Carrie review: women who hate women
I’m struck by the perversity of a story four decades old about religious misogyny and basic feminism and the perniciousness of bullying that still feels fresh and relevant... (please click through for...
View ArticleIt movie review: a series of unfortunate events
The Goonies, Stand by Me, and Poltergeist went into a blender with a pinch of E.T. and John Hughes to smush into a mess of retro 80s mush. (please click through for commenting, social networking, tags,...
View ArticlePet Sematary (2019) movie review: bad things happen when you leave the city
A lazy adaptation of the Stephen King novel, manipulatively cheap when it isn’t provoking eye-rolls at its genre banalities. Why can’t someone find the right role for the charismatic Jason Clarke?...
View ArticleIt: Chapter Two movie review: it doesn’t float
A bigger misfire than its predecessor, and a waste of a great cast. Unsupportably overlong, with a feel-good self-care denouement that’s almost dangerous. The only terrifying thing here is the tedium....
View ArticleDoctor Sleep movie review: a reckoning with the ghosts of the past
A wonderfully unexpected sort of horror movie, beautiful and delicate, but unsettling, too, with an authentic plausibility to the dichotomy between the invented uncanny and the human response to it....
View ArticleMisery (review)
By the Book My biggest fear, as a writer, is that I’ll lose something I’ve written — that a computer crash will wipe out work I’ve neglected to back up, say. My second biggest fear is writer’s block —...
View Articlequestion of the weekend: What books do you read over and over again (or wish...
This weekend’s question was prompted by a conversation with my pal bronxbee, in which we lamented the fact that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all the new books being published that we’d like...
View ArticleFebruary 26: DVD alternatives to this weekend’s multiplex offerings
We know how it is: You’d like to go to the movies this weekend, but soldiers in gas masks have your town surrounded and will shoot on sight if you try to leave. But you can have a multiplex-like...
View Articlequestion of the day: Ron Howard’s Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Tower’? No,...
Have you read any of Stephen King’s series The Dark Tower? No? Imagine if Clint Eastwood and James Joyce collaborated on a trippy fantasy about the mystical quest of a gunslinger. It’s weird and...
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‘Haven’ debuts on Syfy tonight…
…and I’m sorry to say that it’s a bit of a snooze, judging by the premiere episode, which I had the chance to watch in rough cut. More than a bit of a snooze, actually. FBI agent Audrey Parker (Emily...
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my reads: ‘The Passage’ by Justin Cronin
Here’s something I’ll try on the weekend for a bit, see how it plays: a little talk about something I’ve been reading. Not book reviews — you won’t find me getting into anything like the kind of depth...
View ArticleMartin Freeman is not Bilbo; Apple takes over Twitter; ‘The Dark Tower’ is a...
Every week my browser gets cluttered up with tabs for stuff that I stumble across and figure I might be able to use as a Question of the Day or a WTF Thought for the Day or grist for some other post....
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cinematic roots of: ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D’
No movie springs from a vacuum. There are always influences from past examples of the genre, from the previous work of the filmmakers and stars, even from similar films that don’t quite work. If you...
View ArticleChilean mine disaster: the movie; Justin Bieber goes to Hollywood; Muppets...
Every week my browser gets cluttered up with tabs for stuff that I stumble across and figure I might be able to use as a Question of the Day or a WTF Thought for the Day or grist for some other post....
View Articlewtf: ‘The Stand’ as a feature film?
The Hollywood Reporter blog Heat Vision informs us that: Stephen King’s grand opus The Stand is finally getting the big-screen treatment. Warner Bros. and CBS Films are teaming to adapt the novel,...
View Articleretro trailer: ‘Carrie’
I’m seeing Disney’s Prom tomorrow morning. I hope it’s as good as Carrie. “Introducing John Travolta”! Of course he’d already been on TV, in Welcome Back, Kotter. I can’t remember all the details of...
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question of the day: How much is too much to spend on producing a movie?
As production budgets have been spiraling seemingly out of control in recent years, industry watchers have been wondering if there was an end to it. A few years ago, there was the shocking expenditure...
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question of the day: If you could turn any — yes, *any* — book into a movie...
News broke yesterday (via Deadline) that Showtime is developing a series from Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome. That’s really cool and all — I love the book — but c’mon. Developing a narrative...
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Chronicle (review)
Unpulp Fiction Teenaged boy with a drunken, abusive dad and a sick mom. Lovelorn and lonely. Bullied and picked on at school. Bit of a loner. Full of rage and feeling very ineffectual. And now he’s...
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question of the weekend: What’s the trashiest book you’ve ever read?
Something light to get us away from yesterday’s nightmare: What’s the trashiest book you’ve ever read? Feel free to define trashy however you want. When I did some Googling on “trashy books,” I...
View ArticleMitt Romney/Paul Ryan slash fan fiction is a real thing (and other adventures...
What my followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ saw today: • You will not be able to unsee or unread what you see and read here. You have been warned. The Strange World of Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan Fan...
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Great Expectations (London Film Festival review)
I’m “biast” (pro): nothing I’m “biast” (con): nothing I have read the source material (but not for years and years) (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) I love it when a film that is...
View Articlefinal video production diary for the first Hobbit film (and other adventures...
What my followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ saw today: • Videogames as art. Glad to see that Pac-Man and Myst — two of my favorite classics — are included in the collection… MoMA’s new...
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weekend watchlist: a movie worth paying premium VOD prices for
First published May 14th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon. Don’t spend hours scrolling the menus at Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other movie services. I point you to the best new films and hidden gems to...
View ArticleThe Mist movie review: we have met the monsters…
Frank Darabont’s adaptations of Stephen King’s writings are not just some of the best mountings of the writer’s work but some of the best films, period, of recent years: The Shawshank Redemption,...
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Knock at the Cabin movie review: there appears to be an apocalypse happening
If Oscar Wilde was alive and writing film criticism today, he might say something like this: There is only one thing worse than an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a twist ending. And that is an M. Night...
View Articledaily scream: when ghosts of the past still haunt the present
The Daily Stream becomes the Daily Scream for spooky season! It’s not often that we can call a horror film beautiful and unexpectedly delicate, but damned if that doesn’t apply to 2019’s Doctor Sleep....
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