If you’ve never heard of The Room, chances are you’ve been living under a rock. In a cave. On Mars. For the benefit of the members of the Martian cave-dwelling community, The Room is a 2003 cult film known as ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’. It revolves around Johnny, portrayed by writer-director-producer-executive producer-star Tommy Wiseau. He is engaged to Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who decides she is bored with Johnny and sleeps with his best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero), who is Johnny’s best friend. That’s about it. Half of the movie is sub plots that go nowhere, badly made melodrama, and some of the most awkward sex scenes in film history.
If there’s one best-selling author working at the moment that has proved to have no range whatsoever, it’s Nicholas Sparks. All his stories are the same. Two people with no character flaws meet, they fall in love (regardless of the chemistry they actually have), something happens to separate them in which they sit around moping [...]
A little bit late, but here is my retrospective of 2012 in film, with my top 15 best and worst movies to come from last year.
Going into Les Miserables, I was cautiously skeptical on this movie’s overall quality and its quality as an adaptation of the show. I have never seen the stage version live, but I watched it on a concert DVD and really enjoyed it. When I found out Tom Hooper was directing I was even more skeptical. “This is obviously pandering for the Oscars,” I thought, “It won’t turn out any good, like The Iron Lady, or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I didn’t think it could be done. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would work as a movie. It was too ambitious. It had no spoken dialogue. They couldn’t do it. Could they?
In 2008, Martin McDonagh released In Bruges. It was the tale of two hitmen, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, hiding out in Bruges, waiting for orders from their boss, Harry, played by Ralph Fiennes. The film was very highly received, and won a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay. It had a limited release in the US, but [...]
The internet is a new and fascinating way to communicate, share, and create with other people across the world. It’s an exciting new technology that could have (and has had) boundless effects, on culture, society, and life itself. Unfortunately, it also means we get terrible films based on websites filled with deplorable people. Like Smiley.
Three hundred years from now, historians on a documentary programme look back at what they believe was the cause of a nuclear apocalypse, based on the limited information they could piece together from lost records.
“There is an enigmatic figure that hides in the darkness of the world. It is most often seen as a tall, thin man dressed in a formal suit with long, strange arms and a face like a blank slate. Where he comes from is as much a mystery as what he wants. His presence is associated [...]
After over a month of delaying (sorry about that), we take a look at Gainax’s 2007 mecha series, Gurren Lagann.
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is a gaming critic, game designer, and novelist. He is best known for his show on The Escapist, Zero Punctuation.
