Metro Pulse

Spoiler Alert: Escape From New York reinvented the B-movie action epic, Mad Max and The Road Warrior reinvented the post-apocalyptic movie, and 28 Days Later reinvented the zombie flick. Rather than reinvent any of these films or genres, Doomsday settles for merely repurposing chunks of all of them, along with maybe a dozen others. The filmmakers being imitated may feel flattered, but the viewer is more likely to feel simply taken. Full story »

Much to the chagrin of 12-year-old boys and prematurely indignant moral guardians everywhere, Swingtown really isn’t all that steamy. In fact, it’s as boring a take on drug-drenched orgies in ’70s suburban America as one could avoid imagining. Full story »

In many ways, Chop Shop plays out like a cinematic gloss on a late-period Clash song (something buried deep on side five of Sandinista!, perhaps), so it’s serendipitous that Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is also hitting DVD. Full story »

Almost everything and everybody on Made Men, set in the world of Madison Avenue ad men in the early 1960s, is deceitful in some basic way. And most of the lies—the ones they’re paid to tell and the ones they tell themselves—are designed to conceal the humiliations, ugliness, and limitations of human affairs. Full story »

It used to be that a John Sayles film was not a genre in itself. That is, you could expect certain things from Sayles—excellent scripts, character-driven stories, fine acting, a sensitivity to the mores, class issues, and hypocrisies of particular times and places in the Americas—but you didn’t expect the same thing over and over. Over the past 20 years, however, he has increasingly found his material by cross-sectioning communities in transition, especially in regard to race and class, and handing over the resulting dramas to ensemble casts. Full story »

Thank God for Ted Turner. Sure, he’s a post-Cretaceous T-Rex of a tycoon, stalking the corporate mastodon herds of the modern era like the last remnant of a forgotten age. His ways are alien to us, but in odd, seemingly unconnected ways, we prosper from them. Observe the adventure cartoon pastiche The Venture Bros., a show which has in the last couple of years become the hottest addition to Adult Swim’s lineup. Full story »

Asia Argento looks like trouble just sitting there in the luxe waiting room at the offices of the international businessman-type played by Michael Madsen. Maybe it’s the way her wrap dress fits her lean curves (an oxymoron, but still), or the tattoo on the back of her neck, or those big brown eyes and the way that the dark circles under them make her look like she’s been up late doing something she shouldn’t but doesn’t regret. Full story »

These days, it seems for a movie to have a chance to capture the imagination of filmgoing audiences of all ages, it has to have wall-to-wall CGI, an assortment of doody jokes and sly winks to the grown-ups, and a tie-in deal with Burger King. The Criterion Collection, however, recently released sterling new DVD editions of The Thief of Baghdad and “The Red Balloon,” two films each more than 50 years old, each supplying a lesson in the wonder simpler times could produce on screen. Full story »

Word on the street for directors who build their careers in music videos before moving on to feature films is that they’re all style and no substance, favoring the former medium’s trademark flashy visuals and desultory quick-cuts over deliberate, coherent storytelling. If the word is generally true, then first-time feature director Juan Bayona—who made his name producing commercials and music vids for pop singers in his native Spain—is a most notable exception. Full story »

The audience for horror films is overwhelmingly male, and the people who make horror films are even more overwhelmingly male, so it’s perhaps understandable that women have played a rather fraught role in the history of modern horror. Two recent horror films new to DVD attempt to tackle specifically female fears, or in one case, more accurately, the root of male fears of the female. If the movies were better, it might even seem like progress. Full story »

The Indianapolis 500 is the crown jewel of American auto racing. It’s cosmopolitan, with a starting grid that reads like a United Nations roll call. It’s loaded with tradition—the brick section of the track, the ceremonial swig of milk in Victory Lane, Jim Nabors—and familiar names like Foyt, Andretti, Unser, and Mears. And it’s faster and sleeker—maybe even a little classier—than its stock-car racing counterpart. But NASCAR is still miles ahead of its open-wheel competitor, and this year's head-to-head Memorial Day showdown shows why. Full story »

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it”: It’s a meme that’s been floating around so long that hardly anyone, even those who whip it out, knows where it came from. As it happens, it comes from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and his opinion in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio regarding French director Louis Malle’s The Lovers. Full story »

In the United States, the art of reviewing automobiles has become a balancing act of stiflingly polite opinions.
Very rarely will critics straightforwardly say that a new car actually sucks (unless it’s imported from China). Instead, they are able to discern at least a few virtues in every automobile that may please particular consumers; and while magazines may rate cars 1-2-3 in order of preference, number 3 is never really all that much worse than numbers 2 or 1. Although build quality and engineering prowess are certainly more consistent these days, resulting in much better cars than in the horrific ’80s, that doesn’t account for some missed pitches right up the middle—did any mainstream car reviewer declare the Pontiac Aztek a total disaster before it flopped in the marketplace? Full story »

Capturing an artist’s life and work is a tricky proposition for a filmmaker, as the dozens of unsatisfying biopics and in-the-studio-with docs out there suggest. The creative process is mysterious, and may or may not have much to do with an artist’s daily travails. How extraordinary, then, to happen across Steven Cantor’s What Remains, as intimate a cinematic record of a visual artist as you’re likely to see on screen. Full story »

Despite taking geekdom to untold heights of popularity around the world, George Lucas is not a fan favorite in the world of obsessive DVD buyers. He is the Emperor to their Ewoks. They simply want to live in peace, collecting pristine editions of their favorite movies to watch again and again in their cubbyholes; but he keeps disturbing their tranquil lifestyle with unsatisfying DVD sets of his must-have movies. And it’s about to happen again. Full story »