Anghus Houvouras with a weekly wander through the media making its way across the world wide web, including Oldboy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Homefront and The Delivery Man…
The adaptation that no one asked for is finally hitting theaters and being released on a big holiday weekend. Because after a big starchy meal and hanging out with family and friends, what people want to see is a dark, dense thriller featuring people being beaten to death with a hammer.
You know what I’m thankful for? That this movie was finally made and now being released, so that fans of the original can stop bitching about how Hollywood is going to ruin their beloved Chan-wook Park masterpiece. Because now we can watch Spike Lee creatively cannibalize the original and realize that it is, in fact, not the end of the world. Speaking of the holidays…
The holiday movie season is almost upon us and the marketing efforts are ratcheting up which is putting a lot of Hobbit ads on the radar. I find Hobbit commercials and trailers infinitely interesting, because I can’t think of a better example of a filmmaker who could benefit from some reductive theory more than Peter Jackson. When reduced to 3 minutes, there is no more attractive looking film than The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. And yet, I’ve already seen the painfully long, woefully lacking first installment. No matter how attractive the pitch, I know that this movie is going to be three things. 1. Long 2. Boring and 3. In desperate need of editing. Speaking of attractive looking…
I’m not sure if this picture makes Benedict Cumberbatch fearless or sorely lacking in self awareness. I think this is the same look he had when he saw the opening week numbers for The Fifth Estate.
My obsession with futuristic film fashion continues. There was a time when characters from the future only wore spandex unitards with glitter trim. Then it was decided that the future was going to be a rather depressing affair and that everyone would only wear burlap and tattered earth tones. So your futuristic characters either looked like hobos or the chorus of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express. The Hunger Games has taken this trope to ridiculous new heights deciding that the future will be both drab and fabulous, or ‘drabulous’. I understand the concept of the ‘haves’ an ‘have-nots’, but never have I seen the theme brought to the screen with a complete abandonment of subtlety. See, the rich people are the ones wearing the flaming ball gowns and feather corsets and the poor ones are covered in shit. Just in case you missed the allegory.
I’m not sure what to make of James Franco appearing in the Jason Statham action-thriller Homefront. By now I’m used to Statham’s endless stream of mediocre dreck. And I realize Franco often takes roles in undeserving projects as some kind of artistic endurance test to see just what his career can survive.
Does anyone else watching the commercials for the new Vince Vaughn comedy The Delivery Man and think they’re watching one of those parodies that only appear in movies that take place in Hollywood and feature fake celebrities as the main characters? Like Adam Sandler in Funny People. I’m not sure who let this movie happen or how it made through the system of checks and balances that is supposed to prevent disasters like this from existing. I can only assume that Vaughn had some sort of contractual obligation with the studio to deliver a movie as bad as Four Christmases.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published November 18, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
