Digging up The Hole

by Tony Dayoub

Though its release has been held up for three years in most parts of the country, Joe Dante's The Hole has garnered a limited theatrical release in 3D before its upcoming DVD/Blu-ray debut. Rated PG-13, The Hole is a creepy, funny film perfect for everyone from mature tweens to parents and the young at heart. On the scare-o-meter, it falls somewhere between the Goosebumps TV show and Poltergeist, two properties it's reminiscent of. Fans of Joe Dante (Matinee) should be particularly pleased to see the director of films like Gremlins and The Howling continue serving up scares while accurately depicting the sensibilities his young leads.

For the Love of Film III: Rear Window (1954)

by Tony Dayoub

This post is a considerable reworking of a piece I posted on 3/20/09. It's also a contribution to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III being led by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, the Self-Styled Siren, Farran Smith Nehme, and Roderick Heath of This Island Rod.

For movie-watchers with an analytical bent, Alfred Hitchcock provides a wealth of material to dissect. Rear Window is a great example. Much of the analysis focusing on Rear Window highlights the most immediately apparent of the film's metaphors, that of L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart) as audience surrogate while the different dramas playing out in each window of his apartment's courtyard serve as his personal movie theater. Laid up with a broken leg, the convalescing photo-journalist—bored with routine visits by his socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and home care aide Stella (Thelma Ritter)—turns to his window for entertainment. But the movie's titular rear window isn't just a proscenium allowing Jefferies to play peeping tom. Each of the courtyard's individual apartments are a physical manifestation of Jefferies' fears of seriously committing to Fremont.

DVD Review: The Kreutzer Sonata (2008)

by Tony Dayoub

I must confess that I'm not well versed in the work of Leo Tolstoy. But in reading up on some background for this review, I was surprised to discover that the eponymous novella on which The Kreutzer Sonata is based has been filmed almost half as many times as there have been 007 movies. The tale centers on the mounting jealousy of a husband who suspects his pianist wife may be cheating on him with a violinist she's gotten to know as the two rehearse Beethoven's Sonata No. 9. This go-round, the modernized adaptation is helmed by a director I've always had a sneaking admiration for, Bernard Rose (Immortal Beloved).

NYFF11 Movie Review: A Dangerous Method

by Tony Dayoub

On the face of it, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, based on the play "The Talking Cure" by Christopher Hampton, seems like the perfect vehicle for the director's cerebral approach. In his films, Cronenberg is often accused of a detached, almost clinical, method of eliciting drama from circumstances in which the body turns on itself, i.e., The Brood, The Fly, and even less fantastic stories like that of Dead Ringers. So, at first glance, this story depicting the nearly filial relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protege, Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and its eventual rupture over their contrasting approaches to mental illness, seems like the perfect marriage of artist and material.

Blu-ray Review: Videodrome (1983)

by Tony Dayoub

What's got two thumbs, hosted the Cronenberg Blogathon, and has never seen the director's most representative film, Videodrome? A week ago, I would have responded, "This guy." But Criterion sent me a review copy of their new Blu-ray of Videodrome last week, and I can now say I've seen all of Cronenberg's feature-length films. And boy, did I wait too long to catch this one! Criterion's wonderfully appointed package is a mixture of featurettes concentrating on the physical effects by the legendary Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London), extended sequences which appear as pirated S&M transmissions in the movie, and a fascinating panel discussion featuring Cronenberg, John Carpenter and John Landis (with then-unknown Mick Garris), all supplementing a high-def transfer supervised by cinematographer Mark Irwin. Part surrealist nightmare, part political satire and more, Videodrome is clearly the key film in the Canadian filmmaker's oeuvre.

Movie Review: Black Swan (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

I have never been one attracted to Natalie Portman much past her obvious physical beauty. With the exception of early turns in The Professional (aka Léon) and Beautiful Girls, her performance style has always struck me as perfect to the point of being brittle. So Darren Aronofsky's use of her in Black Swan stands out as an astute bit of exploitation, mining Portman's own flaws to inform her role as an overambitious ballerina. Indeed, one could apply this to the entire ensemble cast of this thriller mashing up the ballet movie with the psychological horror film.

Movie Review: Never Let Me Go (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

Woefully underrepresented in the current film conversation, I believe Never Let Me Go will only grow in stature over the next few years. I saw this mournful film (based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro) last week, yet still find it haunting me in a way that brought to mind one of my favorite movies of the last ten years, Children of Men (2006). That's curious because while Children of Men presents a dystopic future, Never Let Me Go gives us a utopic past, or at least an alternate past.

Cronenberg Blogathon: The Brood (1979), or David Cronenberg Presents: MurderBabies

by John Eno

[Delimited Liminality's John Eno finds reason to think Cronenberg's ideas sometimes outpace his execution, especially in The Brood.]

David Cronenberg was pegged early on as a horror director, albeit a director of horror films that didn't fit well in the genre as it had been established up to that point. A lot of this was due to his interest in particularly visceral horror, especially that which affects the body from within rather than from without. Even before I'd seen anything he'd directed, I knew him by reputation as a director of horror in which the monsters aren't any kind of external force but rather come from within, in the most literal way. (That the title of his first feature film is, well, They Came From Within is telling.)

TV Review: In Treatment - A Cure for the Writer's Strike Blues

by Tony Dayoub



Due to the ongoing writer's strike, the return of dramatic TV is looking increasingly bleak. HBO comes to the rescue with In Treatment. They couldn't have presented the drama at a better time, or in a more accessible format.