Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Terminator: Genisys, or How to Waste 170 Million Dollars, is a righteously obsolete sequel; a feckless manure cache more dedicated to nostalgia as computer animated gimmick, patchy, gravity-ignorant FX and slinky-esque “gotcha!” twists than little things like plot, internal consistency and character development. To call Terminator: Not a Word a failure would be to acknowledge that it even tried to succeed in the first place. And let’s be honest here, Terminator 5 tried not. Read More
Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater –prominent writer/directors, Texas natives (both have roots in Houston) and coincidentally my two favorite humans. Their latest films were nominated for Best Motion Picture this year and, delving further, their careers have evolved at very similar rates, humbly paving the quaint dirt road that was the indie film scene in the ‘90s with Slacker and Bottle Rocket. Onward, they transitioned to tastemakers, acquiring cult followings with Dazed and Confused and The Royal Tenenbaums. With each film Anderson and Linklater make, their toolbox gets a little bigger without compromising their eclectic and pridefully offbeat styles, one vastly different from the other, yet hauntingly similar. Which leads to the question, who does it better?
Wes Anderson’s oh-so-deadpan characters spout off some wise, sometimes just straight up madcap tidings, whereas Linklater’s characters go for the gold with philosophical revelations even too deep for Tiny Buddha, and one-liners that end up on t-shirts. Let’s compare the two directors’ most memorable quotes.
“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”
Linklater – Dazed and Confused
“Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s *not* a genius? Do you especially think I’m *not* a genius? You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?”
Anderson – The Royal Tenenbaums
In Dazed and Confused, David Wooderson is a grown-up loser who still hangs out with high school kids. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Eli is a self-absorbed author of western books and also an endearing stalker who hangs out in closets wearing only his underwear. His prose is truly hilarious, as we discover when he reads an excerpt at a press conference: “And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight . . .” Both memorable characters, but Wooderson’s wacky wisdom lives on forever in frat houses across the world.
Winner: Linklater/ Dazed and Confused
“I have been touched by your kids… and I’m pretty sure that I’ve touched them.”
Linklater – School of Rock
“I’ve never seen so many electric jellyfish in all my life!”
Anderson – The Life Aquatic
Both School of Rock and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou have ample amounts of hilarious, memorable quotes. Nothing beats that awkward moment at the parent-teacher conference when Dewey Finn says that perverted quote without even realizing. Ned Plimpton, in his nasally, southern accent-y voice, declares his quotes in a state of enamored fascination. Quotability, in my opinion, is based on if you can shout an obscure quote at a dinner party totally out of context and have people laugh, rather than stare are you questioningly.
Winner: Anderson/ The Life Aquatic
“You know how everyone’s always saying seize the moment? I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking it’s the other way around, you know, like the moment seizes us.”
Linklater – Boyhood
“I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”
Anderson – Rushmore
Linklater’s most recent coming of age opus Boyhood is ripe with wisdom and heartfelt realizations. So is Anderson’s Rushmore, which follows a confused kid as he gets caught up in an obsession with a teacher at his school. I could be biased here, since I’ve been quoting Rushmore avidly for years, but there is just so much angst-filled honesty in Max Fischer, such vulnerable truth.
Winner: Anderson/ Rushmore
Subjective Winner: Wes Anderson’s Quotes are Better
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Join us next week for the next Wes/Dick showdown and check out prior segments:
Battle #1: Reuse of Actors
Battle #2: Locations
Battle #3: Music
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With Magic Mike XXL (our review here), America’s favorite male stripper sequel, hitting theaters on July 1st, we break down just how nudity has become so ingratiated with American cinematic norms. From the barely provocative titillation of the late 1800s (mmmm, ankles) to Channing Tatum wagging his shtick (sadly, not in 3D), we ask how we’ve come so far and wonder how hard the journey has been.
Nudity has been a part of American cinema for over a century. When motion picture cameras were invented, they were immediately used to film people taking off their clothes. Many early films featuring male and female nudity have been completely lost. Early films with nudity were destroyed or censored. More often, like other films of this era, early films with nudity simply chemically disintegrated over time. Read More
In 2012, Steven Soderbergh accomplished the impossible by making audiences – made up of various chromosome compositions – fall in love with a ragtag scrap of male strippers. Magic Mike not only dominated the box office – netting north of 113 million dollars domestically on a 7 million dollar production budget – but won the hearts and minds of critics, who rewarded the film with a 80% Rotten Tomato score. All signs pointed swiftly towards the birth of a new franchise centered around denuding men with real world issues. Women (and some men) rejoiced; ’twas raining men. Read More
The town of DaVinci looks like it’s day, but it’s really night–in other words, it was born in the darkness as it tries for the light. The first scene’s cold tint hangs over like the pallor of a corpse–literally, as Semyon’s (Vince Vaughn) introspection match cuts to Caspere’s melted eyes. Semyon’s abuse story isn’t just significant as a character piece, it’s the unfolding of what’s to come. Read More
Camera Obscura: (Latin: “dark chamber”) is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The following films penetrate the modern psyche through an all too clear lens–its iterations, ethos, phobias, catharsis, and moreover, crisis. With stunning clarity, these masters peered into a void and showed us the contemporaneous man in all of its conflicting form before our eyes.
Every time I read or watch narrative subject matter about modern life, I’m reminded, like others, of our former observers’ clarity. Yes, they had unstoppable imaginations lit on fire, but as fantasy bleeds into reality it’s the warnings that leave a knot. We know they’re there, but our modes of modern catharsis are only synthetic and soon we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) doesn’t know, violently waking supine in a water-filled bathtub as a dingy ceiling light undulates above. More so, he awakens with no memory to an Art Deco nightmare where, in the words of “The Strangers”, “All times and no times are blended together.” Read More
I won’t easily admit to being one to be star-stuck but let’s just say I have developed a life-long BFF crush on Jason Schwartzman. From his debut in Wes Anderson’s electric Rushmore (and onward through a certifiable library of Anderson films) to his cult HBO amateur detective comedy Bored to Death to his truly standout indie-rock band Coconut Records (seriously, listen to them. They’re great) I would count myself amongst the Schwartz’s dedicated fanboys. Having the chance to speak with him not once, not twice but three times over a weekend proved my long-time suspicion: the dude is also an incredibly nice guy. Read More
Inspired by the premiere of Ted 2 – a movie so awful that we here at Silver Screen Riot have declared it the “worst film of the year” [full review here] – here is our list of the five best films about interspecies relationships. These cinematic gems, like the relationship between a woman and a teddy bear, encourage viewers to wonder: how do they do it? Like, do it, do it? Read More
Prepare for weed jokes, hairy sight gags, unbridled misogyny, celebrity cameos, unchecked homophobia, Goose Island product placement, wiener jokes, sperm jokes, boob jokes, period jokes, Bud Lite product placement, lame-brained pop culture references, more weed jokes, mean-spirited black people jokes, more Goose Island product placement, slut shaming, nerd lampooning, Boston jokes, ASU jokes, and a near gleeful amount of hate because Ted 2, the somehow anticipated sequel to 2011’s near awful foul-mouthed CG teddy bear buddy comedy, is finally here. It is also, without a doubt, the worst film of the year. Read More
The Deepest Cuts is a weekly invitation into some of the sleaziest, goriest, most under-explored corners of horror and cult film online. Every title will be streamable and totally NSFW. Whether it’s a 1960s grindhouse masterpiece, something schlocky from the 90s, or hardcore horror from around the world, these films are guaranteed to shock, disturb, tickle, or generally blow your mind.
Though vampire and zombie movies have seen a major revival in popularity in recent years, “monster movies” of the sort exemplified in early genre titles like The Blob or The Creature of the Black Lagoon are a much rarer find. Nightbreed, writer/director Clive Barker’s second feature film, is like a monster movie on steroids. And where recent films like Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods treat horror-movie monsters with humor and irony, the creatures of Nightbreed are not fucking around. This combination of unrestrained imagination and genuine horror make Nightbreed a completely unique and compulsively watchable film. Read More