Posts by Archive Authors

Stop-motion animation remains a rare treat, but your appreciation of the new film, The Boxtrolls, will likely fall into an either love-it or hate-it camp. I will tell you which camp I fall into shortly. Laika Entertainment Studios produced Coraline and Paranorman, which were both oddball stop-motion fun that I enjoyed immensely. The stop-motion process is a dying art that is only rarely attempted any more, but it is widely beloved by film fans. The stop-motion work in The Boxtrolls is excellent. The cast of voice-over actors are excellent as well. The roster includes Sir Ben Kingsley, Jared Harris, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Elle Fanning and Tracy Morgan.

The eyes are the window to the soul, or so we have been told. I Origins is about a scientist studying the evolution of sight in organisms. Part of his research seems to be focused on countering creationists who claim that eyes are an obvious indication of a creator in life on this planet. The scientist, Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) is working on proof that the development of eyes is a process of evolution. His new research assistant, Karen (Brit Marling) surprises Ian with intuitive brilliance and fanatical commitment to the task.

What if two radio guys sat around and made up a movie on the air? In this case, it actually wasn't radio guys, because they weren't broadcasters, but podcasters. I guess the fine distinction between broad and pod is that pod goes out to the world through the internet. It's kind of like Indie radio. Kevin Smith is a very indie guy and even calls his podcast a smodcast. Smith and his buddy, producer Scott Mosier, were doing their smodcast and talking about a post on GumTree.uk about roommate advertisements. It evolved into crazy talk about what might happen.

Martin McDonagh is an extremely important and respected playwright. He is also a pretty good filmmaker. His films are In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. His plays have won too many awards to mention, but some of the titles are The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lonesome West, The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Skull of Connemara and others. His brother is John Michael McDonagh, the writer/director of The Guard and Calvary. All of these works are very good. Calvary might be my favorite.

The pleasure of The November Man is seeing an ex-James Bond come out of retirement being all cool and mean and efficiently lethal. The ex-James Bond is Pierce... Pierce Bronson. He's not as old as Sean Connery, but he's pretty old, and too old to look this good killing people. The November Man is nothing but a cheap and easy, end-of-August bit of popcorn fodder, but it works well. It works so well it already has a sequel planned. I don't think the budget on this is very large, so it probably was a no-brainer. The locations are all over middle Europe and Russia, but I think that's cheaper than New York City or London.