So I FINALLY got out to see a movie again, jeez. It’s not easy these days cause I got four kids. I got three kids, actually, and one little red-face monster who can’t do nothin but yell and scream.
Great big Mongol movie balances bloody battles with kinder, gentler side of Genghis Khan
Creative and visually stunning new Disney/Pixar film can’t help but send mixed environmental messages.
Hilarious mockumentary about the making of a low-budget horror film hits target audience straight in the heart — with a well-oiled machete.
Support indy horror by hunting down these low budget gems before they hunt you down.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull is so unbelievably cheesy, wheezy and queasy that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like simultaneously chugging a bottle of Pepto Bismol and four double-espressos just to restore my body’s equilibrium.
Comic book movies are becoming as plentiful as the comics in a 15-year-old boy’s bedroom.
Break out the machetes, the zombies are attacking Colorado!
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a good mohawk biker flick, and Doomsday delivers
Movies based on classic board games like Monopoly, Candy Land, and Battleship may be coming to bore you soon.
Julian H. Scaff’s “Tales of a Highway” explores Holland’s multi-layered landscape.
Brilliant Cloverfield uses giant monster genre to address politics of terror
Exploration of new experimental sound and video work by Julian Scaff and Felix Kubin
Coen Brothers shoot apart the traditional crime thriller to show deadly scope of drug world and fate itself
By popular demand, the top 666 movies in cinema and more.
A politically irreverent masterpiece from the larger-than-life filmmaker who literally beats his critics.
This disturbing subgenre examined in detail.
What makes a movie great and not just good? I asked myself that question after seeing this film. Because I was swept away if not exactly blown away.
Sidney Lumet continues his recent fascination with characters beyond redemption.
Review of strange new movie by estranged American filmmaker (he lives in the Netherlands) Julian Scaff
Henry Fonda would have handled New Orleans much better than Bush.
With six films of Star Wars finally complete, the question arises: Does the Jar Jar Binks of Episode I give the Han Solo of Episode VI a run for his money?
Dr. Mangrove exposes the radical message hidden within this bromidic romcom.
By Demon
The Hulk has never been fond of the military, always smashing first and asking questions later. Many an old issue of the comic book The Incredible Hulk featured the green behemoth ripping the barrels from tanks, tossing frightened soldiers in all directions, and exclaiming “puny humans, Hulk smash.”
The military has always earned its […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
Equilibrium is a film which escaped my attention during it’s short stint in the theaters, so I didn’t see it until it came out on DVD. It was pleasantly surprising in some respects, disappointing in others, and disturbing in how it reminded me of the message and tone of the […]
By Demon
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
- Noam Chomsky, Media Control
Athleticism and good health are hallmarks of meaningful human existence. Unfortunately, commercial society perverts both to secure profit and control. Therefore it should not be suprising when the Department of Fatherland Security comes out […]
By D’Aporia
What is really known about Derrida?
White hair, for starters…
I finally got to see Derrida the movie and can now confirm the not so favorable responses. Here is what I think.
1.
Granted that the filmmakers spent some effort following Derrida around, filming him talking in what are mostly celebratory […]
By Demon
Cutting to the chase
Knifefighting in The Hunted
For better or for worse, there is a time when every SUV driving denizen of Hollywood feels obligated to actually drive his vehicle out of the city and into the mountains for which it was ostensibly made.
Perhaps one of these trips inspired […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
What does it all mean?
If you think Michael Moore was unabashedly outspoken in his last documentary Bowling for Columbine and in his Oscar acceptance speech at the 2003 Academy Awards Show , you ain’t seen nothing yet! Moore’s next documentary, titled Fahrenheit 911 […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
No Canoo Required
The Animatrix
I was recently treated to an advanced viewing of the Animatrix, a collection of nine animated episodes by seven visionary directors of the Japanese anime genre, inspired by the Matrix feature films. Befitting the hacker theme of the films, […]
By Demon
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
- Noam Chomsky, Media Control
Operation Iraqi Freedom - a military operation, a film title, or both? It sounds like a film title, right next to Operation Condor with Jackie Chan and
Gulf Wars: Clone of […]
Bowling for Columbine is opinionated, rambling, rough edged, and carries a tasteless title. It is also quite remarkable. For in his own stream of consciousness and highly personalized way, documentarian Michael Moore has connected the dots of American hegemony in ways that social theorists with copious volumes cannot.
[…]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
If you were a space alien visiting Earth, you might think that during a time of war when America’s dependence upon petroleum from the most politically unstable parts of the world threatens our national security, not to mention the health and well-being of the whole planet, that the political leaders of our […]
By Demon
We live in it, we breath it, we drink it, and we destroy it, but where is it cinema? It fair to say that movies dealing with the natural environment are rare in today’s theaters.
Movies, almost universally, deal with interpersonal relationships and the struggles of goal seeking humans. Rarely do these goals involve the […]
By Demon
Once upon a time in Hollywood, director Stanley Kubrick was slated to direct a Western. One can only imagine what the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey , A Clockwork Orange and so many other monumental works would have done with the horse and gun genre. Documents from the time, however, provide us some […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
I was recently perusing the movie trailers at http://www.apple.com/trailers/ when I came across a new sci-fi movie called The Core. The premise of this film is that the Earth’s core is going to stop spinning, thus removing the protective magnetic field around the planet and leaving us exposed to the […]
By Demon
Ah, summer movies: space aliens, sequels, secret agents. Where was Movie 666 this summer? Answer: not at the movies.
Forgive this first person digression. It is less than scholarly. This online zine started as a monthly publication some two years ago, now it appears quarterly - assuming the editor has even been to the […]
By T. Fotherington Hexagram
The CIA: All-powerful, all knowing Gestapo of the world. A lurking shadow fires a silent bullet in Zimbabwe - an Afghan dictator dies of mysterious causes - smoke rings blown from a cigarette in a Zurich café are noted and decrypted - and the CIA, the eyes of America sees all, […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
Mad Max Comes to Mayberry
There is a scene of mountains devoid of vegetation, except for a few scroungy pine trees clinging precariously to the dusty earth. Hard-hatted men standing several stories tall put the finishing touches on an petroleum pipeline as we spy oil wells and other dirty machinery in the […]
By Alicia Frobisher
So I went to the movies AGAIN last weekend. I know, you’re all like “Ally, what, like don’t you have cable or something?” Right, and two parents parked in front of it. I mean, my god, what with Daddy and his pay-per-view wrestling and Mom bein a major horndog an shizit for […]
By Demon
Yeah, let’s get this straight.
According to President Bush, America is a country at war. We rain bombs on Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, to get rid of religious fundamentalists who want to kill us. We send military advisors to Columbia and the Phillipines to take care of other problems before they start. […]
The buzz on Star Wars has always been that it’s an homage to the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers movie serials, only better. The new series reverses this - it’s incoherently silly like the old serials, but flashier and duller. At least Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones isn’t as […]
Early in this movie, the eponymous Yoda announces that “the Dark Side, clouds everything; the future, impossible to tell.”
While this statement might hold true for the characters living within Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, the audience knows better.
Plotting the fate of the universe:
Attack of the Clones
In fact, much of […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
On April Fools Day, 2003, Madonna announced that she was blocking the release of her new music video American Life because of images that, as she said in a written statement, might “risk offending anyone who might misinterpret the meaning of this video.” However, the video had already debuted […]
By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
Last year, two films emerged as contenders for the worst comedies ever made. The first of these was Freddy Got Fingered written and directed by MTV wacko Tom Green. Michael Rechtshaffen of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that it “has the dubious distinction of being quite possibly the worst comedy ever […]
Silent movie:
Fear and Desire
Editor’s Note: This new section of Movie 666 features movies with an accompanying “conspiracy” - those films with overly strange production stories, murders on the set, or that for one reason or another have been hidden from public view. This quarter we start with Kubrick’s largely unknown […]
In 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton set out with 27 men to attempt the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. Many of the crew had joined the expedition after reading the following notice:
Men wanted for hazardous journey.
Small wages. Bitter cold.
Long months of complete darkness.
Constant danger. Safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in […]
There is a scene in Black Hawk Down - Ridley Scott’s cinematic rendering of the bloody 1993 street battle that took place between elite U.S. solidiers and Somalia street fighters and militia - where inexperienced yet capable Sergeant Eversman is given some philosophical advice from Sergeant Sanderson, a battle-seasoned […]
Best Supporting Corporation:
Federal Express.
Is objecting to advertising in Hollywood films in the new millennium akin to objecting to the blueness of the sky or the brightness of the sun?
Has advertising in cinema truly become so commonplace that the paying audience is expected to somehow enjoy corporate love songs loosely disguised as […]
The ubiquitous Michael Caine:
Water
In 1985, a movie called Water hit the theaters for about a week and then was gone. Unfortunately, this was probably the best satire of American and European politics of that decade, and most people have probably never heard of it.
The movie is a comedy of errors set […]
The penultimate scene in Beat Takeshi’s Brother takes place in a lonely desert café where Yamamoto, the ostensible hero of the film played by Takeshi, sips away the seconds while waiting for a gang of mafioso to show up and issue him death.
Badfellas:
Takeshi’s L.A. Yakuza
Yamamoto leaves a wad of dough on […]
This is not the essay I planned on writing this month. My original article was about the contemporary “crisis in film criticism.” But in light of September 11, what I originally called a “crisis” seems like, well, not that big of a deal anymore, especially now that bombs are dropping overseas and the terrorist scare […]
I was recently rereading Culture Jam, the cultural revolutionary handbook by my good friend Kalle Lasn. I also recently watching The Matrix for the umpteenth time, mostly just to enjoy the bullet-time kung-fu sequences while I did yoga. As I was watching the film I suddenly started interpreting the subtext from the […]
Robots learn their place in
AI’s Flesh Fair
There are sections of A.I. Artificial Intelligence when director Steven Spielberg seems to be working hard to transcend the commercial imperatives of his earlier work and create a serious film with a new level of sophistication. Some of these sections are quite indebted to Stanley Kubrick, who spent […]
Ray Winstone is
the Sexy Beas
A recent poll asked a random sampling of Americans to vote for the best foreign films of all time. Those Americans that had actually seen a foreign film and were therefore eligible to particiate in the survey produced a somewhat predictable slate of movies. Life is […]
Mars needs trees:
Red Planet
Every year there are a pair of science fiction movies on the same subject heading. In the year 2000, the subject was a journey to the planet Mars. The first film, Mission to Mars, was so embarrassingly bad that it is not even worth writing […]
White kids want to get stoned:
Traffic
Traffic is one of the few mainstream narrative movies in recent years (the Insider is another) that might claim to inform rather than simply distract its audience. Traffic, a remarkable movie about the drug war, is fascinating not for its gunfights (appreciably underplayed), but the basic […]
I lost money on this film. I bet four dollars against someone’s back issue of Teen Beat that it was going to flop. Sword-and-sorcery films are a tired and mined-out genre. They flop. Willow, Legend, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Whatever-it was — who remembers them? Adaptations of thousand-plus page books flop. […]
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reunite in yet another bubble gum romantic comedy for the masses. Ryan is still her old cute mussed-up hair self like she’s always been, but Hanks comes in having picked up a couple of gold statues and having lost his sense of humor. Remember when this guy […]
By Demon
Film buzz Hollywood types line up around the block at the Hollywood Cineramadome, eager as Romans to see the Gladiator spectacle unfold. The cheers of the cinema audience mirror the cheers of the screen audience watching the bloody fights. Maximus wields two swords, separating head from body to furied spectator approval (suburbanites rejoice […]
By Demon
Maximus (Russell Crowe) goes nuts in Gladiator
The almost forgotten genre of the Roman epic has been recalled with Gladiator (2000), an ancient world tale of swords and survival loosely based on the historical reign of an eccentric Caesar, Commodus, who enjoyed gladiatorial spectacle and went as far as performing himself […]
Hollywood has embraced digital technology and the signs of the “new cinema” are everywhere — from special effects in theatrical films to streaming trailers on the web. Much more is promised: soon all movies will be shot on digital video and theaters will swap film projectors for digital ones. Film itself will vanish for […]
Product placement in movies is nothing new, but its contours have changed significantly in the last several years. Consider these examples:
Wayne’s World
Wayne launches a diatribe on product placement in movies, comically undermining his own effort by showcasing a variety of products.
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Dr. Evil makes plans to rule the world […]
Princess Mononoke finally arrived in the United States with the promise that her ink and paint action and epic-length story would transcend not only your average animated movie, but your average live action feature. This coupled with progressive notions of man and nature, Mononoke is not your average toon.
Furthermore, the Princess is […]
Hollywood movies are not subversive. That is the first rule of Fight Club.
Sometimes a Hollywood movie seems too good to be true. For instance, well into the film, the main characters of Fight Club have abandoned their jobs, rejected fancy clothes and other symbols of consumerism, urinated in the soup of the […]
Although Crash does not moralize about the environmental effects of the automobile so much as examine the depth of the automobile’s social penetration, the movie can still be looked at as an indictment of car culture.
Crash implies a dull acceptance on the part of culture regarding the destructive nature of the automobile. In Crash, […]
David Cronenberg’s Crash is currently a late night staple of the Independent Film Channel. While cable channels like Showtime and Cinemax lull viewers with softcore dramas based on sleazy private detectives and women’s fantasies, IFC has the after hours market cornered for sex involving car crashes.
IFC goes so far as to precede Crash with […]
Subject of Puritan wrath, symbol of darkness, child of wilderness, the Blair Witch lives in the forest, kills in the dark, and turns the heads of her victims towards her cellar wall to avoid their deadened stares. Three student filmmakers in The Blair Witch Project find themselves deep in the forest, stalked by the witch, […]
Stanley Kubrick finally emerged from suspended animation with Eyes Wide Shut, an enigmatic, puzzling finale that is not so much climax as encore. Exploring themes of instinct and ritual introduced in 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange; recasting the parallel structure of Full Metal Jacket; and finally materializing the ghosts in […]
EPISODE I: BEN KENOBI BLEACHES HIS BEARD
Some time late in 1998 I read that George Lucas was once again going to make Star Wars movies. These movies would step back in time from the original series and cover the early adventures of its greying heroes, folks like Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader. (article continues […]
What is the Matrix? This is the question posited in countless trailers and tv spots for the same-titled movie. So what is it then? You have probably guessed it has something to do with a computer.
But why does The Matrix take nearly half of its over 2 hours running time to […]
SKG Dreamworks, unsatisfied tormenting viewers with innocuous movies like Mouse Hunt and the Peacemaker (okay, they’ve made a couple good ones too), is currently destroying one of the last remaining wetlands in Los Angeles County with its new studio development.
How a company spearheaded by an oftentimes moralistic director like Steven Spielberg […]
I watched the Awards, despite not having seen Titanic. This didn’t mean I was unaware of the movie by any means. Indeed, by the time awards night came around, I felt like I had seen the movie several times. During the Titanic passion I was working a cubicle job and was surrounded in froth: […]
Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep early last month. His death as a filmmaker comes at a time when filmaking itself is dying at the hands of digital technology.
