Tag: cinephile
Decrying/Praising ‘The Book of Life’ and ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’
What do you get when you add unbridled creativity to a project with limited substance? Well, it’s possible something good may come out of it. In the case of The Book of Life (2014) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), however, you get cinematic dreck. I know—that’s rather harsh. But these two films may…
The best films, performers, and other talent of 2016 thus far
Critics sure do love our year-end best-of lists. It’s kind of what we live for. I love them too, but I don’t wait until year’s end. No – that’s not how I roll. I prefer to write them at the end of August. Sure, it leaves out four months – four pretty important months if…
Mental Illness and ‘King of Hearts’: A Rumination
It finally may be time for me to put away childish things. The estimable editor of CURNBLOG, James Curnow, recently offered up on Twitter an intriguing hashtag, #7childhoodfilms, that generated a large number of responses from folks all over the Internet—including me. The aim was to cite films one liked in childhood and still revere…
Jason Bourne and everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today
The five biggest movies that opened in the USA in the last weekend of July, 2016 had the following Rotten Tomato scores: 76, 62, 58, 57, 50. For those of you who don’t know, RT considers a movie to be “Fresh” if it has 60 or higher, and “Rotten” is it falls under 60. So,…
Hollywood in the 1970s: 10 Films History Forgot
I became a film fan in the 1970s. It was a good decade, one of the best if we’re ranking Hollywood in such a fashion. It had a number of iconic movies. There were the blockbusters – Jaws and Star Wars – which would rewrite the rules for how Hollywood manufactured its product. There were…