A.V. Club Blog

Yup, I’ve already got tickets for a 3:30 show. I’m gonna sneak out of work early tomorrow afternoon and try to beat the brunt of the opening-day rush. In short, I’m fucking stoked. And I’m stoked to be stoked.

I hate to admit how jaded I’ve become about going to the theater to see movies. But really, I have an excuse of sorts: My grandmother, rest her soul, managed a movie theater (first in Englewood, Florida and then a few miles north in Venice; yes, Florida steals all its town names from California) back when I was a kid. From ages 4 to 12, I spent thousands of hours in her little strip-mall two-screener watching hundreds of movies dozens of times, as well as playing tabletop Defender, jawing stale Milk Duds, and picking up trash from the aisles between screenings—a chore my...

Have you ever put off returning a Netflix DVD for so long that it slowly, subtly becomes such an integral part of your apartment’s décor that it seems like a shame to return it? That it’s somehow fucking up your Feng shui old-school? That’s how it was with Robert Altman’s 1957 documentary The James Dean Story and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1968 flop Finian’s Rainbow. After taking up not-so-valuable real estate in my humble domicile for the better part of a year I finally got around to watching both those fuckers recently.

It was a semi-edifying experience. Coppola and Altman are two of my all-time favorite filmmakers but part of what makes these films so fascinating, at least from a historical/cultural perspective is how little they feel like Coppola or Altman movies. There are a lot of great filmmakers whose very first film conveys exactly who they are and where they’re headed. A very straight, direct line can be drawn, for example, from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure to...

Throughout the eighties and early nineties Tom Hanks and Kevin Costner reigned as the James Stewart and Gary Cooper of their generation. Hanks oozed aw-shucks boyish charm; Costner radiated dignity and quiet authority. In an age of flash-in-the-pan pretty boys they seemed built to last as old-style Hollywood stars of the highest caliber.

Hanks has certainly had his ups and downs over the years but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call him America’s most beloved actor. Even when one of Hanks’ films flops, nobody holds him responsible for their failure. It’s always “Charlie Wilson’s War was underwhelming but Hanks was great!” or “Ladykillers was a disappointment but Hanks was hilarious!” Costner, on the other hand, has become synonymous with colossal failure and questionable judgment. From his legendary performance as a pee-drinking man-fish in Waterworld on through to this equally floptastic turn in Rumor Has It (or as Keith and his wife Stevie call...

Unrest

“Yes, She Is My Skinhead Girl”

TeenBeat/K, 1991

Format: 7-inch single

File Under: Perverse, perverted twee

Key track: “Yes, She Is My Skinhead Girl”

“Started as a noisy improv high school band and turned into an indie legend,” is how Mark Robinson, on his...

This has been floating around the blogosphere today: French artist Cedric Delsaux’s photographs blending characters from Star Wars into mundane modern industrial settings. That link goes to a slashfilm.com post on the photos rather than Delsaux’s website, because Delsaux’s website has an irritating Flash interface that is hard to navigate and impossible to link to.

Related: If Star Wars Was Real, a site collecting vintage photos that have had droids and TIE fighters photoshopped into them.

I originally planned a blog post about the 1970 film Performance, and how it had been staring at me from a red envelope since OCTOBER. That’s right, it sat for six full months from Netflix, while I cycled through plenty of other movies. I could’ve purchased it several times. Instead, Performance became the prelude to my Sickbed Film Festival. And, herewith, some commentary on many—but not all!—of the movies I watched while bedridden.

Performance, 1970, dir: Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell

I waited six months to watch Performance mostly because I was never in the mood for what I mistakenly thought would be a boring, plotless psychedelic trip. (Why did I add it to the queue, you ask? I’m not entirely sure.) But the famously... read more

If you look over in the DVD reviews posting today you’ll find my review of the long-overdue DVD release of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. As I allude to in the review, this is my second go at reviewing the film. My first was back in 1997 when I tackled it for this publication. At the time, it was a pretty big assignment. I had less than a full year of film-reviewing under my belt. Heck, I wasn’t even doing it full time. After completing a year of grad school in English at UW-Madison—enough to get me an MA but try taking an English MA on the job market and see what it gets you—I’d dropped out and taken a job at a video store. Thanks to the encouragement of former editor (and current NPR mover and shaker) Stephen Thompson, I’d started doing some freelance movie reviews for what was then called The Onion A.V. Club between shifts spent checking in soft porn, steering customers to a virtually... read more

Can you really think a movie is good (or really freaking good) if you also think it “fails” at what the director intended? I’ve been thinking about this ever since I saw Michael Haneke’s English remake of his 1997 film Funny Games at an early screening last week. I really admired the movie. (I haven’t seen the original, but I understand they are exactly alike, so I’ll just assume until I see it that I really like that one, too.) Funny Games is a brutally terrifying thriller that’s almost too painful to watch, but Haneke is such a master filmmaker you can’t turn away. Like all great horror films, Funny Games is a miserable experience that suddenly becomes exhilarating once its over, because a great cinematic artist has so completely sucked you into his make-believe world.

I’m pretty sure if Haneke were to read my glowing praise, he’d come to my house, take my family hostage, and torture us physically and psychologically. Funny Games is not intended to... read more

My memories of Gingerdead Man are vague at best, and that's a poor sign. This is a shitty horror movie in which a serial killer gets reincarnated as a gingerbread man, voiced by Gary Busey. Even in straight-to-video territory, it's a crime not to tackle a concept like this with all the imagination it can handle. A good B- or even F-horror film always leaves behind some image that's vividly ridiculous, even in the film's own terms. Take Dead Alive, for example. Fully delighted to see a zombie rip a guy's dick off? Well, that still won't prepare you for a priest to leap out, stir up a kung-fu typhoon, and proclaim: "I kick ass for the lord!"

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Prompted by my recent Random Roles with Jean-Claude Van Damme I recently caught up with his 1993 vehicle Hard Target. Without having seen many of Van Damme’s films I can say with one hundred percent certainty that is his best film. The film was seemingly designed as a test to see if John Woo’s pop-operatic Sirk-meets-Peckinpah sensibility would translate to these shores. I think it’s safe to say that he passed with flying colors.

For a John Woo movie Hard Target is pretty good. For a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie it’s fucking transcendent. Woo can’t turn a mulleted Van-Damme into Chow Yun Fat—I’m not sure even God is capable of that—but he can make him swagger with iconic cool. That’s a sizable accomplishment. Woo’s American career is characterized by an impressive upward arc from Hard Target to Broken Arrow to his American magnum opus Face Off and an equally steep downward arc, commercially at least, from Mission Impossible 2 to...