Being Film #6 for Hooptober 2021 Did director Joel Rubin settle the question of "what's the best video game adaptation of all time?" with Werewolves Within? Does it count as an adaptation when producers Ubisoft's only real direction was "make it a good movie?" I have zero familiarity with the video game, although my family... Continue Reading →
Being Film #5 for Hooptober 2021 It feels like after the success of Inside, the debut and arguable pinnacle of the French New Wave of Horror (though I prefer Martyrs) the writing/directing team of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo have struggled to find another story where their particular sensibilities really pay off. Their latest, Kandisha,... Continue Reading →
Being Film #4 for Hooptober 2021 I've gone on record a few times during Hooptober about my less than ardent love for Lucio Fulci. With the exception of The Beyond, his "Gates of Hell" films felt scattered and gratuitous and his riff on Romero with Zombi was anemic at best. So I'm as shocked as... Continue Reading →
Being Film #3 for Hooptober 2021 Somewhere there's a version of Blood Red Sky where Samuel L. Jackson is screaming "GET THESE MUTHAF-CKIN' VAMPIRES OFF MY MUTHAF-CKIN' PLANE!" and that is a movie I want to see. Instead what we have here is a German action/horror hybrid with a great premise that becomes a slog... Continue Reading →
Being Film #2 for Hooptober 2021 Malignant is many things. It's proof that James Wan lost none of his horror chops having made the leap to massive big budget fare like Aquaman and the Fast and Furious franchise. It's a high camp tribute to giallo, filtered through the lens of a guy whose first movie... Continue Reading →
Being Film #1 for Hooptober 2021 Stan Winston is a legend. This is undisputed. The man was a master of practical effects. The stuff he did for both Aliens and Jurassic Park (two films you can definitely spot shades of here) are some of the most breathtaking works of imagination put to screen. So when... Continue Reading →
Take martial arts action, sleazy exploitation and supernatural horror, sprinkle it with a small dose of sex comedy. Give it an almost non-existent budget, populate it with a bunch of terrible but overjoyed actors and combine it with a concept straight out of the head of a nine year old weaned on cross-pollinated action figure mayhem and it STILL doesn’t come close to what ends on the screen, which is a ridiculously enjoyable B movie that gives 100%.
My Jean-Luc Godard education continues with Masculin, Féminin, his 1966 portrait of the youth culture in Paris in the months leading up to the 1965 presidential election. It's a flurry of different visual and aural ideas cut together and framed in a off-kilter documentary style whose purpose isn't anything like a straight narrative, but rather an empathetic if distanced view of the lives of the young men and women Godard found himself surrounded by in Paris.
It's strange, but until watching Band of Outsiders my only exposure to Jean-Luc Godard was Breathless almost eight months earlier.  Kind of a long wait between films, especially after the wonderful taste Breathless left in my mouth, but that wait may have made my feelings toward Band of Outsiders a little sweeter than they would have been otherwise.
Breathless may not have been the movie to "officially" kick off the French New Wave, but after its release there was little doubt it would be the standard bearer for the movement. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard based off a treatment by Francois Truffaut, Breathless leaps off the screen and tears into its story with a youthful exuberance that embraces its roots in American genre films while gleefully tearing apart the staid tenets of how those films are structured.
Cinema Dual 