Every so often things happen in a way that they form a pattern—a pattern that makes you pull back a bit and look at something in a different way. This happened to me over the course of slightly less than a week. It started last Friday night when I ran into someone—an industry professional—outside the Fine Arts after watching A Serious Man.
Is there anything else opening this week besides Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox? Well, yes, there is, but who really cares? Certainly, I don’t. It’s been two years since Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited came out and that’s too long—even if this is actually a smaller gap than usual (three years seems to be the average).
There’s no denying that this year’s Asheville Film Festival was low-key and scaled back. There was no special guest, fewer narrative feature entries and at least one notable miscalculation. That said, the 2009 festival did have more than its share of high points—not the least of which was a very positive vibe from out-of-town filmmakers, […]
From a pop-culture standpoint, this is the week when, like a plague of locusts, The Twilight Saga: New Moon arrives on way too many screens. What is there to say? The two most vapid “stars” of our age—Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson—are back. Expect lots of beefy werewolf boys—sans shirts—and the requisite amount of “soulful” close-ups of the leads.
Having been thwarted in my attempts to record Murders in the Zoo from TCM recently, I took advantage of the fact that the showing was in part to promote TCM’s partnering with Universal to bring out a box set of five loosely defined “classic” horror movies—part of their “Vault Collection”—that had yet to make it to DVD. I immediately ordered the set.
There are only two mainstream releases this week: the inevitable 2012 cash-in, 2012, and Pirate Radio. The former is from big-budget schlockmeister Roland Emmerich, who gave us such incredibly silly trash as The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 10,000 B.C. (2008). That should tell you as much as you need to know about 2012—possibly more than you need to know.
