Earth is 87 minutes. The 1996 feature Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, in which the man and…
Good news, everybody! Elon Musk, the philanthropist/buisnessman/mad scientist who founded PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors has announced plans for a new form of transportation: the Hyperloop. The proposed Hyperloop would be a huge tube that magnetically transports capsules within it at speeds approaching 700 miles per hour. Musk claims that…
Whether your teen years shaped you, scarred you, or left you more or less unscathed, there’s no denying that Hollywood harbors a special love for high school movies. While they each have their own set of one-liners, dated fashion trends, and even more dated soundtracks, there’s a certain formula that…
Most women born after 1960 or so probably had parents or teachers who told them they could be anything when they grew up. Even so, plenty of fields remain largely boys’ clubs, métiers in which women aren’t necessarily unwelcome — just strangely invisible. In the world of In a World…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Lake Bell can do incredible things with her tongue. She can touch her nose, twist it to both sides, and fold it backward as flat as an omelette. In a Silver Lake studio, recording vocal exercise warmups for an online campaign promoting her directorial debut, In a World . …
At the movies, straightforward storytelling, the kind in which a director and his cast push a story forward in waves of action and feeling, has become so out of fashion it’s almost avant-garde. Moviegoers, it seems, need to be cool: not too moved, not too surprised, not too impressed. We…
Like so many screenplays, The World’s End has its origins in a Starbucks. As director Edgar Wright tells it, the ideas for the sci-fi action-comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost came to him while shooting the trio’s last film, the buddy-cop parody Hot Fuzz. That film takes place in…
Geniuses, unfortunately, tend to be impossible people. Consumed by their own dazzling brilliance, they treat those closest to them cruelly and thoughtlessly, causing much undue suffering — only to turn around and invent a device that can put 1,000 songs in your pocket. Damn them. If what we see in…
Equip yourself with snacks and a cardi, because it’s time to cool down at the movies. Here are three films you need to see this August. In A World . . . @ Harkins Camelview In A World… finds vocal coach Carol (Lake Bell) struggling to make her mark on…
And the award for best feature-length freebie goes to…. This week, the Welcome Diner is rolling out the red carpet for its first ever 48 Hour Film Festival. The free event will showcase a lineup of local filmmakers who were assigned a line of dialogue, a genre, and a prop,…
Breaking Bad is easily the best television show currently running, and only The Wire can challenge its all-time supremacy. The riveting saga of what happens when a mild-mannered science teacher dying from cancer makes a fatally bad decision to cook methamphetamine has more twists and turns than the wildest ride…
Discovery Channel’s 26th annual Shark Week is upon us, a week of programming featuring nothing but nature’s most deadly killing machine. However, all this anti-shark propaganda is beginning to give sharks a bad name. Sure, they mercilessly rip an occasional swimmer apart with their powerful jaws and razor-sharp teeth, but…
Warning: This post contains spoilers both real and imagined. It’s the beginning of the end. The second half of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season starts Sunday, August 11. The eight-episode run will conclude Vince Gilligan’s award-winning crime drama about chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-lord Walter “I Am the One Who Knocks” White, his…
Movie stars shouldn’t be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday’s youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That’s not to say actors can’t age gracefully, or that…
If there’s one nuance mainstream comedies have yet to learn, it’s that “empathetic” need not mean “likable” — audiences can feel for characters they don’t necessarily want to be. The hit black comedy Horrible Bosses, which had three angry underlings plotting murderous vengeance against their you-know-whats, should have been a…
Hey, Hollywood can still do romance! Even since the marketeers worked out that the kiss kiss bang bang formula could be profitably split, with bang bang movies getting wide releases and the kiss kisses sold only to that slim niche demographic called “American women,” movie love stories had gotten frustratingly…
How would those Bronze Age storytellers who shaped and handed down the myths of Ancient Greece fare in a modern screenwriting seminar? All that elusive, improvisatory strangeness, that alien sense of causality, that emphasis on origins, not just of franchisable characters but of everything in the natural world, right down…
