Thoughts on movies, comic books, life, and other nonsense, by someone who should know better
The name Guillermo Del Toro on a movie fills me with dread. Unfortunately, not in the way I’d like it to. Everything about the guy I love – his devotion to horror and sci fi, his adoration of HP Lovecraft matches my own, and he has a collection of props I would kill for. His traveling exhibit At Home With Monsters was pretty amazing – I took some pics when I went to see it earlier this year, and posted them here. So yeah, I love Del Toro – unfortunately I think most of his movies stink.
Chances are, if you went to see Passengers based on the previews alone, you’d have gone in expecting a sci-fi thriller with a solvable mystery at its core. The movie, which stars fan favourites Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games trilogy) and Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World) certainly looks that way from the minute or so of carefully edited clips that you get. The giant, somewhat dark looking spaceship in deep space, the two leads running around while things go to hell – and why are they the only two to wake up?! So, yeah, if that was what you were expecting, I bet like me, you came out of the theater disappointed.
There’s a somewhat interesting story behind I Origins – the movie itself, not necessarily the movie’s story. Mike Cahill, writer and director, unable to resolve story issues during development phase of his follow up movie to Another Earth, essentially scrapped the draft and turned to writing, instead, an origin story for his original concept. Hoping it would allow him to address the story issues of the first draft, I Origins was produced as a prequel to the main concept, which was set up at Fox Searchlight sometime in late 2015.
It’s not often that a movie comes along and creates its own genre. Spring, written by Justin Benson and directed by Benson and Aaron Moorhead (who also created the Bonestorm segment of V/H/S Viral, actually does just that: RomHor! Does that sound dumb or overhyped? Probably both, but I feel it’s true. I’ve seen many a romantic drama, and many a horror movie, and this is absolutely a successful fusion of both in that neither element feels half assed. The movie poster describes it as Richard Linklater meets HP Lovecraft – not a terrible mashup, but not completely accurate, to me anyway. This is clearly the movie that Benson and Moorhead set out to make, and I mostly liked it.
AT THE FOOTHILLS OF MADNESS 