Archive
Review: “Bridesmaids”
Director: Paul Feig
Produced by: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, & Clayton Townsend, Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig (co-roducers), Paul Feig (executive producer), Lisa Yadavaia (associate producer)
Starring: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kemper, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Chris O’Dowd, Jon Hamm
Written by: Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo
Music by: Michael Andrews
Year: 2011
After years of making “movies for guys” like Superbad, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Knocked-Up, Judd Apatow, famed producer and director, teams up with director Paul Feig, comedian Annie Mumolo, and, of course, Saturday Night Live star Kristen Wiig to finally make a movie aimed at the ladies. And, I have to say, it’s surprisingly high quality!
The hype for Bridesmaids, at least for me, seemed to come out of nowhere. Despite a strong cast and crew, calling a movie “The Hangover for women” isn’t exactly going to inspire confidence in me in the same way that saying that the decidedly non-diet Dr. Pepper Ten is “not for women.” It’s stereotyping in the worst possible way, and actually does its product a disservice, no matter the quality of the one it’s being compared to. I was actually put off by the push to compare the two movies. The Hangover was a good, entertaining movie, period. Bridesmaids, though I can see the comparison, is not The Hangover for women, but it is also a good, entertaining movie in its own right. Read more…
Review: “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare”
Director: Wes Craven
Produced by: Robert Shaye, Wes Craven
Written by: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Miko Hughes, John Saxon
Music by: J. Peter Robinson
Year: 1994
Now explain to me why more horror movies can’t be this much fun and be scary? As a prelude to his Scream series, Wes Craven goes all meta on us with the seventh Nightmare film by folding his universe into the real world with this re-imagining of the formula and the penultimate appearance of Robert Englund as Freddy.
However, I think you’d be hard pressed to figure this in with the rest of the films, even if you include the crossover with the Friday the 13th series (which I haven’t seen and really don’t plan on seeing for a while), as it’s really almost like a spin-off, sidestory, or, if you’re knowledgeable about comic books, an Elsworlds tale! New Nightmare brings back some of the most famous and beloved of the Nightmare actors, including Heather Langenkamp herself, only, this time… she’s playing herself! Read more…
Review: “Halloween” (1978)
Director: John Carpenter
Produced by: Debra Hill, John Carpenter, Kool Lusby, Irwin Yablans, Moustapha Akkad
Written by: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
Starring: Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, P.J. Soles, Nancy Loomis
Music by: John Carpenter
Year: 1978
The original Halloween was a low budget affair. Extras were barely paid and culled from those who were already living on site in South Pasadena, California. The actors themselves were receiving significantly lower paychecks compared to what they could have made in some other production.
Despite being a fairly well-known actress today, Jamie Lee Curtis was a young, relatively unknown TV actress when this movie was made, best known possibly for being the daughter of Psycho scream queen Janet Leigh and Some Like it Hot icon Tony Curtis. Naturally, this meant a significantly smaller paycheck than what she’d get in just a few years’ time. The prolific Donald Pleasence, a name I had known but needed to look up, was the best known actor in the film at the time, known for his roles on TV and his role as the first Ernst Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, but even he had to take on a significant pay cut compared to his usual for his role as Dr. Loomis in this film. Read more…
Review: “Contagion”
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Produced by: Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher, Gregory Jacobs
Written by: Scott Z. Burns
Starring: Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow
Music by: Cliff Martinez
Year: 2011
If you’ve ever seen a disaster movie, particularly one by The Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich, and knowing what the genre usually holds in store for audiences, you’d be forgiven for not expecting much from this recent take on the genre from Steven Soderbergh. Contagion makes use of many of the same tropes every disaster movie since Airplane opened in 1970: A big cast of well-knowns face an unrelenting threat from an out of nowhere force (usually of nature) that threatens the very existence of themselves and/or humanity.
In The Day After Tomorrow, it was Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, and several others facing global warming. Cue giant wave and running from the cold front. In Contagion, it’s Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and many, many others facing a deadly, highly contagious disease. However, unlike most disaster films, Soderbergh takes a quieter, much more intimate approach and brings the tired genre up to a level that is at once riveting, emotionally resonant, and artfully produced. Read more…
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