DVD Picks: Aviatices, Satanic Cults and LeBron James
February 11, 2010
‘Amelia,” starring Hilary Swank as famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart, is a perfectly serviceable, standard-issue Hollywood biopic that hits all the requisite notes and risks little. It’s an enjoyable movie experience and, at under two hours, admirably restrained in length. I only wish the movie, like its heroine, had a little more guts.
It’s a problem of form, really. “Amelia” is done about as well as this type of movie can be done – but that’s the problem. The celebrity biopic has become Hollywood’s most tired and predictable genre. If you recall, we were tipped to this problem in 2007 with the very funny mock-biopic “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.” “Walk” tackled the subgenre of the musical biopic, but its cautionary lessons can very easily be extrapolated – and, evidently, ignored. Read the rest of this entry »
Already a legend of low-budget horror, ” Paranormal Activity” is an object lesson in the power of viral marketing. Filmed for $15,000, its theatrical take after wide release on Halloween is $107 million, with an additional $10 million or so still coming in from the UK.
So why such astounding success? First, “Paranormal” is a scary ghost story with an effective gimmick: Like “The Blair Witch Project,” the film is presented as found footage, the record of a haunting caught on camera and left by the dearly departed victims. Read the rest of this entry »
A Timeline of Videogame Music
December 9, 2005
Gamespot.com
Lost: Television’s Triumph of Ambition
June 14, 2005
Popmatters.com
Hard to say, really, which moment packed the most punch. There was the kidnapping of a child by spooky sea hillbillies, or the unexpected detonation of a new character by dynamite. The landlocked slave ship. The anthropomorphic smoke demon. The crazy French chick stealing the baby. The heroin addict’s apparent relapse. Or maybe it was the bio-mechanical island monster uprooting trees and dragging people underground. Tough call. Read the rest of this entry »
Da Vinci Turns Two
April 12, 2005
The Fiction of Historical Accuracy
PopMatters.com
Dan Brown’s mystery/thriller The Da Vinci Codeis the kind of phenomenon for which the words “mammoth” and “blockbuster” were seemingly invented. Every now and again, an author manages to find the cultural sweet spot with surgical precision, and many trees are felled to print the billions of pages demanded by hungry readers.
In fact, the book has been at or near the top of the sales charts for more than two years now — the first printing hit shelves in March, 2003. At one point, Da Vinci was selling around 100,000 copies per week. Two years later, and it’s still hovering in the top five of the New York Timesbestsellers list. To date, it has sold more than 18 million copies and has been translated into at least 44 languages. Everyone I know has read this book. Everyone you know has read this book.
