Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on March 30th, 2007
In theatres now (and no doubt hitting DVD before long) is the Korean film The Host. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a monster movie this good, and even longer since we’ve had one with this much depth.
Any text, of course, has its subtext, and this is as true of giant monster movies as any other work of art. But some films are much more a much richer subtext than others, partly because the filmmakers were quite deliberate in seeing their monsters in a metaphorical or symbolic light. Though the e...
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on March 28th, 2007
WOW the Rebuttal, Marvel at the Hulk, and a God of War mystery - Welcome to the column that has many mysteries, like the one of how it gets run every week known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. What do you get when you have a rusted out 11 year old water heater that leaks? You get a new freaking water heater. Grizzly Adams put it in on Tuesday. He did a fantastic job. I now have hot water and the leaks appear to be drying ...
Posted in: Highly Defined, News and Opinions by Archive Authors on March 26th, 2007
Breaking the Blu cherry and all still remains well. I hope you’ve enjoyed my first two Blu reviews for the site. Rest assured, everything is always a work in progress, and we’re coming along rather nicely, don’t you think?
The big news for the week has to be the announcement of The Matrix trilogy arriving to HD-DVD shelves on 5/22, with a BD release sometime down the road. The common assumption for the BD delay appears to be the lack of BD-J interactivity right now, which would also explain why Ba...
Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on March 23rd, 2007
A tale of three films. One is original. One is its remake. One is a cash-in. And the latter is the one that became a classic.
In 1975, a big-budget SF effort by Norman Jewison hit the theatres with much publicity. This was Rollerball. In a future world with no wars, and everything is controlled by corporations, human aggression is channeled through the titular, extremely violent game. The game has been designed to be such that becoming good at it is impossible, and thus there are no heroes, and the f...
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on March 21st, 2007
Take Two for Sale?, Cooking Your Mama and An Extremely Long Name - Welcome to the column that brings you in the F & M in family but in reverse known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. I found me a new addiction to stray me (at least temporarily) from Rainbow Six Vegas, it is also the first PC game that I’ve played in years that wasn’t solitaire. It’s called Guild Wars. I picked up the first one for a me...
Posted in: Highly Defined, News and Opinions by Archive Authors on March 19th, 2007
P>The first full week of being format neutral, and all appears to be well.
Well, that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? I picked up Casino Royale, Layer Cake and Black Hawk Down, and all seems to be pretty good. All of them having PCM soundtracks doesn’t hurt either. I’ve also grabbed Motorstorm and Resistance Fall of Man recently, so the gaming and movie split is about 50-50 right now, on top of everything else I’ve been doing. The reasoning for those three titles, aside f...
Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on March 16th, 2007
Gosh, I don’t know if today’s subject counts as cult movies. These are genre films, though. And they’re old.
Really old.
They’re the first.
Horror, fantasy and SF in film effectively owe their existence to one man: Georges Méliès. A stage magician, he attended one of the first shows the Lumière brothers put on with their cinematograph, and was intrigued by the device’s commercial possibilities. Come 1896, he was making his own movies. He built a movie a studio, and here I let Denis Giffo...
Posted in: Dare to Play the Game, News and Opinions by Michael Durr on March 14th, 2007
Take Two takes a loss, Jungle Hunting and Turtle Soup 360 style - Welcome to the column that wishes it could celebrate Steak & BJ day with more than a steak known as Dare to Play the Game.
Welcome to another edition of Dare to Play the Game. No, I’m not a First Sergeant in Rainbow Six…told you! I’m about three bars in though, not too bad I guess. However, I did complete the co-op terrorist hunts for a nice achievement. I am also only three missions away from the co-op st...
Posted in: Highly Defined, News and Opinions by Archive Authors on March 13th, 2007
Happy March 13th (and a very special one at that)!
Well, your humble reviewer has gone through quiet a bit in the last several days. I’ll try to make it as brief as possible; work sucks ass. Let me count the ways; I came in at 1:30 in the morning once on a day I wasn’t working, I helped my boss repel some REALLY explicit propositions by one of his employees when we were in New York City on business, I get some medical attention to him when he has a stroke on ANOTHER trip to New York, and what do I get as re...
Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on March 9th, 2007
There’s exploitation, and there’s exploitation. And then there’s nunsploitation. There are few forms more unabashedly interested in the full-on sleaze wallow, with the possible exception of the nunsploitation film’s close cousin, the Women In Prison (WIP) flick. As ever, this is less a survey (there’s an entire book on the subject out there), more some semi-random musings.
Sleazy as the form gets, its roots are relatively serious in nature (but then, the same is true of the WIP). One of the pioneering works...
