Ogden Marsh is Hollywood’s typical snapshot of small-town, Podunk, Midwest America. Located in Iowa, it’s the kind of place where hunting, pickups, farming, the gentle smell of manure and voting Republican are generally the norm. It’s the type of town without strangers, where kids ride bicycles gleefully and without fear down Main Street, and where the entire town shows up to cheer on the high school baseball team. It’s idyllic, old-fashioned and charming. And when The Crazies opens you already know how this film is going to turn out; this Normal Rockwell-esque hamlet is about to get it’s ass kicked.
The Crazies is a remake of a 1973 movie with the same name, written and directed by George Romero, the brains behind Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and most recently, Diary of the Dead (2008). Romero is credited as a writer for the remake and both stories are basically the same: The inhabitants of a small town start going murderously cuckoo, the government barricades the area, and a man and his pregnant wife have to escape both their nutjob neighbors and the conspiring government handymen, dead set on leaving no trace of the mysterious toxin infecting the town’s citizens.
There’s something mesmerizing about Martin Scorsese and the answer as to what finally dawned on me while watching him accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes almost a month ago. No, it’s not his furry caterpillar eyebrows tucked behind his bold, thick-framed glasses, nor is it his infectiously happy speech and big-toothed grandpa grin. To be precise, it’s his absolute and lasting love of all things cinema, which was unmistakable as I listened to his gracious remarks after receiving the prestigious award from the Hollywood Foreign Press.
The Wolfman, Universal Pictures’ remake of the 1941 classic, is a taut backlot tram tour of a dour, sunless 1880s England, complete with cobweb-infested castles, fog-filled cemeteries and forests, and topped with blood-soaked werewolves that would make the phony Lycans in the Twilight Saga quiver in their own puppy piddle. Simply put, The Wolfman is a devilishly fun haunted house thrill ride, only with more severed limbs, decapitations, popped out eyes, disembowelments and torn flesh.
The first thing you should know about Crazy Heart – a simple yet searing portrait of a tired and broken country music artist named Bad Blake – is it will bring to Jeff Bridges (Iron Man) his first-ever Academy Award win out of five nominations over the last 40 years. You should also know if you live in Cache Valley and plan to see this movie, you’ll have to head south to Ogden, where it’s showing at the 
When in Rome is an absolute travesty of a movie and so painful and upsetting that a night of reveling in latex and sadomasochistic groin clobbering would be a preferred alternative to the sheer misery of this so-called romantic comedy starring Kristen Bell (Couples Retreat) and Josh Duhamel (Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen). 29 days into 2010, it is now cemented as the worst movie of the year thus far and easily the crappiest thing to come to multiplexes since I Love You, Beth Cooper.
I read Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones in 2002 shortly after a close friend’s daughter died in a summer boating accident. We were both young parents back then – he with three young girls, and me with a four year-old daughter. My heart ached for him because, as a father, I could totally fathom the sheer and seemingly never-ending hurt flowing through his soul. Unexpected death is always a tragedy, but it seems the death of a child is particularly piercing and sad.
Recent Comments