We’re almost there– it’s down to the final ten. Starting with: 10) 13 Assassins: “While the plot that subsequently comes together falls within the bailiwick typical to most men-on-a-mission films as Shinzaemon collects his chosen warriors– a motley crew of samurai ranging in age and experience, which eventually also comes to include a hunter (Yusuke … Continue reading
2010, as a cinematic year, left me somewhat cold. I distinctly remember having a difficult time choosing my annual top ten, for two reasons. One, this time last year I’d only seen about thirty-ish movies; that’s not a very wide range of movies to choose from, though I was certainly able to muster ten films … Continue reading
Flamethrowers, precarious romance, badass muscle cars, and directionless, angry young men make for a potentially cataclysmic cocktail. So goes the narrative of Evan Glodell’s Bellflower, a tale of love and apocalypse and slackerdom and possibly the most aesthetically unique film of the year. Glodell, who not only directed the film but also wrote the script … Continue reading
Some of you who read a wide variety of movie blogs across the web may have noticed an odd phenomenon recently, in which a couple of the reviews at A Constant Visual Feast have turned up on another person’s blog. There’s a reason for this. Recently, I’ve begun doing contributing writing over at the very … Continue reading
(Cross-posted over at GoSeeTalk.) In an early scene in Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, Scarlet Johansson’s beleaguered zookeeper whirls around on Matt Damon’s optimistic single father turned zoo owner and demonstrates the film’s greatest hindrance in one ham-handed chunk of dialogue. Neither Crowe nor the film has any faith in its audience to pick up … Continue reading
(Alternate title: In which A Constant Visual Feast becomes a social pariah within the film blogosphere.) The primary emotion that characterizes my reaction to Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids, the sleeper hit comedy of the year, is disappointment. Crushing, heavy, appalling disappointment. Coupled with that, denial; I don’t want to acknowledge my disappointment. I don’t want to … Continue reading
About the only thing Jonathan English’s Ironclad has going for it blood; he can rest easy knowing that his film absolutely lives up to its tagline, providing copious amounts of human viscera for audience entertainment at the cost of telling a good story. Ironclad is simply bad. The only comfort I can accord the film is … Continue reading
Hanna makes a sound argument that action movies need not be artless, though maybe when the person at the helm is Joe Wright the final outcome can only inevitably attain a level of artfulness worth observing. Wright is responsible for 2007’s Atonement, a strikingly beautiful film that remains mostly empty despite its impressive craftsmanship; where … Continue reading
(Cross-posted over at GoSeeTalk.) While watching The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, you can feel Spielberg grinning happily on the other side of the camera. It’s a welcome quality; adapting Hergé’s beloved comic books to screen in the first of a planned series of films with collaborator Peter Jackson seems to have brought … Continue reading
Another year, another film about films and the spirit of filmmaking itself. Leave it to the legendary Martin Scorsese, though, to take the opportunity to fuse together a picture of that persuasion on a grand, macro scale which spans more than a century instead of honing in on a more intimate examination of the craft. … Continue reading
More than fear, the great takeaway of The Ward is disbelief. How could the man responsible for 1982’s masterwork The Thing have it in him to churn out something so horrid as this? It’s hard to see anything of the John Carpenter of twenty-nine years ago in his latest offering, the first cinematic effort he’s made in a … Continue reading
I’d say I’m speechless, but I’m already several words over the line: theaters are starting to not only tolerate cell phone based activities (a’la texting and tweeting) during performances and screenings, they’re encouraging them in some cases. By now, this is probably common knowledge– stories of this nature have already been run by a number of … Continue reading
“It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”— Roger Ebert I can’t think of a single contemporary film* I’ve seen that’s quite like The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s sprawling, time-spanning, grand opus of spirituality, creation, and human existence. Mercurially free form, the film rejects many traditional notions of narrative … Continue reading
Consider for a moment that The New York Times is over one hundred and fifty years old. More impressively, the third largest newspaper in the United States can still claim relevance regardless of its antiquity. With online news aggregation sites fast becoming the face of new journalism in the modern world, it’s becoming increasingly– and alarmingly– easy … Continue reading
Take a second and think about this: Ridley Scott has only made two science fiction movies in his career. Two. Not only that, but they’re two of the most influential contemporary sci-fi pictures– so his batting record in the field is pretty impressive, to say the least. Scott’s so celebrated for his work in the … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 