Posted: November 25th, 2009 | Author: Noah | Filed under: Feature | Tags: Cannibal The Musical, film, horror, Ravenous, Revisting the High Nineties | 2 Comments »
It seems that I slept through all those timely Halloween horror film recommendations last month. However, this double feature is just is applicable now as it was then, which is why I’m making these my Yanksgiving (what us Canadians call American Thanksgiving, or at least should start) family viewing picks. Because nothing says ‘Thank You’ to your fellow man more than seeing to it that his leftovers don’t go to waste.
The 70’s and 80’s saw cannibal films become a big horror sub-genre popular with the cult crowds. The early 90’s had the subject break into mainstream movies with the Best Picture winning Silence of the Lambs, though most would agree this movie has little in common with the aforementioned underground movement. A couple years later Alive was released, which was a true story with an awesome plane crash and a stranded soccer team doing what needed to be done to survive. It would be almost a decade before Hollywood returned to Thomas Harris novels for subsequent Hannibal Lecter sequels, re-makes and prequels, leaving a period in between where I can think of few man-eats-man movies other than these two often overlooked treats: Cannibal: The Musical and Ravenous.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: October 23rd, 2009 | Author: Noah | Filed under: Feature | Tags: film, Revisting the High Nineties, Sean Penn, The Indian Runner | No Comments »
They told us what to watch then, now it's my turn.
Welcome to the first installment of what is sure to become the biggest thing on the ‘net since it stopped making those NIN-inspired up dial up noises. This will be an ongoing series of articles in which I recommend a film from the decade that gave me the love of the medium. The nineties were by no means the golden age of cinema, but it was a pretty damn good era to come of age in. I will try to find titles a lot of people may have missed, but I’ll also be encouraging you to take a second look at movies you may have dismissed the first time around while hopefully helping you discover some bargain bin gems. Our first nineties notable was directed by a man who made his name acting cool in the eighties.
Before Sean Penn was milking the Academy for a yearly performance nomination, he made his directorial debut with an extremely savvy, underrated film called The Indian Runner. The few films he’s directed since (The Crossing Guard, The Pledge and Into the Wild) have generally been well received as mature, realized projects, but I still feel this often overlooked first film is his strongest. The year was 1991, and the barely 30 year old actor demonstrated that he was a lot more than just that, and was in fact very well versed in cinema, its past masters as well as its capacity for artistic expression.
Read the rest of this entry »
Recent Comments