Saturday, July 20, 2013
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Movie Review: The Conjuring (2013)
by Tony Dayoub
How long has it been since a so-called horror movie actually scared you? Made you jump? Yes. Turned your stomach? Sure. But actually sent chills up your spine? The Conjuring is the first fright movie in years that accomplishes that. And without the aforementioned cheap tricks either. The Conjuring instead resorts to some of the tried and true techniques of classic horror cinema—the slow burn, viewer investment in its characters, polished camerawork—that have long been absent from the genre.
How long has it been since a so-called horror movie actually scared you? Made you jump? Yes. Turned your stomach? Sure. But actually sent chills up your spine? The Conjuring is the first fright movie in years that accomplishes that. And without the aforementioned cheap tricks either. The Conjuring instead resorts to some of the tried and true techniques of classic horror cinema—the slow burn, viewer investment in its characters, polished camerawork—that have long been absent from the genre.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Movie Review: Pacific Rim (2013)
by Tony Dayoub
Pacific Rim—as hulking and earnestly dumb a blockbuster as are its robot Jaegers—represents a bit of a concession to box office realities from its director, Guillermo del Toro. While Del Toro is not exactly unknown, anyone outside of the most ardent film buffs or fanboys will probably not have heard of him. His finest films, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth are both foreign language fantasies that mostly played in art houses. His previous stabs at box office respectability, Blade II and the Hellboy features, are horror tinged masterpieces of the comic book variety, released way before the popularity of superhero films really hit its peak. And just before he was to direct The Hobbit films for producer Peter Jackson, Jackson took the movies back for himself to helm. Well, he may have dodged a bullet with that last franchise, but you get the picture. Del Toro's a talented filmmaker with the worst kind of luck, still trying to prove to studio honchos that he can place the butts in the seats. So it's ironic that the well-reviewed Pacific Rim, as honest an attempt by Del Toro to prove he has what it takes to both excite and attract audiences, has been tracking so poorly in most box office forecasts.
Pacific Rim—as hulking and earnestly dumb a blockbuster as are its robot Jaegers—represents a bit of a concession to box office realities from its director, Guillermo del Toro. While Del Toro is not exactly unknown, anyone outside of the most ardent film buffs or fanboys will probably not have heard of him. His finest films, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth are both foreign language fantasies that mostly played in art houses. His previous stabs at box office respectability, Blade II and the Hellboy features, are horror tinged masterpieces of the comic book variety, released way before the popularity of superhero films really hit its peak. And just before he was to direct The Hobbit films for producer Peter Jackson, Jackson took the movies back for himself to helm. Well, he may have dodged a bullet with that last franchise, but you get the picture. Del Toro's a talented filmmaker with the worst kind of luck, still trying to prove to studio honchos that he can place the butts in the seats. So it's ironic that the well-reviewed Pacific Rim, as honest an attempt by Del Toro to prove he has what it takes to both excite and attract audiences, has been tracking so poorly in most box office forecasts.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Rehabbing Tonto
The Lone Ranger as Picaresque Tale
by Tony Dayoub
As The Lone Ranger shifts from the point of view of its hero, John Reid (Armie Hammer), to the first-person narrative of his Indian sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp), the tired pulp story becomes a postmodern picaresque. A type of story with a long literary tradition but seldom seen on film, a picaresque is usually episodic in nature, a fact that contributes to what many perceive is the messiness of The Lone Ranger. Tonto exemplifies the typical picaresque hero (or picaro), noble in intentions but misguided and perhaps even unreliable in his perception of the events in which he is usually at the center. Like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, this film begins with a rather decrepit Indian as a dubious storyteller, spinning a yarn full of non-sequiturs and magical realism that both uncomfortably overlap with heinous atrocities in order to subvert the typical white victor's perspective of the American western. The first appearance of Depp, made up to look a hundred-odd years old, is itself a metatextual reference to Little Big Man’s protagonist, Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman). Crabb is a white man raised by the Cheyenne who encounters famous figures like Wild Bill Hickok and George Armstrong Custer (who, in The Lone Ranger, finds his own visual parallel in a cavalry officer played by Barry Pepper), just before their grand, untimely ends...
CONTINUE READING AT PRESS PLAY
by Tony Dayoub
As The Lone Ranger shifts from the point of view of its hero, John Reid (Armie Hammer), to the first-person narrative of his Indian sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp), the tired pulp story becomes a postmodern picaresque. A type of story with a long literary tradition but seldom seen on film, a picaresque is usually episodic in nature, a fact that contributes to what many perceive is the messiness of The Lone Ranger. Tonto exemplifies the typical picaresque hero (or picaro), noble in intentions but misguided and perhaps even unreliable in his perception of the events in which he is usually at the center. Like Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, this film begins with a rather decrepit Indian as a dubious storyteller, spinning a yarn full of non-sequiturs and magical realism that both uncomfortably overlap with heinous atrocities in order to subvert the typical white victor's perspective of the American western. The first appearance of Depp, made up to look a hundred-odd years old, is itself a metatextual reference to Little Big Man’s protagonist, Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman). Crabb is a white man raised by the Cheyenne who encounters famous figures like Wild Bill Hickok and George Armstrong Custer (who, in The Lone Ranger, finds his own visual parallel in a cavalry officer played by Barry Pepper), just before their grand, untimely ends...
CONTINUE READING AT PRESS PLAY
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