13 Days of First-Time Frights: Carrie

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #7: Carrie

The real horror story was the High School memories we made along the way. That's a sentiment I'm sure Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) would agree with. Carrie's time in High School has been fraught with bullying and cruelty as her classmates pick on her ceaselessly. Her home life isn't much better considering that she lives with an ultra-religious Mother, Margaret White (Piper Laurie), whose idea of discipline is to lock Carrie into a closet when she's convinced that her daughter has been possessed by the Devil. Yes, Carrie's life is no picnic, but she does have one interesting advantage at her disposal. Carrie is gradually discovering that she carries the ability to make things move with her mind.

The Perfection Is An Extravagant & Messy Thriller But Also A Brilliant One

SPOILERS FOLLOW BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO TALK ABOUT WHAT THE HECK THE PERFECTION IS AND HOW IT FARES IN BEING THAT

The Documentary Spielberg Looks At An Iconic Career In An Engaging Manner

This morning, the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced and among the nine films nominated for Best Picture was The Post, Steven Spielberg's newest directorial effort. With The Post securing a Best Picture nod, this meant, as pointed out by Mark Harris on Twitter, that Spielberg has now had eleven of his movies nominated for Best Picture, the second highest amount of movies a single director has ever had nominated in Best Picture (William Wyler has the most with 13 of his features scoring Best Picture nominations). That's an astonishing accomplishment and it's far from the only place where Spielberg's career has been marked with great success as anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last four decades can attest.

In Laman's Terms: Five Classic Directors Who Deserve A Major Comeback

In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

While a number of directors from the big American cinema revolution of the 1970's (like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen) are still doing regular work in Hollywood, it must be said that quite of the few masters from this era as well as other prolific directors from other epochs of Hollywood have found shockingly little work in the modern day cinematic landscape given how many classics they've delivered in their career. As just a little fun exercise, I've compiled five notable directors, some of whom come from the aforementioned creative boom of the 70's, others who come from other eras of Hollywood, who don't get much in the way of work anymore but totally deserve more high-profile gigs, perhaps from the likes of studios like Netflix, Annapurna or Amazon who are now in the business of financing costly auteur-driven projects that major studios are hesitant to greenlight.

Your Mission To Mars, Should You Choose To Accept It....

Brian De Palma was one of the most influential filmmakers of the final three decades of the 20th century, with films like Scarface, Carrie and the 1981 masterpiece Blow Out cultivating praise from general moviegoers and film geeks alike. It's a pity then that he's been mostly M.I.A. in the 21st century, with only his divisive 2002 movie Femme Fatale scoring much in the way of praise, though a documentary all about the man himself entitled De Palma was released last year and ended up being widely praised. Hopefully a studio like Amazon Studios, Annapurna or A24 gives Brian De Palma a chance to make a truly great movie again.

Blow Out Review (Classic Write-Up)

Sound is a key component for any non-silent movie. The tiniest creak of a door opening or a car starting up can add multitudes of personality to the world of any given individual motion picture. Of course, the best sound work can be best summed up by an old axiom (which I’m paraphrasing) referring to the equally important world of visual effects; your work is truly successful when nobody even notices it. In other words, the phrase refers to how the best visual effects seamlessly incorporate themselves into the story and don’t call attention to their own virtues. The same can be said for exceptional sound work, which can be easy for even a cinema devotee like myself to take for granted.