The Film Crusade

It’s no surprise that Sean Byrne’s relentlessly blood-soaked “The Loved Ones” won the Cadillac People’s Choice Award at TIFF’s midnight screening. The young Australian writer/director has since been hard-pressed for free time as many in Hollywood have been vying for his attention.

On June 30th it will have been 20 years since Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” was screened in theaters. Lee’s controversial yet bold exercise in filmmaking proved himself a pioneer in understanding race relations and certainly one of the best black voices in film.

Somewhere in that cabinet where you keep all of your movies, there are several reliable cover movies. They’re called cover movies, well, because you need to be wrapped up and curled fetal position into a thousand or so covers and pillows. Some may refer to these as ‘blanket movies,’ but that’s simply incorrect.

What is it with the bad-guy biopics? And why do audiences keep eating them up? Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is a clear-cut example of the direction Hollywood has been going for the last couple decades in terms of framing traditional antagonists as protagonists.

What makes Watchmen so challenging is that it is not easy-watching. While most comic-book flicks these days are purely geared towards escapism, Watchmen compels viewers to consider humanity in its lowest form and think about the human capacity for evil.

One of the most intriguing expressions of the sanctity of the human body, Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” functions as a paranoid, psychosexual mind-warp. But what was Kubrick really trying to say?

One of the most highly anticipated of 2008, Oliver Stone’s W. is less an attempt at defining President Bush’s legacy as President, and more an introspective character study on how Bush came to be President and how he viewed the office.