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amityville

From Page to Screen: The Amityville Horror

Tara Clark Leave a comment

The Amityville Horror is a classic in the world of horror, both on the page and on the screen. After the ordeal the Lutz family went through their story made national headlines. It drew the attention of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, now famous because of the Conjuring and Conjuring 2, also based on cases they investigated. Within a year a book had been written (Jay Anson, 1977) that was an instant national best seller, and two years later (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1979) was released which quickly became the biggest indie hit to date. James Brolin was reading the book when some clothes that were hung on his closet door and scared him witless for a moment; at that point he said he knew there was something to this story. Clearly, it is a story worth the time to both read and watch, assuming you enjoy both claustrophobia and dread.

When is the house warming?
When is the house warming?

The movie is a very faithful adaptation of the book. From the grand incidents, like Jody, to the little incidents or details, like the missing money or the mirrors in the bedroom, the movie knows and respects the source material.

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Big Short

Trailer of the Year Awards – The Big Short

Matt Edwards 1 Comment

It’s Trailer Tuesday here at SCC and also time for another nominee in the Trailer of the Year Awards.  Director Adam McKay (Step Brothers, Anchorman) takes a break from the Will Farrell comedies to take on the rather ludicrous true story of the events leading up to mortgage crisis of 2008 and those characters who predicted it and profited from it.  Adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Michael Lewis, the film looks to become the definitive answer when best explaining why you and your neighbor lost half the value of your home and watched your 401k vanish. Unfortunately, as Anthony Radanzzo points out in his 2010 review of the book for Reason:

Lewis falsely assumes that the perfect storm of failures at mortgage brokers, rating agencies, Wall Street firms, and regulators is the outcome of free market “hypercapitalism.” But in fact those problems are all symptoms of a government-manipulated market that didn’t allow for failure and had government subsides favoring housing investments over other sectors of the economy. One of The Big Short’s biggest shortfalls is failing to examine how federal policy drove investors to get things wrong while Lippman, Eisman, Burry, and the Cornwall Capital boys managed to get it right.

Still, with an all-star cast made up of Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Steve Carrell and McKay behind the lens The Big Short is sure to make a big gains when released this Christmas and heading into Oscar season.

While the trailer an obvious attempt to capture the same audiences that made The Wolf of Wall Street a hit, modeling your trailer after a Scorcese film ain’t a bad thing. It offers up the perfect blend of one-liners, set pieces, and a tone all in sync to the classic Led Zeppelin song “When The Levee Breaks.”  For that alone, it deserves the nod.

2015 Trailer of the Year Award nominees so far:

Mad Max: Fury Road

Black Mass

Cop Car

Joy

Trumbo 

compton

Movie Review: Straight Outta Compton

Sean Malone Leave a comment

compton-posterThough I normally would reserve my film reviews for SmashCut Culture, I recently got asked to do an in-depth review of Straight Outta Compton for Liberty Unbound and took the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the surprisingly libertarian messages in the movie.

Get the gist here:

There are very few movies I would describe as explicitly “libertarian,” but as unlikely as it may seem, F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton is high on that list.

The film interweaves the stories of legendary hip hop artists Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), and Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) and chronicles their rise out of violence and poverty to fame and fortune as the groundbreaking gangsta rap group, NWA (“Niggaz Wit Attitude”). This is not, as you might imagine, a film for children or even most teens. It depicts a life experience steeped in drugs, gang violence, and police brutality in one of the poorest, most dangerous parts of Los Angeles in the 1980s. Against this backdrop, three teenagers looking for a way out created one of the biggest entertainment acts of the last three decades, and irrevocably changed the face of the record industry.

At its heart, Straight Outta Compton is a great entrepreneur story, but more in the tradition of The Godfather than Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Nearly all of the business dealings that occur throughout the film are built on threats and violence, and certainly not what libertarians would endorse. But contrary to what a lot of people might assume given NWA’s music, there is no glorification of gangs or gang culture in the film. In fact, a major theme is the drive to escape violence, even though it swirls around every character in the movie.

But the theme of commerce over violence was not the only libertarian quality to the film. It also depicts a fascinating period of American culture when actual government censorship (and threats of censorship) were on the rise. While the movie touches on the way censorship affected the growing gangsta rap scene around the country, I think few people today are fully aware of how extensive the governmental push against free speech really was back then.

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Trailer Tuesday – The Peanuts Movie

Matt Edwards Leave a comment

In 1950 cartoonist Charles M. Shultz debuted what would become arguably the great American cartoon strip – Peanuts. Gracing the pages of nine different newspapers for the first time on October 2, 1950 was a bald headed boy named Charlie Brown. His faithful beagle, Snoopy, made his appearence just 2 days later. 65 years, and 2,600 newspapers later, Charlie Brown, and the more popular, Snoopy, would make up an marketing empire that could rival the one based on some Mouse. But Peanuts had a far more, albeit subtle, impact on the culture than Disney’s band of animal characters ever would. What Schultz and the comic strip did in the 60s and 70s really helped foster forth an era of a new normal, one that centered readers on what real diversity meant – a melting pot. And like a true melting pot, it was a slow cook.

From Hogan’s Alley

Characters like Franklin, Peppermint Patty, and even Pig-Pen helped acknowledge that race, gender and social status shouldn’t be the focus of societial relationships. Individualism and free association is the best path to achieving a harmonious community – even if Lucy pulls the football every time. It wasn’t all Schultz’s idea though. Like many advancements, sometimes it takes some outside persistance. For instance, Schultz was nudged into introducing the Franklin character by a school teacher who insisted the time was right to introduce a black character that was just as adorable as the others. With literally the stroke of a pen, or many strokes, Schultz agreed and without ever overtly acknowledging such an introduction of a minority character, Franklin appeared and fit right in with the rest of the Peanuts gang.

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LPH

Kelo v. New London is Coming to the Big Screen as the Little Pink House

Smash Cut Culture Leave a comment

ReasonTV’s Nick Gillespie sat down with writer/director Courtney Moorehead Balaker to discuss the adaptation of Jeff Benedict’s book Little Pink House into a major motion picture scheduled to begin filming this fall. It’s been 10 years since the SCOTUS decision decided in favor of the city of New London over homeowner Susette Kelo in an eminent domain abuse case that sent shockwaves throughout the country.

See the interview below and read more here.

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Trailer Tuesday: “The Intern”

Patrick Lehe Leave a comment

Don’t click away just yet…this isn’t that aimless, laughless comedy about Google that you’ve probably never seen…or at the very least never remembered.  No, this is something different entirely. Trust me, that’s a good thing!  “The Intern” brings together a very unlikely duo in Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway, which is only the beginning of the genius behind this comical concept!

The first shot sets this “buddy dramedy” up perfectly.  A young, successful interviewer aintern-screenshotsks the dreaded and most contrived interview question of all time, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”  Sitting opposite him is not another young and hungry interviewee hoping to land a big first job. No, it’s 70-year-old Ben (DeNiro), whom retorts with the best answer…”When I’m 80?”  Hilarious.

Cut to Ben entering his new internship working for Jules Ostin (Hathaway), whose chemistry here is immediately undeniable.  As the two begin working together, we see Ben completely immersed in a world he doesn’t understand with new age millenials running the show.  Jules is the CEO of an online fashion site and although she’s seemingly Ben’s successful superior, her dramatic arc seems to center on the fact that she might not be as experienced and cut-out for the job as she thought.  You’re sure to laugh and cry and be horribly offended at the cross-generational jokes that are understood by some, and over the heads of others.

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Film Review – The Connection (the French one)

Matt Edwards Leave a comment

2-la-french-film-2015-habituallychicReleased in US this past weekend, the French-Belgian production, The Connection (La French in Europe) is based on the infamous French Connection heroin drug scheme of the 1960s and 70s.  This plot brought the opiate from Turkey into the US by way of France, thus the name, the French Connection.  The story was first popularly dramatized in the 1971 American film, The French Connection starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider and directed by William Friedkin.  While both films only claim to be loosely based on the actual drug trade, this latest incarnation is focused solely on the French investigation (versus the NYPD investigation focused on in the Friedkin film) and is set a number of years later.

The film points out early on the devastating impact that the drug was having on western cultures in the seventies and into the eighties and even uses archive footage of then US president, Richard Nixon first declaring the “war on drugs,” to set the stage.  What of course followed in the US has been written about, fictionalized on film, studied in academia and debated on endlessly for over four decades. The creation and rise of SWAT raids and the over-militarization of police, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a blackmarket that has lead to tens of thousands of deaths due to gang violence and innocents fleeing their homeland for better living conditions.  While the film doesn’t address the lasting impact this war on drugs has had over the years, it certainly gives us a familiar look into the underground world, the power struggles and the dangers associated with trying to combat it all. From warrant-less (or at least bending the rules) wiretaps, crooked cops and judges, and politicians who turn a blind eye in order to secure their political futures, The Connection brings home the fact that corruption throughout the system and questionable law enforcement tactics in the war on drugs isn’t just an American problem.

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child44

Film Review – Child 44

Smash Cut Culture Leave a comment
[Editor’s note: The following is a guest review by Brian Watt originally posted in the members only section at Ricochet. It has been posted here with permission from author.]

Only a handful of theaters around the country are still showing the Ridley Scott-produced and Daniel Espinosa-directed Child 44. It is available for pre-order on Amazon and iTunes now, so should be released for sale or rental within a month. If you search for reviews of the film you’ll find a mix of opinions and several of them negative though IMDB does display an overall rating of 6.4 out of a possible 10, which isn’t that bad. Most critics and moviegoers have complained that as a thriller Child 44 is just not taut or thrilling enough and instead is too dark, brooding, oppressive and ponderous — essentially not akin to other flashier blockbusters in the genre – any of the films in the Bourne series or even more realistic and slow-paced spy thrillers that probably tread more closely to actual spycraft, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

If you want extreme car chases through the streets of Moscow, motorcycles racing over rooftops, explosions hither and thither or endless and preposterous martial arts fights where good guys and bad guys leap onto walls and do back flips and break each other’s kneecaps, then Child 44 will surely disappoint — though it does have three intense fight scenes, particularly one aboard a train, that all appear much more realistic and chaotic and less choreographed than anything you’ll see in a Bourne or Bond film.

Chikatilo-mugshot
Chikatilo mugshot

It seems to me that the more salient reason Child 44 will disappoint is because it is not a spy thriller at all and I would argue is not intended to be a thriller but more of a detective story while also a graphic indictment of how dehumanizing communism is when practiced. The film is based on the Tom Rob Smith novel of the same name (which admittedly I’ve yet to read), but which I understand is loosely based on real-life serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, also referred to as the Butcher of Rostov or the Rostov Ripper, who was active between 1978 and 1990 and who sexually assaulted and brutally murdered 52 women and children that authorities know about in Russia, the Ukraine and the Uzbek regions during the latter years of the Union of Soviet Socialist states.

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avengersageultron1

Film Review – Avengers: Age of Ultron

Sean Malone Leave a comment
Avengers_Age_Of_Ultron-poster1
Even the poster is crowded.

Within about 36 hours of its American theatrical release, Avengers: Age of Ultron has already grossed over $424 Million dollars worldwide (update: the final tally for the weekend is $626,656,000) and it earned the title of having the second-highest grossing opening day of all time, just behind Harry Potter’s final installment. Marvel Studios continues its Hulk-like rampage across the American cinematic landscape. Having now seen both the 2D and 3D (not worth it) versions of the film, I feel like I’ve done my part.

But I guess the real question is, “Was it worth it?”

The short answer is yes, absolutely.

The longer answer is, this is a film that has a lot of heart, goes out of its way to show its heroes actually being heroes, further develops key characters that haven’t had as much of a chance to be seen in other films, has a pretty compelling villain (almost entirely thanks to James Spader), and unsurprisingly features some phenomenal action sequences.

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blackmass

Trailer of the Year Awards – Black Mass

Matt Edwards 4 Comments

I may have used my “Trailer of Year” card a wee bit early this year on Mad Max Fury Road back in January as I gushed over the pure enjoyment it brought me, because the latest trailer to drop on the scene is for the true crime film Black Mass starring Johnny Depp as notorious Boston mafia hitman Whitey Bulger.  This one sent chills down the spine, courtesy of the great chameleon that is Johnny Depp.  So I’m going to keep track of the trailers that stand out for me this year and declare a “Trailer of the Year” award at 2015’s end.  Consider Mad Max Fury Road as entry number one and Black Mass as entry number two.

Two observations: 1) It’s clear to me that Leonardo DiCaprio has been attempting to emulate Johnny Depp for the past 20 years.  2) The scene anchoring the trailer is a direct homage to the most famous scene in modern mafia film history – Joe Peschi and Ray Liotta’s “whatta mean I’m funny?” scene from Goodfellas.  The difference in scene depicted here is, the stakes are higher because it’s not personal, it’s about business and survival.  This is not a rip-off, this is a great example of being influenced by the greats and improving on it. We’ll see how it plays out in the feature.

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GoodFellas25

Goodfellas at 25

Matt Edwards 1 Comment

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Martin Scorcese’s New York mafia masterpiece Goodfellas. Film critic Sonny Bunch over at the Free Beacon writes about the iconic film and points out, rightly so, the obsession with the shot. 

The tracking shots have been discussed to death—I defy you to find a listicle celebrating the “long shot” that doesn’t include Goodfellas’ Copacabana entrance, along with Touch of Evil’s first crane shot and Altman’s work on The Player—but Scorsese isn’t just showing off. These shots serve a purpose. My favorite is early on, when and are introduced to the guys in the crew, Jimmy Two Times and the rest. These new characters, several of whom we never see again, make eye contact with the camera (that is, the viewer), welcoming you into their world, insinuating you into their scams.

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cutbank

Film Review – Cut Bank (2015)

Matt Edwards Leave a comment

cut_bank_ver2_xlgCut Bank is an original story made up of equal parts Fargo, A Simple Plan and Psycho.  Long time television director Matt Shakman  (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) takes his first jab at feature film directing with a small-town murder mystery titled Cut Bank, set in the poetically named real-life town of Cut Bank, Montana.  The town boasts a large display at it’s border declaring it as the coldest place  in the lower 48, however the film takes place during a not-unusual summer heat wave.  That my friends, is real honest to goodness nature-made climate change.  I imagine one of the reasons why the filmmakers chose to film in the summer is to remain as far removed from the look and feel of the classic Cohen Brothers’ film Fargo, which this almost certainly is inspired by.

While the film starts off as a murder mystery of whodunnits, after about 15 min, we quickly know who did done it, and more importantly why.  The why in this case is about what it usually always is, money.  And the who seems to be more about, who isn’t involved.  So then why even bother watching?  Well, this is one of those rare stories in film nowadays, where the audience is allowed to know everything and is left to simply watch and relish as these characters play catch-up.  (Gone Girl was another recent example of this, although for me, the ending ruined the entire experience.)  With a terrific veteran cast, as an audience member, all I want to do is watch these actors do their thing.

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Trailer Tuesday: “Old Fashioned”

Patrick Lehe Leave a comment

Well, as many of you have probably caught on, I typically reserve “Trailer Tuesday” for whatever hot new blockbuster is about to hit theatres and give it an in-depth, philosophical and life-changing analyzation. (Sarcasm).  However, this week, I’ve decided to give some love to the little guy…because that’s what we all consist of, isn’t it? Little guys (and girls) trying to make it in a big world. Alright that’s enough philosophy.

In an attempt to compete with, or rather pull attention away from, the impending phenomenon that is the “Fifty Shades of Grey” film franchise, this little indie film called “Old Fashioned” does something unique with its’ trailer. I came across this while perusing the Apple trailers page and was surprised to see such small project getting some love from the Apple monster. 50ShadesVsOFSmall There is no dialogue in this trailer, and it makes direct comparisons to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books and film, in that it prides itself on being the exact opposite.  Title cards and clips of a young love flourishing roll over a nifty, heartfelt soundtrack that these producers probably found on a royalty free website of some sort.  Either way, I applaud their efforts.  They take the stereotypical characters of the “Fifty Shades” series and intentionally draw attention to the fact that these characters are sincere, innocent, realistic people just looking for love in a…well…old fashioned way.

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