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One Room Country Shack: Quentin Tarantino Unleashes The Hateful Eight
Some movies come with a colorful history, meaning that their road to the big screen has been rather unusual. One of those is Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Originally designed as a follow-up to the successful Django Unchained, the director temporarily scrapped the whole project because a first draft of the screenplay had been leaked […]
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Pick Up the Pieces: Leonardo DiCaprio is The Revenant
Alejandro González Iñarritu is the most versatile director of our time. After the highly complex Birdman, which reflects on media and show business in a self-referential way, he surprises the public with a movie which couldn’t be baser. It reminds me of the famous quote by Auguste Rodin, ‘I choose a block of marble and […]
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Double Agents: Guy Ritchie Reveals The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Pop culture has always been captivated by the Cold War. Back in the day, its backdrop spawned the longest-tenured blockbuster movie franchise ever, the James Bond series. This fascination with spies from the East-West conflict has never ceased, particularly so with Hollywood reenacting television shows and feature films from that era. The latest example is […]
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A New Chapter: J.J. Abrams Introduces the Next Generation to Star Wars: The Force Awakens
‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…’ Every part of the Star Wars franchise begins with that fairy tale opening and John Williams’s trademark fanfare, and each time, the diehard fans have been passionate about it. A decade after George Lucas’s final film in the series, the latest installment, Episode VII: The […]
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Ghost in the Machine: Daniel Craig’s James Bond Hunts Sam Mendes’s Spectre
‘James Bond will return…’ Barring a short period in the early 1990s, when the future of the series was up in the air thanks to legal issues, this statement has been as sure as death and taxes for more than five solid decades. Three years after the gargantuan success of Skyfall, the British super spy […]
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In the Cards: Christian Bale is Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups
Terrence Malick remains an enigma. First, the reclusive director vanished from the filmmaking landscape for two solid decades between his sophomore effort Days Of Heaven and the acclaimed The Thin Red Line. Then, he returns with a new movie every other year from 2011’s The Tree Of Life on, after never having spent less than […]
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Cheap Sunglasses: Roddy Piper Fights the Aliens in John Carpenter’s They Live
‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper was arguably one of wrestling’s first true major superstars in the late 1980s. When the Canadian fought Hulk Hogan at the then-WWF’s initial Wrestlemania, his popularity almost rivaled that of the blond, mustache-wearing ‘Hulkster.’ These two men were also pioneers in terms of turning their fame in the ring into carving out […]
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Home by the Sea: Ray Milland Welcomes The Uninvited
Horror films were popular in the United States in the 1940s, in spite of the Second World War and the feel-good stories Hollywood brought to the silver screen to distract the people. Russian-born writer and producer Val Lewton, in particular, managed to attract a cult following with masterful B-movies such as Cat People, I Walked […]
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Broadway The Hard Way: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, or the Psyche of an Actor
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu had already been a known commodity in Hollywood circles for a while. His debut feature, Amores Perros, became a fan favorite, while his U.S. projects 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful landed him the star power of Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Sean Penn, or Javier Bardem. With his fifth movie, Birdman: […]
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Spybreak: Matthew Vaughn Introduces Us to Kingsman: The Secret Service
Parodies of spy pictures – and the James Bond variation in particular – are a dime a dozen, with a fairly mixed bag of results. The cream of the crop may be the first two Austin Powers movies, International Man Of Mystery and The Spy Who Shagged Me. The low point is arguably a spoof […]
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The Midget’s Lament: Tod Browning’s Freaks, or the Birth of Cinema from the Spirit of the Fair
Every once in while movies give a new direction to pop culture by starting a new epoch. Take A Clockwork Orange (1971), which influenced the punk movement by providing a new dress and language code for youth culture. Moreover, a hip-hop culture without Scarface (1983) would be hard to imagine. The movie I am going […]
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Food, Glorious Food: Chef Jon Favreau Goes Back to the Roots
In Hollywood, Jon Favreau has become a household name as the man at the helm of the Iron Man trilogy. While he admittedly did a commendable job as the director of the first two movies from that franchise, he actually started out as an indie comedy filmmaker. Chef, a pet project of his, sees the […]
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The Doors of Perception: Nietzsche Revisited in The Diving Bell & The Butterfly
Le scaphandre et le papillon by the American artist and director Julian Schnabel is a good example of what cinema is able to accomplish. Based on a novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, the movie is depicting his real and unique destiny. After a stroke Bauby (Quantum Of Solace […]
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Tyranny of Souls: James Franco and Seth Rogen Conduct The Interview
Despite the fact that most comedies involving Seth Rogen have generally been subject to debate, none of them has stirred as big a controversy as The Interview. A political comedy about real-life North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the film has been threatened by the Pyongyang regime for months, leading to Sony Pictures becoming the victim […]