BABY DRIVER (2017, directed by Edgar Wright, 112 minutes, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY When Youtube first began playing adds for Edgar Wright’s new crime and car flick, Baby Driver, I will admit I was a little upset that they seemed to have made a glaring omission by not including Simon & Garfunkel’s eponymous song anywhere in the trailer. “Just where do these jokers get off?” But, before I could take to social media to bemoan the state of modern cinema, I decided to do a little digging. What I found there more than satisfied me. In fact, it whet […]
CINEMA: Growing Up Spider-Man
SPIDER-MAN HOMECOMING (2017, Directed by Jon Watts, 133 minutes, USA) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT I bought my first my first Spider-Man comic book last century. I watched the Spider-Man cartoons every saturday as a kid. I own three Spider-Man T-Shirts, five Funko Pop collectibles, and wrote at least three poems (one of which made my creative writing thesis) focused on the character. However, I was not excited about Spider-Man: Homecoming. Sure, Tom Holland’s Spidey was amazing in Captain America: Civil War (2016) but I didn’t care. He was every bit the adorable nerdy smartass that Peter Parker […]
CINEMA: The Making Of Luc Besson’s Valerian
WIRED: Valerian, though, will be an order of magnitude stranger. For starters, there’s the source material, a French series of bandes dessinées (graphic novels, literally “drawn strips”) called Valérian et Laureline, a moderne sci-fi title not well known in the US. Then there’s the Avatar-level amount of alien that Besson is pumping in—far more than anything else he has made. The movie has visual effects from both Weta (The Lord of the Rings) and Industrial Light & Magic (basically everything else). Where The Fifth Element had just under 200 effects elements—that flying-car chase through Manhattan, the luxury-cruise starship—Valerian has […]
CINEMA: Beggars Banquet
BEATRIZ AT DINNER (2017, directed by Miguel Arteta, 83 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s a truly classic premise at the heart of the new film from director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, the pair who previously worked together on indie dark comedies Chuck And Buck (in which White co-starred as “Buck”) and the under-appreciated Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Good Girl. Their latest, Beatriz At Dinner, centers around a wealthy dinner party that takes on an unexpected interloper, the working class mystic/masseuse, Beatriz (played by the always-intelligent beauty Salma Hayek, suitably dressed-down here.) You can see […]
CINEMA: Release The Bats
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have announced the return to US cinemas of One More Time With Feeling, the acclaimed feature film about the making of their album Skeleton Tree directed by Andrew Dominik. The film will screen in select cities in the USA around the band’s live shows from May 2017. One More Time With Feeling probes the deeply personal circumstances surrounding the making of the band’s 16th studio album Skeleton Tree, and features live performances by the band in the studio. It is the first ever non-animated black and white film shot in 3D. One More […]
CINEMA: I’m With Her
WONDER WOMAN (2017, directed by Patty Jenkins, 141 minutes, USA) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Wonder Woman has a lot riding on it. It has to singlehandedly save the DC Comics’ Extended Universe from an advanced state of cinematic suckitude while simultaneously adapting DC’s third most popular superhero of all time without pissing off 75 years worth of comic book geeks, proto-feministas and latter day riot girls AND be a better female superhero film than Supergirl (1985), Tank Girl (1995), Catwoman (2004), and Elektra (2005). For years studio execs were able to say “the audience doesn’t want female superheroes, […]
CINEMA: White Hawk Down
THE WALL (2017, directed by Doug Liman, 81 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The battlefield on which the new thriller The Wall is set in is boringly familiar, a cliché even: the beige blankness of the desert, the armored U.S. soldiers, the bent and blasted rubble, and the forbidding drone-laden soundtrack with Arab voices chanting overtop. The history of Hollywood’s war films makes for a telling window into public attitudes about national conflicts about our endless wars in the Middle East (if you begin with the Afghanistan invasion of 2001), and the public’s unthinking acceptance of them, […]
THE LADY OF THE LOG: Q&A w/ Catherine Coulson
Artowrk by JJUSTINE DEVINE EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview originally posted on September 28th, 2015. In advance of Sunday night’s long-anticipated reactivation of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, we present this reprise edition. EDITOR’S NOTE 4/25/16: Just found out the sad and shocking news that Katherine passed away today. In tribute, we present a reprise edition of this very in-depth interview we did with her last October in advance of her talk at the Pennsylvania Academy Of The Arts, which was part of PAFA’s David Lynch retrospective, The Unified Field. She was very generous with her time — this was probably the […]
CINEMA: Star Bored
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The saddest thing about the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which carries the official title Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, is that it’s going to make a lot of people think they’re happy. “Hold on,” you say. “Think they’re happy? If they think they’re happy, then they are happy.” Which is often true, but not always. I think I’m happy eating a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a large fries. But a few minutes later, when my salt/sugar/fat high has dissipated into self-disgust, I realize that what I’ve paid for is mainly bloat. The […]
CINEMA: The Riddler
RISK (2017, directed by Laura Poitras, 97 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As Risk, the latest film from documentarian Laura Poitras, gets underway — with its darkened hotel rooms, glowing LED screens and Poitras’ distinctive, hushed, monotone narration — it quickly feels like we’re back for a sequel to her Academy Award winning profile of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, 2014’s Citizenfour. Nobody is calling Risk a sequel, yet in some ways it is that and more, a film in production both before and after Citizenfour that contains and builds on all of the earlier films themes. As the film […]
TRAILER: Starlight (Feat. Iggy Pop)
SPIN: In the ensemble-cast film, Iggy plays an angel-like figure who watches over a mysterious, grotesque circus–all lust, greed, and violence behind-the-scenes–situated on the banks of the North Sea. Think of a French art-film amalgam of Wings of Desire and Freaks (or Carnivale) and maybe you have a bit of the picture. Watch the new trailer below, and look for the on-demand/Blu-Ray release on May 9. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Review Of Jim Jarmusch’s Stooges Documentary PREVIOUSLY: Iggy Pop @ The Academy Of Music
INCOMING: The Last Jedi
Like the teasers for The Force Awakens, this doesn’t reveal much plot. Out of context battles between The First Order and The Resistance are shown but other than X-Wings, TIE Fighters and stormtroopers shooting each other, we know nothing. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) tries to escape a Resistance base alongside his orange robot ball and Finn (John Boyega) is still asleep in some medical pod. Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) whispery Obi-Wan-esque voiceover as he trains Rey (Daisy Ridley) in the ways of the Force and presumably the Jedi is the bulk of the trailer. I say presumably because Luke says […]
Q&A: Charlie Siskel, Director Of American Anarchist
BY DILLON ALEXANDER The Anarchist Cookbook is that forbidden book your older brother and his friends ordered off the internet and used to make napalm in your old, crazy neighbor’s driveway that wound through the woods. Or maybe it’s the book that your posh friends prominently displayed on top of their coffee table for shock value. Maybe you heard about it on the news, when it was found at the apartment of some alienated, mentally unstable man who was convinced that he was the Joker from The Dark Knight. Maybe you have no clue what it is, but chances […]