Yeah, yeah. I know. How many assholes' opinions do you need to read about Pacific Rim before you're allowed to come to the conclusion that it sucks all on your own?
Well, the answer is just one more. This one's.
And for the record, I don't plan to review Pacific Rim. Instead, I'm starting this blog in order to keep track of the films I love and the films I love to hate. For years I've spent countless minutes (precious minutes, people) trying to tell annoyed party guests why they should be interested in Italian horror films. Or how the handful of sci-fi/horror flicks from the 80's that embraced and actually made commentary on the aesthetics and culture surrounding punk rock does more in the way of exploration than a hundred other "straight" features on the same topic. Why RoboCop was and is the best comic-book-movie-not-based-on-a-comic-book-at-all. Or how I can think of more than a couple of parallels between Friday the 13th and Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. Typically these kinds of encounters end with me spilling a plastic cup full of red wine on my shirt as people slowly try to back away, all the while nodding in faux compassion. And, God bless 'em for listening for as long as they can manage. Other times, and these times are vastly in the minority, I find someone who not only wants to listen to my rant (my ultimate narcissistic goal), but who goes on to explore some of these things herself. And all (well, most) jokes aside, that's what I want to accomplish in this blog.
We live in a time when access to media is so easy it becomes overwhelming. Because we can look at so much, because we can hyperlink and cross-reference and spend a lifetime falling into the Wikipedia void, we many times end up looking at nothing at all. Or else, we do what's easiest and watch what is most current and most popular. When my Netflix instant page tells me "What's Popular in Nashville, TN" I can't help but wonder if it's really that different from any other city in the country.
So this is to be an effort to help my readers move beyond what schlock Netflix has to offer and into the schlock that the last 100 years of cinema has to offer. It's not going to be high-brow. In fact, as you can likely tell, my tastes are most times tuned to the artfully degraded. I think, and I'm not joking here, that the likes of Lucio Fulci and John Waters are just as important as Truffaut and Fellini. I hold A Nightmare on Elm Street in much the same esteem as Abre los ajos (two movies about dreams, get it?). So while it's not going to be an ongoing rehash of the Criterion Collection, it is going to be serious. The things I love I take very seriously, even if a lot of the public wants to write it off as kid's stuff.
So please stay tuned as I begin to review both new and catalogue films that meet my oh-so-discerning criteria for consideration.
First up will be a review of the semi-recent Scream Factory Blu-ray release of Stuart Gordon's From Beyond. Fans of Gordon, 80's horror, neon lighting, and H.P. Lovecraft should be interested to see how the verdict pans out.
Until then...
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