The Japanese, Advertising, and the Kitchen Sink

The movie I want to talk about this week is a bit of an old one, definitely born of a different time. A time before the film industry became what it is today. To be more precise it was created at THE tipping point of the industry; arguably THE biggest year in cinematic history: 1977.

Art movies

What does it mean for a movie to be “Art”? What separates an “Art Film” from the big mainstream blockbusters that roll by every summer? Or the pretentious Oscar bait that pompously parades itself through theaters every December? I think “Art” is not in the movie, but in the viewer.

Incubus Review

This week I sat down and watched Incubus. Incubus (1966) is rather special in being one of the very few movies ever written entirely in Esperanto. A language created by Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof to be incredibly easy to learn and speak. Having dabbled in learning it myself I can attest that it is VERY intuitive and easy to learn, although I haven’t committed enough time to it to become anywhere near fluent. Not only is Incubus interesting for being in Esperanto but it has A LOT of big names before they were famous like: Director: Leslie Stevens (creator of the The Outer Limits), lead actor: William Shatner (Captain Kirk), and cinematographer: Conrad Hall a multi-academy award winning cinematographer whose credits include American Beauty, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Cool Hand Luke. The result of all this is a pretty decent horror movie. It’s clear that the budget for the film was low even by the standards of 1966: the movie was shot in black and white, and what few special effects are primitive at best. What really makes this film stand out, however, is the cinematography, the creative story, and Shatner’s acting.

Some Things About tron

I am a pretty massive Tron fan. Ever since I saw the movie for the first time back in about 2002 I have loved just about everything in the franchise. I tracked down a new in-boxed copy of the spectacular videogame Tron 2.0 (now available on steam by the way), and I even saw the disappointment of Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D. I enjoyed it too, still disappointing, but very much enjoyable. However I don’t want to talk about Tron: Legacy right now, or even Tron 2.0, I want to say some things I think are pretty neat about the original Tron.

Why would I watch this!?

I recently watched the Evil Dead reboot for the 5^th or 6^th time, and as an Evil Dead fan, and a fan of horror movies in general, I really started to wonder WHY would I ever go back to this movie so many times if it is infinitely inferior to the other 3 Evil Dead movies?

New Blog!

This blog was a Tumblr blog of mine before I realized that Tumblr really isn't the best place for long winded posts talking about movies I like (or don't like as the case sometimes is). So I decided to move to Blogger which seemed to be a much better choice. Over the next few days I will be copying my old Tumblr posts over to this new blog (there aren't that many), and hopefully they will be much easier to read, comment, and share. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and please enjoy my musings.