If you’ve caught Transformers recently, you’re familiar with Mission: Impossible III director J.J. Abrams’ upcoming film Cloverfield. And you’re possibly a bit puzzled by it all, or maybe you’re excited. It definitely came as a shock to me the first time I caught the trailer, and even back when it was just “Clover”, “Cheese”, “Slusho”, “1-18-08” or even just “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”, it definitely had my interest.
There are some, probably inevitable, comparisons to The Blair Witch Project. And these aren’t unfounded comparisons—both are filmed in a largely first-person perspective via hand-held camera and purported as documentary of some sort.
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From the cult musical Newsies to Batman Begins, Christian Bale has been one of Hollywood’s favorite eye candies. But he is so much more than that - this veteran of movies like American Psycho and I’m Not There is an incredibly talented actor to boot.
Did You Know?
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Despite your immediate expectations about Darkness, you will likely be surprised. I was, actually–the first time I heard about Darkness, I thought it was going to be some kind of ripoff of Darkness Falls, a mediocre horror flick about a tooth fairy gone awry. What I actually got, meanwhile, was a surprisingly chilling little horror romp from a Catalan director, no less.
I bring that up because it’s spectacularly rare. A Catalan horror film, especially one that makes it to the United States film market, comes along very, very seldom. In fact, searches for “Catalan horror film” on both Wikipedia and Google turned up precisely nothing.
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According to a Hollywood adage, everyone wants to direct. Many people shouldn’t. Zach Braff, on the other hand, star of the wildly popular irreverent medical show Scrubs, is free to ply his trade whenever he likes.
Garden State was somewhat of a cultural phenomenon when it came out. Written, directed by and starring Braff, alongside starlet Natalie Portman, it told the simple story of a young man trying to enjoy his life. Over-medicated and lonely, he seeks a meaningful connection with someone. Anyone. Drugs and friendship both fall flat.
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Okay…everybody just calm down for a second. Because I got news that’ll blow your ever-lovin’ mind if you’re a horror buff like yours everfreakintruly.
Everybody knows this guy, right?
That, right there, is George Romero. He’s the guy who, just barely forty years ago, braved convention and indignation alike to bring us Night of the Living Dead, the horror movie to end all horror movies and indeed began an entire subgenre of horror, survival horror.
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There’s nothing like an exploitative beauty pageant to bring a family together - so proves Little Miss Sunshine, the indie hit that quickly became an Oscar contender in 2006. Abigail Breslin’s appealing performance assured that Little Miss Sunshine would become the cult classic that it is today.
Did You Know?
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Hannibal Lecter was never meant to captivate anyone’s attention. Introduced in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, he was part psychopath, part cannibal, and part FBI informant. 
With the exception of the much later penned novel Hannibal, which was adapted to film in 2001, he is never the villain of the story. In the most famous entry in the series, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal helps the heroine catch an even more vicious killer: Buffalo Bill.Thanks in part to Anthony Hopkins’ enthralling performance, Hannibal Lecter has become a household name. Though Ted Levine’s Buffalo Bill was frightening and demented, Hannibal’s politeness and intelligence made him a curious spectacle. It’s hard to imagine him killing and dismembering his victims, much less eating them.
Hannibal represents the two divergent pieces of human nature. His primal viciousness and his absurd politeness somehow walk hand in hand, as he insists on only killing the rude or the vulgar. He has respect for people like Clarice, the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs - in the novel Hannibal, he even falls in love with her.
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I hate Miyazaki anime. Genuinely. I hate it like dental visits and health food. I hate it like an all-day marathon of American Idol. If someone offered me a choice between 
watching Princess Mononoke and hitting myself in the head with a tack hammer I’d have to sit down for a moment and really think that over. At least the hammer thing would stop hurting in less than two hours, a feat Princess Mononoke just can’t top. But I’m not here to talk Mononoke today, no sir…today I’m here to talk Howl’s Moving Castle, a film that tries way too hard and accomplishes entirely too little.
Trying Way Too Hard
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Under most circumstances I would not be wasting my breath talking about Wes Craven. I’m not very fond of Wes Craven under most general circumstances because I find his work to have all the subtlety of an open cask of Sarin, which is why I like to call him Wes “Nerve Gas” Craven.
But then, every so often, Wes Craven likes to screw with the tattered remnants of my sanity by coming out with a halfway decent movie or doing something otherwise unlike him. Indeed, Wes Craven sought to buck the system and prove the Broken Clock Theory correct with his film Red Eye.
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Dark Water came too late for its own good. Though the original was pretty solid, and the remake had its moments, its timing was so far off that the end result couldn’t help but be unmarkable.
The Wrong Time
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