Tag Archive
How Do You Know
A visual motif is supposed to be used to express a feeling that is never overtly expressed by the characters, revealing something about them that they’re unaware of or trying to hide. A perfect example is Tammy Metzler in the movie Election, and the use of garbage that she either hides behind or hangs out […]
Style Over Stupid: Vol. 1, Black Dynamite vs. New York, I Love You
I’d imagine it’d be hard to convince someone to give you money for what amounts to a film school exercise. Not so much for the actors who will probably have a ball playacting and indulging their most deliberately childish ideas. Take, for example a movie like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Psycho, a thoroughly […]
The Informant!
Being intentionally campy is a slippery slope. There are generally two polar opposites that filmmakers aim for, with John Waters and his deliberately wretched acting and fecal excess on one side and Pedro Almodovar and his brightly colored wallpaper and screaming transvestites on the other. Well, maybe there’s not a huge difference, but in terms […]
The Marc Pease Experience
The best examples of movies that use product placement as plot points are Tsui Hark’s Double Team which amongst other things, has our heroes hide behind a Coke machine, protecting them from certain death and Alexander Payne’s Election, where Matthew Broderick, because he is staring at a can of Pepsi, is able to deduce that […]
Identity
This is exactly the kind of psuedo-clever phoned-in-written-over-the-weekend script that reeks of Donald Kaufman (Adaptation). From the first 10 minutes on, where I swore the movie couldn’t have been this bad: Unless it was on purpose? It certainly couldn’t have been more hokey. Indian burial grounds? The number 6 that turns into a 9 when […]