Do you dare go toe-to-toe with PREDATORS (2010)?

Posted by Michael Thielvoldt

Dir. Nimród Antal
Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, 7/8/2010, 7:30

[Warning: CONTAINS SPOILERS!]

Predators doesn’t waste any time getting straight into the action. Though it does not begin en media res, it surely begins “in the middle of things.” The film opens on a free falling Adrien Brody who, after waking from unconsciousness, pounds at the beeping, glowing, Iron Man-esque medallion on his chest in hopes that it will release his parachute. It does, but just barely, as the camo-clad Brody tears through thick canopy, landing with a bassy thud on the jungle floor. The film’s title card flashes across the screen: “PREDATORS.”

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Opportunities for the Week of 7/2-7/8

Posted by Austin Cinephile

Time for the weekly roundup of Weird Wednesday, Terror Tuesday, special events and outstanding new releases that you will not want to miss this week. Only the best selections here, aiming to ensure you see at least one great film every day.

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Assignment 9: This is Atrocious

Posted by Daniel Metz

Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:

What makes a horrible film?

So, this is Austin Cinephile, a place for the collection of essays about cinema love, not cinema hate. Negatively isn’t exactly what we’re aiming for. That said, love and hate are often intimately intertwined (just ask my ex-wife), and one cannot experience one without the other. Daniel once wrote, in his now-famous Lord Love a Duck review, that “You’ve got to constantly watch bad cinema in order to truly understand good cinema.” This is an important thing to keep in mind.

Further, great cinema is a pursuit, an adventure that is often wrought with mediocrities along the way. We must all see bad film as the plague that it is, and be able to move past it in order to find the gems of the screen.

This week, we explore what characteristics, energies, and events lead to uninspiring cinema.

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Opportunities for the Week of 6/25-7/1

Posted by Austin Cinephile

Time for the weekly roundup of Weird Wednesday, Terror Tuesday, special events and outstanding new releases that you will not want to miss this week. Only the best selections here, aiming to ensure you see at least one great film every day.

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TOY STORY 3 (2010): two movies in one

Posted by Stephen Jannise

Increasingly, the discourse surrounding Pixar films suggests that they truly are “family” movies, in that they contain something for the kids and something for the adults in the audience. To a certain extent, this has been true of films like Finding Nemo and Up, which featured heroes for both the younger and older moviegoers. While the kids could associate with the young fish Nemo or the boy scout Russell, their parents might see themselves in Nemo’s worried father Marlin or Russell’s cranky neighbor Mr. Fredrickson. However, at the end of each of these films, the underlying depths of emotion provided by these older characters ultimately intersected with the more light-hearted elements directed toward children, resulting in undeniably happy conclusions. This is not the case with Toy Story 3, which actually has two concrete endings. For the kids, the film provides one of Pixar’s patently moving finales, but for the adults, the film actually ends a few scenes earlier, in an unusually stark, wholly genuine display of friendship and mortality.

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Please see PLEASE GIVE (2010)

Posted by Daniel Metz

I am hard on the Summer months when maybe I shouldn’t be. Yes, it is the worst part of the year cinematically, with the possible exception of Spring. The saving grace of the March-to-May period is that the tiny independents that premiered during the Winter in New York or at film festivals make their way down to the rest of the country. By June, however, the bulk of this product is off the shelves, and what we’ve got left are the kind of movies that, put simply, bum me out.

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Opportunities for the Week of 6/18-6/24

Posted by Austin Cinephile

Time for the weekly roundup of Weird Wednesday, Terror Tuesday, special events and outstanding new releases that you will not want to miss this week. Only the best selections here, aiming to ensure you see at least one great film every day.

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Side effects of the BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY (1985, 1989, 1990) may include frequent deja vu

Posted by Stephen Jannise

On Sunday at the Ritz, Christopher Lloyd arrived at the Alamo Ritz in a DeLorean to kick off a day-long marathon of the Back to the Future trilogy. Like most aging, disinterested guests, Lloyd did not have much to contribute to the experience beyond an interesting anecdote or two, but it was certainly enjoyable for fans of the films like me to see Doc Brown in the flesh. More enlightening was the experience of watching these films one after another, which I had never done before. The most interesting observation I come away with from the back-to-back-to-back screenings of the films concerned the increasingly conflicting balance between the unique temporal possibilities of the films and their narrative ambitions.

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Assignment 8: Who’s Responsible?

Posted by Daniel Metz

Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:

What do you think about the auteur theory?

Although the auteur theory (the belief that the director is the “author” of a film and the critical stance associated with it) is out of fashion within the academic and certain enthusiast circles, it is still the most dominant method of understanding film production and organization currently employed by moviegoers. More often than not, a question like, “What films do you like?” results in a list of filmmakers (directors) rather than genres, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, or any other classification. Further, video stores, newspaper listings, and most other modes of extra-industrial film promotion uses a film’s director as a primary classification marker. Most film reviews, likewise, rely exclusively on a reading of the director’s assumed role in film construction.

While we try not to lean too much on the director’s ivory tower. We attempt to acknowledge the role of editors, cinematographers, screenwriters, producers, and actors/stars in film production. That said, we are certainly guilty of auterist criticism at times. For instance, we recently published a list of our favorite “auteur films.” We also classify/identify films by director in our under-poster text.

This week, we probe our assumptions about the auteur theory and see if we can explain/excuse our behavior.

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I wouldn’t mind picking up THE HITCHHIKERS (1972)

Posted by Daniel Metz

This rough and tumble quickie is really good. Directed by the husband and wife time of Beverly and Fred Sebastian, who pleased me very much with their ‘Gator Bait, this picture’s got it all: women, women, women. But also crime, hippies, cars, guns, and did I mention women?

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