THE CINEFANTASTIQUE HORROR FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION PODCAST V1:E5 – Overlooked & Underrated: INK, GHOST WRITER, DR. PARNASSUS
It’s a genre light week, with no new horror, fantasy, or science fiction titles released in cinemas, so Dan Persons, Lawrence French, and Steve Biodrowski take this opportunity to shine a little much-deserved light on some overlooked and/or under-rated genre titles. The main topic of discussion is INK, the surprisingly good [...]
MMP at the 2010 Spirit Awards
ell, “next to” the Spirit Awards might be more accurate. We weren’t actually at the ceremonies, but over the past year we’ve been fortunate enough to cover a fair number of the 2010 winners.
So if the acceptance speeches didn’t get anywhere close enough to satisfying your curiosity about how these films came about, [...]
THE ART OF THE STEAL Interview
At one point in the new film THE ART OF THE STEAL, one of the people protesting the moving of Dr. Albert Barnes’ art collection (Picasso, Modigliani, Renoir, Cézanne, amongst others) from its home outside Philadelphia into the city proper stands outside the gates of the museum’s eventual home, screaming, “Philistines!” The art world occasionally [...]
Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher on OCTOBER COUNTRY
A tangent here, but stick with me: At the beginning of the animated film, MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMATAS, director Isao Takahata envisions the world of his titular family as an ocean voyage, complete with pounding waves and raging storms, but arriving eventually at a safe port. If the analogy was transferred to OCTOBER COUNTRY, the [...]
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SHUTTER ISLAND Press Conference
The embargo on the SHUTTER ISLAND press conference has lifted, so I’m putting it out for your entertainment and enrichment. However, I believe the embargo on criticism is still in place, so I can’t really set this up in the way that I’d like. You’re just going to have to wait for the BRAND NEW [...]
Michael Hoffman on THE LAST STATION
The core of THE LAST STATION’S story is the conflict between Leo Tolstoy and his wife, the Countess Sofya, over the rights to his works. But frack that, what really matters is that you’ve got Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as the Countess, and the opportunity to watch them seduce, cajole, clash, and [...]
Anthony Fabian on SKIN
You could probably forge a good, absurdist, dark comedy out of a government where racial identity can be declared and reversed by official decree, and white parents whose child’s skin is, because of a genetic quirk, darker than theirs struggle to get their kid designated Caucasian. I can imagine Terry Gilliam going to town on [...]
Mira Nair on AMELIA
You’re going to have to trust me on this one: I am a romantic. ONCE is one of my favorite films; I teared up at both UP and MARY AND MAX (animated characters struggling for their small bit of happiness just hit some special spot in me). But when you’re telling the tale of Amelia [...]
Sebastian Silva on THE MAID
New York Magazine’s David Edelstein pretty much called it: About midway through, you could be forgiven for worrying if THE MAID was teetering on the precipice of going the full, THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE route — a concern that’s only enhanced when a stray cat turns up that seems to have “I [...]
Nicolas Winding Refn on BRONSON
You wanna talk extreme? Charles Bronson, ne Michael Peterson, has spent thirty-four of his fifty-six years of life in incarceration of one form or another — most of that time has been in solitary confinement. The system has been violent to him, but he’s been violent back, and an anti-authoritarian cult has risen around his [...]
