Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining (1980) is terrifying for multiple reasons. First and foremost, it deals with two taboos: parricide and filicide. What's terrifying about Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) isn't that he's a homicidal maniac; it's that...
Happiness is a Warm Gun
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Next to Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and James Bond, Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name is one of cinema's most iconic heroes. The poncho, the small cigarillo, and an uncanny ability with a piece of cold, hard steel, the Man...
Hit Me Baby, One More Time
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
When I originally put together the list of the neo-noirs I was planning on including in this retrospective, I had put down two David Lynch titles: Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001). Unfortunately, Mulholland Dr., one of my favorite...
The End Is the Beginning Is the End
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
I had been pushing off my neo-noir retrospective review of Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) for numerous reasons. Initially, I kept pushing it off so that we could run it the same week that his latest film, Inception -- one of...
Talking Book
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
On the morning of July 12, 2010, having just poured myself a cup of coffee, I began to scan a page from the Harvey Pekar/Robert Crumb story "Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket Lines" for an essay on American...
Film Soleil
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Re-watching John Dahl's The Last Seduction (1994) with the intent of writing a review for the neo-noir retrospective, I initially thought I was going to be writing about Linda Fiorentino's femme fatale. I mean, how can you not think about...
The Laws Have Changed
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Luchino Visconti's 185-minute film The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963) begins outside a quiet Italian villa. The camera gradually makes its way closer to the estate, gliding across the windows -- open to the early summer breeze -- until settling on...
Death Is Not the End
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
In Ernest Hemmingway's short story "The Killers," the reader is presented with a character, Ole Anderson, who knows he is to be killed by two hit men yet goes gently into that good night. The story, which was directly adapted...
She Has a Girlfriend Now
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
I wrote in my last neo-noir retrospective review of The Long Goodbye (1973) that neo-noir films take "a self-reflexive approach to the narrative and stylistic tropes of the classical era." This was true of most of the films in this...
With a Little Help From My Friends
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
After kicking off the 2010 Pajiba Neo-Noir Retrospective with an analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight (1996), I felt the strong desire to put his film in dialogue with the neo-noir of his mentor Robert Altman: The Long Goodbye...
Out of the Past
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Last summer, shortly after the beginning as a film critic with Pajiba, I published a ranking of the five film noirs of the classical age over the course of a week. Ever since, I've been contemplating doing a top five...
Every Cynic's Kryptonite
By Dustin Rowles | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
Around the same time that movies like The Day After (reviewed here) came out and traumatized kids across the country with real fears of an apocalypse, another movie actually designed for children would come along and traumatize youth in a...
No "I" In Threesome
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
This week, a few readers noted on my Facebook page that I had been away from Pajiba for a while. The story of my absence is not a particularly entertaining one, as I was simply bogged down with various types...
Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?
By Drew Morton | Posted Under Pajiba Blockbusters | Comments ()
This past week, Dustin linked to Time Out Magazine's list of the 50 greatest animated films and, upon realizing the presence of John Lasseter's feature-debut Toy Story (1995) ranked at number five, noted "Toy Story 2 was better than Toy...
Fright of the Living Dead
By Agent Bedhead | Posted Under Film Reviews | Comments ()
Most of the time when one discusses a decade-old film, a spoiler-revealing discussion is to be expected. However, if you haven't yet watched The Sixth Sense (honestly, why the fuck not?) and have any interest in doing so, you'd better...
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