Now that ‘The Avengers’ has quickly crossed the $1 billion mark worldwide, can any of the three wide openers this weekend knock it off the pedestal? There’s a big, dumb and loud action movie based on a board game, an edgy R-rated comedy and a cliché-ridden chick flick. My guess… Nope, none of them can do it.
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I enjoy walking into screenings without knowing anything about the movie I’m about to see, but when I walked into ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’ and discovered which actors star in this ensemble comedy, I wished that I’d stayed home to watch ‘The Grey‘ instead. It’s not usually fair to judge a movie by its cast, but in this case, it’s absolutely accurate and probably worse than you’d imagine.
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I’ve been an unapologetic fan of director Peter Berg for some time now, but today I hang my head in shame for his extreme failure. This old ‘Battleship’ capsizes before it even leaves the dock.
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[Editor's Note: For this entry in the Hitchcock Blogathon, we're joined by John Carvill, writer and editor of the UK-based arts and pop culture web site Oomska.co.uk. John has graciously contributed an article that he describes as "an unscientific analysis of the Blu-ray editions of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps’ & ‘North by Northwest’." -JZ]
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Although ‘The Dictator’ removes Sacha Baron Cohen from the ‘Candid Camera’ character roles that’s he’s known for, the movie is still filled with plenty of offensive, boundary-pushing content. By taking a terrorist-friendly dictator and slapping him in the middle of New York City, the edgy possibilities are limitless.
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Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ is a masterpiece of suspense that many critics consider to be his last truly great film. The director’s use of editing, composition and sound design are simply magnificent throughout, carefully structuring a slow descent into terror. As much as the majority of the film’s running time leaves me in awe of the filmmaker’s incomparable skill, I must confess that there’s a small (admittedly very immature) part of me that can’t help but find certain aspects of the movie to be sort of… comical. That’s right, I said it. A tiny part of me thinks that Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ is funny.
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Universal must have been salivating at the prospect of ‘Topaz’. It was, after all, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Leon Uris. Considering that ‘Topaz’ was produced in the wake of the staggering success of the early James Bond films, the fact that its story revolves around a globetrotting spy surely put a gleaming smile on the faces of the studio’s accountants. Tack the name of the legendary Alfred Hitchcock onto all of that, and ‘Topaz’ had to have seemed destined to be a runaway hit. So what happened?
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As you all know, I’m a huge movie poster fan. I’m also a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan. So, when the Hitchcock Blogathon was announced, I just had to get in on it with a special Hitchcock-themed edition of Posterizing.
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In a fortuitous bit of timing, this Hitchcock Blogathon happens to be running the same week that I’ve been attending a conference in San Francisco, which was of course the setting of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous films. In fact, I’ve been staying in a hotel seen in the movie. Since I had a free day before the conference to tool around town a bit, I decided to visit a few of the locations immortalized in ‘Vertigo’.
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When one thinks of Alfred Hitchcock films, the preface “Based on a true story” doesn’t usually jump to mind. Yet that’s exactly what ‘The Wrong Man’ is. Adapted from a real life case of mistaken identity, the movie reportedly stays remarkably close to the actual events that inspired it. In many ways unique among the director’s vast canon of spine-tingling thrillers, the film retains a rare sense of realism for the Master of Suspense, which results in a picture that’s both atypically and classically Hitchcock.
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