The good news is that Fantastic Mr. Fox (review in this week’s Xpress), Pirate Radio, A Serious Man and An Education are all still in town. In fact, while Fantastic Mr. Fox underperformed most places, it did considerably above the national average locally – a pattern I expect to hold if it has the Asheville appeal of Wes Anderson’s last two films.
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).
Since I started reviewing movies for the Xpress a few years ago, it’s been my policy (and a notion I picked up from Ken) to watch as many theatrical releases as possible, especially the great big blockbusters that clog up multiplexes every week. Part of this is necessary for building the movie fan’s greatest asset, a frame of reference, but also to understand what is happening within the world of film at large.
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.
I realize that this is a presumptuous question that supposes that the reader did fall in love with the movies in the first place. Still, I’m assuming for argument’s sake that such a condition probably has something to do with the reason you’re reading this column in the first place. The question in my mind is whether this was a cumulative thing for people or if there’s some outstanding defining moment that brought this about.
A more than usually interesting array of movies comes our way this week—including another challenge to local moviegoers to get out and support the kind of non-mainstream film I’m always being asked about. In this case, I specifically refer to Park Chan-wook’s take on the vampire film, Thirst, which opens this Friday at the Carolina Asheville.
It’s become a tradition that Justin Souther and I undertake some kind of Halloween treat for this column. Well, it’s a treat for us, no matter what anyone else thinks about it. This year we opted to go to perhaps the very core of the horror film—death.
Before last Saturday night at the Carolina Asheville Cinema, it had been about 30 years since I last attended a public screening of Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) with a live cast. Back then these midnight shows were pretty common. A group of fans would dress up as the characters in the […]
Apart from Paranormal Activity expanding to the Carolina Asheville this Friday, there’s nothing new on the Halloween horizon, but there are a few notable not-so-new movies making reappearances.
I happened to be in the position yesterday to look in on the Saw marathon—you know, that less than stellar idea that it would be great to allow people to work their way through all five Saw movies with the big finish being the unveiling of Saw VI at midnight.
OK, here’s one of those weeks where we’re actually getting some things that people have been asking me about. And once again, I encourage you to get out there and support these movies. It’s in everyone’s best interest to help support quality—or potentially quality—film in Asheville.
As those of you who read these columns reguarly know, I was in Florida last week—in large part to bring a long-lost (well, sort of) friend who hadn’t seen a new movie since probably the early 1990s into the 21st century of films. I discussed the choices—and potential choices—a column back, so it seems only reasonable to bring everyone up to date and how the experiment went.
The big movie this week is Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are—a feature-length adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s very short children’s book. The interest in this ranges from enthused to cautious to downright hostile (one person on the Xpress forums likened the prospect of the movie to having his childhood raped).
With Ken gallivanting around sunny Florida this week, the duty of producing a Screening Room has fallen into my well-manicured hands. For those of you looking for the usual Hanke wit and wisdom, do not be disappointed, because I give you something better, the most important, insightful bit of film criticism you will read in the next five to seven minutes, an article on how movie aliens are stupid.
Well, we had a pretty decent crop of movies last week. This would be the week to catch up with some of them. How bad are this week’s offerings? Well, I’m leaving town to avoid seeing them. OK, so that’s an exaggeration.
I have a friend who hasn’t actually seen a movie made after 1995. He’s of course heard things about the state of modern film, and what he’s heard hasn’t enticed him to venture into it. Naturally, I’ve taken it upon myself—with his seemingly enthusiastic permission—to bring him into the 21st century of movies. The trick is I have five—maybe six—days in which to do this. The question then is how to do this?
Considering the fact that the first time I saw the trailer for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story some admirer yelled, “You suck!” from the back of the theater, and since the Fine Arts Theatre lost one poster for the film to some wit who scrawled an expletive across it, I’d say that we’re in for the usual controversy that lies in the wake of every Moore film.
