Image via Wikipedia

The public’s recent embrace of all things zombie has put the factory in overtime mode, churning out a steady stream of undead ghouls who can make a bounty of a single intestine, will crawl if they have to, walk if they can, and run when required by the script, and, let’s face it, know a good brain stem when they smell one.

We may love all the nutty, misunderstood blood suckers among us, ridiculously handsome all (I suppose, if you’re self-selecting, why not?), but it’s the zombies that we fear. And zombie movies, when made by someone with what the undead most desire – brains – can act as a platform for all sorts of things that vampire movies just can’t. Because after all, we get it, right? Blood lust is about well, lust. Sex. Having sex, not having sex, and sometimes men having sex or not having sex with other men despite the proximity of all those tasty Adams Apples bobbing about. Ooh-la-la. Anything beyond sky blue balls in your average vampire flick? Not so much. continue »

Here come the brides...?

When Marilyn Manson recently asked little Evan Rachel Wood, 17 years his junior, to tie the knot (”Tighter! Tighter, Evan! Don’t make me use the whip!”), it got me thinking about the, you know, normal everyday stuff that would fill up their dull domestic life.

For instance, I’m sure they’ll have a heavy helping of Robert Smith on rotation in their sound dock at all times. But who knows? The Smiths might get equal play. Or perhaps Einstürzende Neubauten is more their speed. Who knows with these crazy kids?

But mostly I wanted to know what was in their Netflix queue, since Netflix is both a handy web-based movie rental house and an online community, where people love to share their favorites, warn you off of the stinkers, and often open their queue for your own perusal. The Manson-Woods didn’t do that, but I don’t think it takes the Psychic Friends Network to figure out what would likely be the next few movies coming to the castle. I don’t know about you, but I think I smell pop corn.

continue »

The Killer Inside Me. 2010.

Debra Granik may have won the top award at last week’s Sundance Film Festival, but one of the most talked about pictures of the fest was The Killer Inside Me, Michael Winterbottom’s stylized noir-tastic adaptation of the pulpy Jim Thompson page turner. Starring Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, half small town Sheriff, all raging psychopath, and Kate Hudson as his girl (at least for a while), this Killer is the 11th time someone has brought one of Thompson’s tales to the big screen.

Which seems like a lot. 11 movies based on books or stories you’ve written? And many of them, like The Getaway, The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet, are beloved classics of the form? Surely that would make Thompson one of the most-adapted pulp authors of all time, right? continue »

Blasted curse! Now I can't get up!

Saturday night, as the powdery stuff fell on the heads of thousands in Utah, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival came to an end with statues handed out to Tim Hetherington and journalist Sebastian Junger, for the documentary Restrepo, an intense and very close-up portrait of soldiers in Afghanistan, and to Debra Granik, for Winter’s Bone, a spare suspenseful tale of a girl (Jennifer Lawrence, from The Burning Plain, which nobody saw, and Jodie Foster’s upcoming The Beaver) coming of age in the Ozark mountains. I can almost hear the banjos. Just a pickin’ an’ a grinnin’. Aw shucks. continue »

The Utah/US Film Festival.

Besides Robert Redford, we really have only one man to thank for putting the Sundance Film Festival on the map, and his name is Steven Soderbergh. Though the Coen Brothers won the Grand Jury prize way back in 1985 with Blood Simple, 1989’s Audience Award-winner, sex, lies and videotape, (the first year they gave that award) really created Sundance as we know it today. Hell, back then the festival wasn’t even called “Sundance”; it was the “Utah/US Film Festival.” Woo-hoo. I won the “Utah/US Film Festival.” Great. I’ll just put that trophy in the closet where my “Southern Florida Seasonal Film Festival” and my “Central Kansas Tumbleweeds Film Festival” and my “Nobody Gives a Crap About This Film Festival Film Festival” trophies are collecting the dust of my rapidly deteriorating dreams. But that’s exactly what Soderbergh won and, though I jest, it obviously worked for him. Despite the clunky name, a win in Utah was a big deal, even back then. The prize actually came with a couple wives attached. It had yet to become THE big deal, the festival of festivals, at least if you were indie, anyway. But it was getting there. And the fact that they official renamed it “The Sundance Film Festival” (and stopped handing out wives) in 1991 didn’t hurt. Branding is everything these days, as readers of Closely Watched® certainly understand. continue »