Expelled Grey Matter

Blaxploitation wasn't really a term for the films starring black actors and, frequently, featuring black writers and directors in the early to mid-1970s at the time the original movies were made.  In all honesty, the exploitation part in many of the films is questionable at best, other than some of the later movies rehashing plots and trying to ride on the coattails of Shaft , Super Fly and Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song .  Hollywood was at a point in the late 1960s where they were hurting, as color televisions became less expensive and the huge, epic films of the past started to seem like relics as many of the confines (such as the Hays Code) began to fade away.   Due to the failure of big budget productions, and movie studios frequently teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, many were happy to distribute films made by up-and-coming independent writer/directors.  In many cases it was the people who made the movie that went around and got the financing, hired t...

I have no idea when I will revisit Hayao Miyazaki's work - a lot of it looks like it is strictly for children - but I am glad that I decided to check it out after all this time.  Spirited Away , though meant for certain age group, still surprised me with how entertaining it was for adults.  I had heard great things about Howl's Moving Castle , although I was unaware that it was originally a children's novel by Welsh author Diana Wynne Jones, who was reportedly quite happy with Miyazaki's version of her book. While I did have A Wrinkle in Time , I really wish I had more books like this available to me growing up.  I was entering high school when the Howl's Moving Castle was published, but if it had come out about three or four years before I would have loved it.  I read novels for adults largely at that age because, story wise, that was what was there to interest me, but whenever I had the chance to read something interesting that didn't infantilize children of ...

While the Twilight and Harry Potter series sparked the craze of young adult fiction novels in the early 2000s it was The Hunger Games that took that adult part seriously.  Yes, the later Harry Potter series appealed more to older teenagers, but the original audience for those books grew up with them, with the style of the books progressing with them.  Suzanne Collins, much like the late Andre Norton, instead endeavored to write solid science fiction stories that would appeal to the 16 to 20 age group. I will be the first to admit that I am far outside any of the demographics she was going for.  Some of the better books made for young adults can definitely be enjoyed by adults as well, and that is certainly the truth with The Hunger Games .  However, the series was also aimed toward young women.  It is strange that I would even be interested in something like this, especially since the idea of a dystopian society having children be forced into mandatory competiti...

While Disney has made a number of horrible animated movies - many of the worst being in the last two to three decades - there are two movies the studio has always regretted making.  One, of course, is Song of the South , which remains locked away in their vault until the time comes that an angry mob won't burn down their theme parks if it gets shown.  The other was The Black Cauldron, the company's only attempt until requiring Pixar of making animated movies for those who have ages in the double digits.  The Black Cauldron had been in production since the early 1970s when Disney bought the movie rights to Lloyd Alexander's series of books known as The Chronicles of Prydain .  The books themselves were based on an ancient Welsh collection of prose called The Mabinogion.  The movie is a truncated and simplified version of Alexander's first two books, omitting a number of side characters and subplots.  Still, the aim of the animators was to make Disney's first...

Richard Linklater is a writer and director known largely for movies in which people wander around and talk.  What sets him apart from the current indie trend called mumblecore is that, while movies like Slackers or Dazed and Confused may not really have a plot, they have a place and time.  He typically explores the various people that live in a certain moment of time and, between scripted and improvised moments, eventually develops something solid out of all the chaos.  I have seen many directors try this, and Linklater is one of the few that is successful. A Scanner Darkly , though nominally a science fiction story, was written by Philip K. Dick based on his experiences with drugs and the effects it had on him and his friends.  While it means characters need to be developed much more than in a lot of Linklater's films, it also gives him the chance to do what he does best: film people being people in the situation they are in.  In this case it's three guys livin...

9 was supposed to be a foray into animation for adults, but from what little I remember of the advertising that would have been difficult to understand.  In all honesty I was just surprised when I watched this that it wasn't a Disney or Dreamworks film.  Instead, it was the first movie made by a studio called Focus Features, who followed this up with the more well-known (and well-received) adaptation of Coraline . Originally made as a short film by writer and director Shane Acker,  9 is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a fascist human government was wiped out when the machines they created revolted against them.  The machines didn't fare much better, and it is into this world that 9 (Elijah Wood), a mechanical ragdoll creature with parts made out of household items, comes to life.  Confused and afraid, he soon meets 2 (Martin Landau), a creature similar to him.  They don't get much of a chance to become acquainted before they are attacked by a mechanic...

I am going to make a controversial statement, and it is one that I rarely make because every slightly off-the-beaten path movie gets slapped with this moniker.  However, I will come right out and say that Lifeforce is the one movie out of the 1980s that has been denied its place as one of that decade's classic science fiction films.  It is, to use the cliché, an underrate sci-fi gem which was treated horribly by the studio, by critics and, as a result, by audiences, much like its director was.  Tobe Hooper had his first big hit with his second feature film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , in 1974.  It eventually became a major hit, earning quite a bit of a profit on its low budget and becoming a horror classic.  Despite that Hooper's career pretty much went up and down; his next movie, Eaten Alive , was another horror film, and although it has its own cult following these days it didn't have the same appeal as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .  The latter movie...