A little late on this, but in honor of Tomorrowland, here is another, more successful, Disney attempt to turn a theme park attraction into a live-action film, a success that has haunted their follow-up attempts to this day…
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a little bit of lightning in a bottle. It shouldn’t work; in fact, it didn’t just ten years later – when the principal actor and director teamed up again with a similar tone and dollar signs in their eyes, only to be trounced by generally divested cinema-goers and critics. It didn’t work the half-dozen or so times that Hollywood has tried to return pirates to the mainstream since the end of their heyday ransacking Hollywood way back in the misty yesteryear of the 1930s. And it didn’t work just the same year The Curse of the Black Pearl was released, when Disney took two other Disneyland/ Disneyworld rides and made films out of them, both to negligent box office results and dismal critical failure. Continue reading
At its best, horror cinema works like a trance. From more esoteric, cryptic works like Dreyer’s Vampyr to pressingly, pulsingly modern joints such as It Follows and Under the Skin, the genre cuts through the fat and almost approaches us on an unconscious level. At its best, which isn’t nearly often enough, the new Poltergeist almost gets there. Director Gil Kenan is, at a conceptual level, the perfect shepherd for the material – his animated Monster House is almost an animated Poltergeist anyway. Unfortunately, it ends up being a much better Poltergeist remake than the one he would go on to direct a decade later. The one, you know, called Poltergeist. 
Christopher Nolan has always had a problem with his inner thoughts drowning out his ability to make compelling cinema, and the companionship of David S. Goyer in the writer’s chair has never been rectifying. Case in point: The Dark Knight Rises is a belabored mass of hang-ups, side-treks, false starts, hasty endings, and ignoble intentions. On the latter, the film’s villain Bane (Tom Hardy) – who turns Gotham’s poor against its wealthy so that he can profit in the end – is a troubling figure of social dejection and husky sooth-saying radicalism, and he is, without a doubt, a symbol for the false intentions of working class leaders, or Nolan supposes. If the superhero genre is a card-carrying caretaker for traditionalist individualism, libertarian democracy, and the American Way, The Dark Knight Rises is the flag-waving stalwart with a mouth for the status quo. It makes no bones about its fear that the working class is a raving groupthink machine defined only by its inability to restrain itself, lying around in wait for an opportunity to search and destroy and just hurting for an anarchist fight. 
Edited May 2016
The comic book movie in 2005 was entrapped in its own split-decision bifurcation. On one hand, the likes of Elektra and Fantastic Four were omnipresent holdovers from the 1990s and markers of a genre strangling itself into childish submission. On the other, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City sought to experiment with the comic book form as an avenue for pure cinema, and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence was caught taking the medium of cinema to task with the violence of the human condition. Both were attempts to push the comic book medium to new depths, but both also tacitly exposed the limits of the superhero genre by eschewing the likes of Spider-Man or Superman for stories that, at their structural elements, had very little to do with the tradition of the comic book. Just as the comic book had grown up and left some of its inner core back in the minds of teenagers, so too was comic book cinema moving away from the fluff and the puff and toward something a little more brutalized and tragic. 
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium is a better film than its follow-up, Chappie, but it is also a more distressing one. Chappie is inept at the level of bare functional mechanics, but at least it feels like the product Blomkamp wanted to make (and, admittedly, proof that he does not much understand storytelling or tone at all). Elyisum, meanwhile, has the musty odor and schematic corporatism of the product he thought he was supposed to make. While Chappie is a fearlessly stupid product of personal vision, Elysium is an antiseptic epic (an antisepic, if you will) masquerading as a unique work of social parable and world-building. It is ungainly and poorly focused, using dirtiness as a cheap aesthetic trade-off in lieu of genuine emotional effect, and it is largely willing to trot out themes about inequality and social rebellion in increasingly arbitrary, insulting ways. That is, before it turns said themes into paltry excuses for lazy action entertainment, and Matt Damon. 
Let it be said: Sinister boasts a naughty, dejected, little deviant of a title screen, and as an unmitigated proponent of title and credit sequences, this is a great boon to my mental state.
Say what you will about Alexandre Aja’s Horns, but it is a looker. Photographed by Frederick Elmes, who spent his strongest days lensing slices of dirty, surrealist Americana for David Lynch like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, the film’s version of the Pacific Northwest – filtered through the piece’s relentless weirdness – often recalls a diluted Lynch at his best. Logs cut through the screen with a lush, romantic hue that ironically captures the forested expanse as a jungle ready to swallow the everyday suburbia of the film. Elsewhere, sequences surrounding a quintessential American icon – the diner – pervert the locale to a darkened, neon-hued collage of red and blue that Lynch himself would have appreciated. The look isn’t a surprise – Aja isn’t the most capable of filmmakers, but he has passion, and he knows his forebearers. With an opportunity to play in Lynch’s Twin Peaks territory, he clearly knew who to fan-boyishly turn to, and he arguably found the perfect cinematographer for his vision. 
Black Death
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, being both a welcome surprise and a disappointment. A surprise because, ultimately, it is good, and in some ways more than good, and a disappointment because the ways in which it is good are essentially carbon-copies of its predecessor. Still, they are improved carbon-copies, and if we are in the business of deciding whether Catching Fire is better than The Hunger Games, it would be a great quest to find a way in which it is not.
The Long Take 