I’m old enough to when David Holmes’ slinky and disreputable lounge music meant that Steven Soderbergh had some business to conduct among the living. Here it feels out of place, like Booker T and the MGs playing at a beautifully lit, carefully staged and totally lifeless museum exhibit. After a clever misdirect or (maybe?) two, you can almost David Koepp wishing he was back writing about actual dinosaurs and spooks instead of metaphorical ones. The result…
I adored this movie, and I love that it’s exactly the movie Ryan Coogler wanted to make, flaws and all. I knew it would be excellent, I knew there would be vampires, but what I didn’t expect was the music, which moves the story forward while literally bringing me to tears at how exultant and wild and joyful it is. Coogler’s world is exploding with confidence, opinions, and a love of movies. There are problems — it’s frankly impossible to imagine how anything could measure up to the first hour — but somehow it just makes me want to see it again.
Spending Superbowl Sunday revisiting Renny Harlin's best movie is definitely a choice, but I regret nothing.
I had a job reading scripts and writing coverage for a production company in LA in 1994 when Shane Black's screenplay sold to New Line for a record $4 million and copies started making the rounds. I sitting in my little apartment, reading it start to finish in one sitting, unable to quite believe what I was reading. Even to my recently Tarantino-ized…
"Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist," Pauline Kael wrote back in the late Reagan years in September of 1986, "a Frank Capra of dream logic."
Well, that wasn't *exactly* what I was thinking, when as a sixteen-year-old, I was sitting in the Bijou Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that same year, watching wide-eyed as Dennis Hopper sucked greedily on a gas mask before dry-humping Isabella Rossellini on her apartment floor. I was there on a first date…
