Posts Tagged ‘Bill Skarsgard’
Tuesday, December 31st, 2024
102 years after F.W. Murnau’s illegal copyright violation classic, here’s writer/director Robert Eggers following up THE WITCH, THE LIGHTHOUSE and THE NORTHMAN with THE NOSFERATU.
Nosferatu? Yesferatu. Absolutelyferatu.
In many ways NOSFERATU is pure Eggers: the meticulous attention to old timey visual, linguistic, and folkloric detail; the dreary natural lighting like you were sent hurtling to the past and forced to deal with a lack of electricity; the emphasis on mood, atmosphere and performance over modern horror tropes. The biggest way it’s different comes from being an adaptation (of an adaptation): while he maintains his trademark of presenting deeply researched superstitions of the past as reality, he has to do it with the more conventional horror set up that only the protagonists believe in the supernatural, and the others around them don’t buy it until it’s too late. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bill Skarsgard, Bram Stoker, Christmas horror, Dracula, Emma Corrin, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Ineson, Robert Eggers, Simon McBurney, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 22 Comments »
Monday, August 26th, 2024
Can you believe they finally really did it? They remade THE CROW! We don’t need to go into the whole litany of attempts, but they’ve been announcing versions of this for 16 years. And now they did it. And they released it.
The people I hear from online are, to put it mildly, not eager to welcome this new little birdy into the world. Many people hold the original 1994 movie, and sometimes the James O’Barr comic book it was based on, sacred. It’s a cool movie, people a little younger than me saw it as angsty teens, they feel connected to the soundtrack, and of course it’s a movie about tragedy that you can’t separate from the actual tragedy of Brandon Lee. There are people who instinctively pull out the torches and pitchforks for any remake announcement no matter what, but this one feels more religious, like when THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST came out.
It’s possible that’s an internet exclusive. When a real life friend brought up the remake a while back and I mentioned people being up in arms about it she was completely baffled. But now the reviews are out and critics too are acting like a pile of rotting garbage crawled out of a dumpster, rang their doorbell and asked if it could wear their favorite shirt. (It’s at 29 on Metacritic.) A movie as rejected and disreputable as its hero.
I’m posting from an undisclosed location, I know all the exits, I got my go-bag packed, so I’m gonna give it to you straight: I liked THE CROW (2024). Not just “it’s not as bad as they’re saying” – I honestly think it’s pretty good.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Skarsgard, Danny Huston, FKA Twigs, Isabella Wei, Jordan Bolger, Josette Simon, Laura Birn, remakes, Rupert Sanders, Sami Bouajila, William Josef Schneider, Zach Baylin
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Horror | 43 Comments »
Wednesday, May 1st, 2024
BOY KILLS WORLD is a new action/dystopia/comedy goof that I could’ve guessed would annoy the shit out of many people even if I hadn’t already seen the evidence. You know, it’s got that splattery paint, sarcastic smiley face type of aesthetic. From the trailers I wondered if I might be one of those people, but I actually really liked this thing until almost the end. I found its brazenly show-offy oddballery pretty charming. It looks at you like yeah, I know this is alot of unnecessary gimmicks and trinkets, but I like that shit, what’re you gonna do about it?
Uh… nothing. Please – continue! I think Glaive Robber called it accurately in the REBEL MOON PART TWO: THE SCARGIVER comments when he wrote, “Old Vern would have PASSIONATELY hated it. But maybe not Contemporary Vern.”
It’s a frenetic, hyper-active, smart-alecky and casually violent movie, so every review besides this one compares it to a Ryan Reynolds comic book movie that’s not BLADE TRINITY or GREEN LANTERN. If you must compare it to modern super hero movies I’d say it’s more SUICIDE SQUAD, THE SUICIDE SQUAD and BIRDS OF PREY, but that didn’t even occur to me until now. I was thinking more along the lines of POLAR, SMOKIN’ ACES, ACCIDENT MAN, a little SHOOT ‘EM UP, a little KINGSMAN. Hell, maybe a little CRANK and CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE. I hated those but some people swear by ’em. Actually the comic book movies it made me think of are those ones we used to get in the ‘90s where you never heard of the comic before or again but they created a whole stylized alternate universe for it on a medium-sized budget. I always appreciated them for that, and this is better than many of them.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Andrew Koji, Arend Remmers, Bill Skarsgard, Dawid Szatarski, dystopian futures, El Michels Affair, Famke Janssen, Francois Chau, H. Jon Benjamin, Isaiah Mustafa, Jane de Wet, Michelle Dockery, Moritz Mohr, Quinn Copeland, Sam Raimi, Sharlto Copley, Tyler Burton Smith, Yayan Ruhian
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs | 10 Comments »
Monday, March 27th, 2023
JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4 is the culmination of one of the great movie series of our time, and a masterwork of its genre, one of the few American action movies to arguably outdo overseas epics like THE RAID 2, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US and THE VILLAINESS. Like its predecessors it expands on JOHN WICK’s distinct style of martial-arts-and-guns ultraviolence, introduces colorful new allies and enemies, and invents even more astounding ideas for types of action spectacle you haven’t seen before. But this one adds an extra layer of emotion through heroic bloodshed style bonding and a deeper realization that everything John Wick does in these movies only digs his hole deeper.
I’ll warn you before I get into the biggest spoilers, but as usual this review will be better for reading after you’ve seen it. If you’re just wondering how good it is compared to other chapters, I believe the first film stands on its own and then the sequels get better the more spectacular they become. So CHAPTER 3 was the best but has now been usurped by CHAPTER 4. (But I love the Halle Berry and Mark Dacascos stuff in 3 so much it’s not an easy choice.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Skarsgard, Chad Stahelski, Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Marko Zaror, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Shamier Anderson
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 58 Comments »
Monday, September 12th, 2022
The trailer for BARBARIAN suggests an intriguing and pretty straight forward horror-thriller idea. Tess (Georgina Campbell, KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD) shows up at her Airbnb late on a rainy night and discovers that somehow someone is already staying in it. It’s a scary neighborhood on the outskirts of Detroit, so the other renter, Keith (Bill Skarsgard, ATOMIC BLONDE) lets her come in while they try to figure out what’s going on. They can’t get ahold of the owners, so she sneaks a photo of Keith’s driver’s license (just in case) and reluctantly accepts his offer to take the bedroom while he sleeps on the couch.
He seems very polite and cute, but of course that’s a reason not to trust somebody in a movie like this. Plus the motherfucker played Pennywise! So when weird shit starts happening and she finds a scary secret door in the basement you try to figure out if he’s up to something or if they’re both in trouble together or what. And you can sort of see where it would go from there.
Or that’s what it seems like. One question: why BARBARIAN? Why not, like, OVERBOOKED or SCARE BnB or whatever? Well because it goes a little further off that set up than you might expect, and I’m glad I heard that because it inspired me to go see it opening day. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Skarsgard, Georgina Campbell, Justin Long, Richard Brake, Zach Cregger
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Tuesday, September 12th, 2017
STAND BY ME vs. THE THING. A group of young nerd friends in the small town of Derry, Maine battle a shape-shifting (usually clown-shaped) thing-from-another-(not-specified) that feeds on the fears of children. Oh, and also feeds on the actual children, apparently as a way to create more of that sweet fear.
Stephen King’s book tells the story of this “Losers’ Club” in 1958, and then reunites them as adults to do It in grown up style. Andy Muschietti (MAMA)’s movie just handles the childhood half of the story, moving it up to the summer of 1989, three years after the book even came out.
I read the book probly 30 years ago and only remember it well enough to be thankful they left out the pre-teen gang bang scene. I still question the part where a bunch of boys and one girl go swimming together in their underwear and then hang out that way. Maybe it was different on the east coast but this seemed like an alien clown’s idea of what the youths do together. Also the graphic blood pact seemed to me from a different time, but I guess God bless those little psychos for being up to that kind of self-mutilation. I couldn’t do it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: '80s nostalgia, Andy Muschietti, Bill Skarsgard, Cary Fukanaga, clowns, Finn Wolfhard, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Nicholas Hamilton, Sophia Lillis, Stephen King
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 175 Comments »
