Run, Run, Run As Fast As You Can Away From The Gingerbread Man

It was no surprise to learn that Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man was plagued by production problems. The movie has all the hallmarks of something that's been tormented by competing creative visions. You don't just get the kind of clumsy editing or erratic tone in Gingerbread Man in just any movie. It could only come out of producers & directors having wildly different visions for how a motion picture should be. Of course, you don't have to know about its behind-the-scenes struggles to know Gingerbread Man is messy. Its journey to the big screen could have been smooth as butter and Gingerbread Man would still be a poor movie.

Down in the Delta Is Top-Shelf Feel-Good Entertainment

Down in the Delta focuses on a family living in Chicago plagued by turmoil. Loretta Sinclair (Alfre Woodard) struggles to secure a job to take care of her two kids while Loretta's mom, Rosa Sinclair (Mary Alice), is forced to take care of the family. Something's gotta change. Rosa, after talking to some of their relatives on a phone call, comes up with an idea. Perhaps a return to the family's root in Mississippi will turn things in Loretta's life around. Loretta and her two kids aren't exactly enthusiastic about the idea of leaving their familiar surroundings for an extended stay at Uncle Earl's (Al Freeman Jr.) house. But the last thing Loretta's family wanted could end up being just the thing they needed.

Pleasantville Is An Impressive Showcase For Effective Satire, Memorable Visuals And Jeff Daniels

It's so much fun to go in totally cold into a first-time watch of a movie and become totally enchanted by discovering where exactly that movie is going. Movie marketing can be so spoiler-heavy, it's totally a wonder when the secrets and plot outline of a movie remain a mystery, especially when it's twenty-one-years-old like Pleasantville! The directorial debut of Gary Ross, I was aware of this movie being a star vehicle for Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon and that it was done in black-and-white but other than that, the concrete details of the production remained a mystery to me. This meant my first-time-viewing of Pleasantville turned out to be such a delightful experience as I got to unearth all the joys this movie has to offer!

The Prince of Egypt Is An Outlier In DreamWorks Animations Filmography Very Much For The Better

Today, DreamWorks Animation is known for one thing and one thing only: computer-animated movies with pop culture references and pop songs a-plenty. That's a touch unfair to their entire catalog of the studio that also includes deviations from that norm like How to Train Your Dragon or Kung Fu Panda, but there's also no denying that it's an apt summarization of most of their output. The trailer for their newest film, Abominable, feels like a microcosm of all the stereotypes associated with DreamWorks Animation, from an extended belching joke to the closing gag of a yeti dancing around to the tune of Shake It Off by Taylor Swift. That's a DreamWorks Animation movie right there, through and through.

Crowdpleasing Classical Romance Gets Done Right In Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love's Best Picture win was heavily controversial, to put it mildly. In the years since it took home this trophy, only Crash and Green Book seem to have generated equal or greater amounts of strife with their respective Best Picture wins. Its controversial award season campaign tactics, as well as the fact that it beat out a Steven Spielberg directorial effort for the award, not to mention the very understandable dark cloud that lingers on anything, like a Best Picture win, that gave the monstrous Harvey Weinstein further clout in Hollywood all, have led the reputation of Shakespeare in Love to suffer greatly. In recent years, though, its standing seems to have improved significantly as Oscar snubs and wins fade further into the past and we're all left to just take a look at the movie on its own merits.

Rushmore Is A Phenomenal Examination of A Teenager Coming To Terms With Reality

Allow me to cut to the chase here and say, upfront and outright, that I absolutely loved Rushmore. This is a movie that just captured my attention from the moment it began and even long after its credits stopped rolling it's still occupying a space in my mind. The reasons for this are numerous, but before I detail those reasons, allow me to establish what exactly this motion picture is about. Rushmore begins by introducing our lead character, fifteen-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), in a math class where the teacher has put up a math problem that nobody he's ever known has been able to solve for extra credit. Putting down the newspaper he's reading in class, Fischer goes up to the board to solve it.

The Fun Vampire Action Film Blade Proved That Marvel Comics Characters Could Headline Enjoyable Movies

Though it may sound like total poppycock to in a day and age where Rocket Raccoon, Korg and M'Baku are beloved household names, there was a point in time where movies based on Marvel Comics characters were thought of as box office poison. Movies based on Howard the Duck, The Punisher and Captain America had been received with ridicule and dismal box office, the latter element occuring if such films received any kind of domestic theatrical release at all. Meanwhile, attempts to turn characters like Spider-Man into major motion pictures had been fraught with endless problems. In the mid-1990's, it looked like that Marvel Comics character may be doomed to never get proper theatrical movie adaptations.

Then Blade came along.

Director Darren Aronofksy Offers Up A Slice Of The Unconventional With This Pi

The 1990's saw a large number of great directors make their feature film debuts, particularly in the first half of the decade that saw the likes of Richard Linklater & Quentin Tarantino make their marks on the world of cinema. But that doesn't mean all the notable directorial debuts could be found in the first half of the 1990's since Wes Anderson leaped into the realm of feature films with 1996's Bottle Rocket while Darren Aronofsky entered feature-length filmmaking with his 1997 motion picture Pi, a film that certainly establishes a large number of the specific filmmaking traits many associate explicitly with Aronofsky to this very day.

Steven Spielberg's Second World War II Movie Of The 1990's Was The Excellent Saving Private Ryan

I'm pretty sure this will make me sound like some sort of Steven Spielberg shill or something (who would be giving me dollars for positive reviews in that case like how Marvel apparently sends check to Marvel shills? Amblin? Am I an Amblin shill?), but it's impressive how many of his movies have been able to cement themselves as the de facto pop culture touchstones for various parts of history and/or our world as a whole. Jaws is the cornerstone of how we all perceive sharks, E.T. is thought of as the standard-bearer for friendly depictions of otherworldly visitors while his historical films very much feel like the most famous depictions of massively important historical events like the Holocaust or Abraham Lincoln's presidency.

Histoire(s) du Cinema Is An Academic Exercise That's Frequently Incoherent

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #27
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #48 (tied with The Battle Of Algiers)

Looks like I'm gonna have to adjust my reviewing procedures in order to properly tackle Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema. Just five minutes into this extended movie (which is broken up into eight individual segments), it was apparent I couldn't use the same reviewing barometers I used for, say, Going In Style recently. This isn't a conventional narrative film, but that's true of a lot of Godard's work. Histoire(s) du Cinema goes even further and isn't even trying to be like Godard's more abstract and unconventional dramas, it's basically an exercise in exploring the past of cinema in incredibly avant-garde ways that's mostly been made for himself and film academics.

The Very Fabric Of One's Identity Is Pondered Within The Truman Show

Like fellow late 20th century movie star Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey is basically a no-show in the modern day world of pop culture. For a while there, Carrey was unstoppable at the box office and even at the dawn of a new millennium, he managed to crank out hits like How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Bruce Almighty that dwarfed the work of any other comedic actor on the scene financially. And then...it just stopped. I'd personally chalk that up to his public support of the anti-vaxxer movement, which made headlines in 2008 and cast a dark shadow over any future attempts (like his 2008 movie Yes Man) to mine that everyman personality that was at the center of many of his biggest 1990's hits. There was an element naivete to those characters that could be cute and charming at times, whereas his real life naivete was dangerous and ignorant.

Two Of Quest For Camelots Songs Managed To Ape Disney While Creating Something Unique

Welcome to a new bi-weekly column called When Good Songs Happen To Bad Movies, in which I look at pretty well done songs that just so happened to debut in more subpar features.

Animation, like many other aspects of Hollywood that spawn success, seems to be a fertile ground for imitation, as seen by the surplus of fairy tale skewing animated features that were released in the wake of Shrek's phenomenal success or the insane amount of CGI animated films released in 2006 thanks to the success of Finding Nemo three years earlier. The 90's followed this sort of trend to a tee, with The Lion King's humongous box office managing to get every movie studio to create their own animation company to churn out would-be animation blockbusters.

The Big Lebowski Review (Classic Write-Up)

Dude, Where's My Car...And The Money...And My Tapes

Narration is a common element found in cinema that's frequently utilized for numerous purposes. Perhaps the goal of the narration is to set up the tone of the motion picture, or to deliver exposition or even just to set up a joke. The Big Lewboski uses narration as a way to accomplish that first objective, with Sam Elliots distinctive vocals describing the landscape of  Los Angeles and the films main character, The Dude (Jeff Bridges), though eventually his narration disintegrates into him losing his train of thought.

Franchise Frenzy: The Lion King

I Ain't Lion...That First Movies Still Amazing (The Sequels? Weeellllll.....)

Gives ya chills, don't it?

Disney is pretty much the reason why I love not only the art of animation, but cinema in general. Their movies were ones I rewatched endlessly, to the point where even today even the mention of key words like "necessities" and "world" are likely to cause me to burst into a Disney song. One of my favorites of the bunch was easily The Lion King, a movie released only a year and a half before I was born, and (something I didn't realize until I actually started writing this article) one that came out twenty years ago this week. Who can believe it's been twenty years since moviegoers were enthralled by the Circle of Life? Even today, the movie has a tremendous presence in pop culture, to the point where a new sequel TV series entitled The Lion Guard was announced last week.