Award-winning writer and film historian Steve Evans (aka Cinematic Cteve) celebrates current, classic, cult, and forgotten film in these freewheeling essays on the cultural significance of the cinema. Special features include reviews of foreign films, noteworthy DVDs and concert discs.
If you love movies, then come experience the wild enthusiasm of film writer Steve Evans, still raising a ruckus after all these years.
One of my favorite
active directors, Paul Thomas Anderson, is working on an adaptation of Inherent
Vice, a novel by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Pynchon.
Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights) makes some of the most
challenging and intelligent films of anyone working today, albeit he makes them
far too infrequently to suit me. Pynchon's material seems tailor-made for
Anderson's sensibilities, which is a roundabout way of saying I am excited. His
new project reunites Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line).
Inherent Vice follows a late-1960s private eye investigating drug traffickers
connected to a former lover. Crosses and double-crosses pepper the noir plot.
Delighted to report that The
World's End from British director Edgar Wright will release stateside in August. He reunites with
funnymen Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who romped through Wright’s previous
comedies Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. World’s End is no less high-concept.
Wright’s new film follows a group of childhood friends
on an epic pub crawl through the little Hertfordshire town of Letchworth on the
night of an extraterrestrial invasion. Their goal is to consume 50 beers each at a dozen bars, culminating with a nightcap pint at The World’s End, a famed pub that
they failed to reach during their first attempt 25 years earlier. The friends vow to get annihilated. Little do they know. On this
night it’s literally the end of the world as aliens attack. But when you've knocked down 50+ pints of beer, how can you really tell?
The trailer contains unmistakable similarities to Wright’s near-classic zombie-spoof Shaun of the Dead (2004), though astute genre fans will see a tip o’ the hat to
old chestnuts like Tobe Hooper’s insane science fiction zombie film Lifeforce (1985) and Children of the
Damned (1963), as well. Lots of influences bubbling in this Mulligan's Stew of a movie.
Despite the whiff of familiarity in the trailer, I’m
thinking this picture will be a hoot. The Shaun of the Dead trailer did not do justice
to that film, which only found an audience months later on DVD. I loved it, and zombie-minded director George Romero reportedly did, too. Three years later, Hot Fuzz turned the buddy-cop genre inside-out, making it impossible to watch a noisy action movie like Lethal Weapon ever again with a straight face (which is not to say you ever could).
Pegg and Frost make one of the cinema’s great comedy teams,
while Wright brings a twisted sense of humor and encyclopedic knowledge of
genre to his films. Here’s hoping their third outing delivers some badly-needed
anarchy to a summer film schedule dominated by sequels and superheroes.
If only
childish movies will be playing this summer, at least this one promises to
be truly juvenile.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) premiered 60 years ago today at Cannes and won the Palme d'Or seven days later. It is one of the great thrillers, possibly the most intense film ever made, and one of the finest things to come out of France since Champagne, Renoir and Jeanne Moreau.
Watching The Wages of Fear is like having your heart clutched in a vise for 147 minutes. Essential viewing.
Synopsis: four desperate men trapped in a South American town agree to help an oil company extinguish a raging fire on a drilling rig some 200 miles over the mountains. Each will receive a cash payment of $2,000 (about $17,000 today). The catch: they must drive dump trucks loaded with volatile nitroglycerin -- the only explosive available for smothering the fire -- across treacherous jungle roads.
The resulting white-knuckle ride will take your breath away. Films just don't get any better than this.
I am partial to the Criterion edition of this picture. The two-disc set contains an eye-popping transfer of this mesmerizing movie, as well as an analysis of the censorship it faced in the United States for alleged anti-American sentiments. In truth, the film is more about anti-multinational-corporation sentiments and the folly of avarice. Check it out.
The success of this film gave Clouzot the clout to make the relentlessly terrifying Les Diaboliques, which in turn inspired Hitchcock to give the world Psycho.
Nothing like a little creative competition to bring out the best in artists of every discipline.
Send all feedback, including requests for contracting Steve's comprehensive writing and research services, option offers for his screenplays, accolades, love letters, etc. to: Cinematic Cteve
Steve has devoted much of his life to viewing and studying films. At last estimate, he had seen more than 15,000 motion pictures during a lifelong love affair with the cinema.
An award-winning writer, film historian and movie critic, Steve's work has appeared in more than 50 newspapers and magazines, as well as online film sites including IMDb.com, Rotten Tomatoes.com and DVD Verdict.com.
He received a master's degree in communication from the University of Virginia and a bachelor's degree with honors in journalism from Virginia Commonwealth University.
He has a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to B-movies, films noir and The Criterion Collection.
Steve can also connect himself to Citizen Kane in three steps.
Posts
