Shutter Island is the best movie of 2010.
I realize that with competition like When in Rome, Valentine’s Day, Dear John, Book of Eli and Extraordinary Measures, that’s like being the least effeminate boy band member. But if Island were released in 2009 like it was supposed to be, there’s no doubt it would fill one of the 10 Best Picture Slots, taking the place of something idiotic like The Blind Side. As it stands, come next fall as Awards season rolls around, it’s almost a surety that Shutter Island will be forgotten. Too bad.
At least you can see it now, and since there’s really nothing else worth watching in theaters, might as well…
Shutter Island marks Leonardo DiCaprio’s 4th collaboration with famed director Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Casino, Raging Bull), along with being Scorsese’s first movie since winning the Best Director Oscar for The Departed that he really deserved for Goodfellas. But who’s keeping track?
How does Shutter Island stack up in the DiCaprio/Scorsese canon? It’s a slim notch below The Departed but far more engaging than the uneven Gangs of New York and the slightly bloated Aviator. Scorsese’s not going for any awards though he’d deserve some if properly released, as this thriller is his most overtly entertaining movie since ‘91’s Cape Fear. For those of you who’ve read the Dennis Lehane novel, the movie is mostly faithful, until…we’ll get to that later
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After a long week of waiting, the miserable half of the audience that were forced to make Dear John the movie to finally, inexplicably knock Avatar off the #1 spot now have an avenue for cinematic payback. Hopefully after being browbeaten by your wives/girlfriends into seeing Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried express their virginal love as only a PG-13 movie can, you got rimmed or at least a handjob. You deserve that much, at least.
As an alternative, The Wolfman is no great furry shakes as a movie as it’s barely a couple of paws up from Jason Bateman’s Teen Wolf Too, but some decently graphic shots of gore should expunge some of the truly disgusting stuff you saw last week while Tatum and Seyfried were doing some hardcore nuzzling. Congratulations, Amanda Seyfried, something you’re in that’s actually worse than the $20 sets and Pierce Brosnan’s eerily accurate portrayal of a braying donkey in Mamma Mia!
As another October nears its end, yet another Saw movie makes its way into theaters.
If this was say, 2006, you might have given a shit. But the Junior Varsity Saw trilogy has more than succeeded in turning a halfway decent horror series into a punchline. Hey, I guess we all have to laugh sometime until another Scary Movie comes out, but at least that series has the decency to stop at 5.
Yes, the Saw series sucks now but I can’t bring myself to hate it because there’s something entertainingly interesting watching how awful the Saw franchise has become as the series tries and new and dim-witted ways to breathe life into itself. Saw has become the Muhammad Ali of Horror: You sorta feel sorry for it as it stumbles its way about like a retard…
Orphan is unlike any of the Creepy Kid movies you’ve been inundated with over the years…
Actually, it’s a lot like the Creepy Kid movies you know backwards and forwards, except Orphan’s much, much better. Yes, the trailer feels overly familiar, and to an extent the movie is, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have good gory fun with it.
There’s something wrong with Esther- That’s putting it mildly
You’ll never guess her secret- You might, but I didn’t, and nothing about it is a cheat. It’s one of those reveals where you watch the movie a second time or play it back in your head in a whole new light and you realize Esther’s more fucked up that you initially thought
One goes into Terminator Salvation with more questions than actual anticipation…
A mere quarter of a century after James Cameron launched his Terminator series with future Cali governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, we get a quad-quel in Terminator Salvation we really didn’t ask for, but will probably watch anyway because it stars Batman. If this movie starred anyone else but Bale, would you even care, considering the trailers were less than whelming and looked a little too much like Transformers…but dustier?
T4’s also PG-13, which is almost always a debit as that kiss of death has pretty much punctured the sac of the horror genre. Look at what happened two years ago when the Die Hard franchise was saddled with the emasculation of only being able to say “fuck” once, no gore to speak of, and watered-down action. I’m not against PG-13 in general, considering one of the greatest action movies of the past 20 years, The Fugitive, was also PG-13, but it’s proven to be the exception to the unfortunate rule.
At short last, The Uninvited comes to DVD. And this is what you look like caring. You’re extremely smart because you skipped this in theaters along with everybody else. If you’re bored enough to WANT to watch this, be even smarter and let someone else be the dumbass that rents a movie not horrible enough to be reviled, but just uninteresting enough to be an inconsequential January blip on your movie radar. You didn’t bother watching this because the trailer made it look like yet another (sigh) PG-13 (strike one) remake (strikes two and three) of a halfway decent J-horror movie albino-washed and scoured for your protection making it barely scarier than that Jonas Brothers movie that came out last March.
Trust your initial instinct and avoid it on DVD, as if you weren’t going to do that already. In fact, you can probably wait another week and it’ll hit the $5 bin in your local video store. What the hell am I saying? All your local video stores are out of business…
After years of repeated inquiry, the film The Haunting in Connecticut finally answers the question, What is actually IN the great state of Connecticut, aside from one of the best (if not the) college basketball teams in the country right now? Being a lifetime Left Coaster, this question has been brewing in my mind for decades (about 5 minutes before I began writing this). So before I wrote this review, Horrroryearbook generously paid for a chartered flight (Wikipedia) to Connecticut so I could take a look around this mysterious and uncharted parcel of land somewhere in the upper-right hand corner of that US Map we never paid attention to in Social Studies because we knew it wouldn’t really matter if we learned it or not unless we were on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and they just HAPPENED to ask us that question along with other questions that happened to be relevant to our lives no matter how far-fetched and loaded for the easily emotionally manipulated it might seem
It’s a story as old as the hills. I have really no idea how old hills really are, but apparently they’re pretty darn old. And if it weren’t for movies I wouldn’t know that hills actually have eyes, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
January 23rd. A day that will live in movie indifference. For on this day, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, the prequel that no one really asked for to a vampire/werewolf series no one really cares about opened to half-filled theaters around the country. When asked about awareness of the movie, mass audiences said “Wait…there’s a 3rd one coming out? I really couldn’t be more apathetic as I was in line for Hotel for Dogs”.
My Bloody Valentine is one of the best times one could have at a mediocre horror movie this year and I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s the best horror movie of January, except maybe for the Jewsorcist (AKA The Unborn), and maybe The Uninvited (doesn’t that just look BAD?) and possibly the Underworld prequel (everybody looks embarrassed to be there). I’m too terrified to actually sit through Paul Blart: Mall Cop (looks like one of those stupid-premise movies that would usually star Rob Schneider or Chris Kattan), so that’ll have to be taken out of the equation…
Movies like Dread are why I tend to um, dread getting low-budget horror screeners in the mail. It’s almost automatic that they’re going to be horrible, the only suspense generated is to what degree the present screener will be worse or better than the one you got in the mail earlier that week and is now taking residence among your banana peels and empty yogurt cartons in the trash. You fear for the environment, hoping the screener discs will disintegrate into something that eventually helps mother Earth, because they sure won’t do anybody any good as they’re being watched.
December 12th, 2008 will be The Day the Earth Stood Still and the day that no one cared to watch it, because why bother with such mediocre when you’ve got Milk or Frost/Nixon? At least last summer’s other end-of-the-world-scenario movie The Happening was so fucking stupid that audiences could mollify the time they were wasting making fun of it. What few audiences show up to this will wish their world HAD ended right before they forked over their $10-12.
Because the Haunting of Molly is as insignificant a trifle you’ll see released this year, and you probably won’t know someone who’s actually seen this as I’m sure it’ll be out of theaters next week to make room for Madagascar 2. Yet it’s not egregiously horrible enough to be mentioned in any “year’s-worst” lists. In short, it’s the other Jacksons not named Michael or Janet. If it was a Baldwin it’d have to be Stephen, but please wait until he’s out of the room before you begin laughing
Oh boy, yet ANOTHER “found footage” horror movie where we the audience gets to see the action from the camera’s point of view and the biggest scare of the movie is whether we can keep our food in our stomachs in enough time to run to the lobby bathroom…
7 friends meet at a cabin by a creek (hence the title of the movie The Creek…as opposed to 7 Friends Meet at A Cabin). It’s a tradition they’ve been enacting for years. They drink. They smoke. They do everything but have sex.
