Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of “Ready Player One” is a fantastic, mind blowing amalgam of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Tron,” and “The Matrix” all rolled in to one multicolored strobe of pop culture. You’d think with the rapid fire barrage of pop culture nods and winks to video games, anime, and television series that “Ready Player One” would lose sight of its narrative. In the end, though, Spielberg keeps a firm grip on the novel by Ernest Cline, never once losing sight of what made the original novel such a must read in 2011.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
Aragne: Sign of Vermillion (2018) [Fantasia 2018]
Saku Sakomoto’s “Aragne” is a real stab at anime horror that embraces its nonsensical story, and never actually delivers a narrative at any point during its run time. “Aragne” is thankfully a merciful hour long film, but one that’s a disorienting, and incoherent experience. And not in the artistic way. More in the realm that Sakomoto seems to have half assed a lot of the film and kind of took it in to the realm where he makes it looks intentional the whole way through.
John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994): Collector’s Edition [Blu-Ray]
John Carpenter has always been about transcending what ever form of storytelling he pursued. Even when paying homage toWesterns or remaking something like “Village of the Damned,” Carpenter never approaches it conventionally. With “In the Mouth of Madness,” he had every chance to repeat the same meta-beats as “They Live,” but he ends up delivering a genius, beautifully loony, often brilliant piece of cinema that’s both a tribute to literature, a meditation on the power of the imagination, and our own state of being and reality.
La nuit a dévoré le monde (2018) [Fantasia 2018]
Overnight, Paris is overrun by zombies. Seemingly, everyone has turned into the undead while Sam slept after a party. As he finds himself alone, he finds ways to survive and not lose him mind.
Beast Stalker (2008) (Ching Yan) [New York Asian Film Festival 2018]
After a gunfight and car accident, a cop pursuing a long time criminal foe is involved in the death of a child. His guilt pushes him to chase the criminal even more fervently. The child’s mother, a prosecutor, pushes for the most severe punishment for this criminal.
Dynamite Graffiti (Suteki na dainamaito sukyandaru) (2018) [New York Asian Film Festival 2018]
In this biographical film, the viewer follows the rise and fall of porn magazine creator and runner Akira Suei.
Written and directed by Masanori Tominaga and based on the autobiography by Akira Suei, the film starts in the 1980s and goes back and forth in time, showing important moments in his life, from his childhood, including his mother blowing herself up, to his meeting his wife to his life painting cabaret billboards and then building his pornographic magazine empire. The film shows this in a light that lets the viewer makes up their own mind about Suei and his work and in a way that does not condone or condemn any of it. It shows things as they were and raises a few questions about censorship and morality policing.
The Forest of the Lost Souls (A Floresta das Almas Perdidas) (2017)
In a forest known as a prime suicide location, two strangers come upon one another and their lives are deeply affected.