Brad Pitt – Missile Test

October Horrorshow: Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

Here’s an old review I wrote for an abandoned month of Tom Cruise reviews. It slots into the Horrorshow quite well:

What a clumsy title. The title of this film is up there in clumsiness with Ballistic: Eks vs. Sever, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. It can’t be too much longer before Hollywood shoves out a film that has two colons in the title, right? Of course, Hollywood has nothing on the Japanese, who are absolute virtuosos at stringing together nonsense titles. The anime realm brought us The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, a film which showed us that J-pop is a weapon of mass destruction, and Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone. Not too long ago I saw a Japanese detective flick from the 1960s titled Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! It was every bit as good as it sounds. But, while I jest, potential viewers should not let the awkward title steer them away from Interview with the Vampire. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles”

October Horrorshow: World War Z

The October Horrorshow has been a little thin on zombie flicks this year. This is only the third zombie flick that’s made the cut (four if one were to count Resident Evil: Retribution, and I do not). This is also the best of the bunch. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: World War Z”

The Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading

Watching a Coen Brothers movie is sometimes like attending a blind tasting. There won’t be any swill waved under one’s nose, but just what is in the glass could be surprising, or disappointing.

Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers followup to their best picture winner, No Country for Old Men, has a very serious plot. A former CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox, played by John Malkovich, is writing a memoir of his days with the company. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is secretly pursuing a divorce, and makes a copy onto disc of files from his computer, including the memoir and some classified materials. A secretary at her lawyer’s firm loses the disc at a gym, where it is found and comes into the possession of Chad (Brad Pitt), a personal trainer. Chad enlists his colleague, Linda (Frances McDormand), in a scheme to extort money from Osbourne in exchange for the disc. Meanwhile, Katie is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a Treasury agent who, coincidentally, meets Linda through an online dating service. It’s complicated, and only gets more so when plans crisscross and things inevitably go awry. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading”