More drama please, Crimson Peak

Here's Murtada to review of the new wide release Crimson Peak.

Visually Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a big sumptuous meal. So visually full at all times that it masquerades a thin plot and uninteresting lead character and almosts gets away with fooling us into thinking it a great film. The compelling visuals keep it enticing throughout: Huge frilly sleeves on the dresses; red smoke flaring up from creeks on the floor; a creepy black skeleton hand moving ominously. It never stops.

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Women's Pictures - Mary Harron's American Psycho

Anne Marie continues a special horror month on "Women's Pictures"

Fun fact: American Psycho was the single most voted for film for the horror edition of Women's Pictures. Despite that, I almost didn't include it. This isn't because of some sudden onset of squeamishness on my part, or dislike of the film. American Psycho simply isn't a horror movie, at least not by conventional standards. American Psycho is director Mary Harron's dark Juvenalian satire of American consumerism, materialism, and the crisis of masculinity in the turn of the 21st century.

Though set in the 1980s, American Psycho is one of a handful of films from the late 1990s and early 2000s that violently pokes at the concept of modern masculinity. Like American Beauty and especially Fight Club, American Psycho confronts the idea of modern man chained to a desk, unfulfilled and overburdened by contemporary consumerist definitions of success. The titular Psycho is Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a music-obsessed Wall Street broker in the decade where everything, from hair to shoulder pads to paychecks, was bigger. Bateman has all of the plastic markers of success: trendy apartment, good haircut, designer cloths, WASP fiance, the right friends, and a killer business card. But under his flashy, fake veneer, Patrick is all id. He wants to kill. He wants to fuck. He wants to possess. [More...]

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Women's Pictures - Antonia Bird's Ravenous

What is the difference between a hero and a coward? Where is the moral line between surviving hunger and gratifying gluttony? What was the true nature of manifest destiny? When you think "cannibalism horror flick," you probably don't expect questions like these, but Antonia Bird's 1999 genre-bending Ravenous surprisingly pauses to ask these questions before launching into some spectacularly self-indulgent gore. The result is a veritable smorgasbord of horror tropes and outlandish ideas that make up an unusual horror movie which might not be to everyone's taste.

Guy Pierce, hot off L.A. Confidential, plays John Boyd, a cowardly captain in the American army during the Mexican-American War. He has been decorated for capturing an enemy command after hiding under a pile of dead bodies, though he did so out of fear, not heroism. His superiors send him to a remote outpost in the Sierra Nevadas, Ft. Spencer, which is run by a Colonel (Jeffrey Jones), a drunk (Stephen Spinella), an idiot (David Arquette), a religious nut (Jeremy Davies), a soldier (Neal McDonough), and the two genre-required Native Americans (Sheila Tousey and Joseph Runningfox). When a half-mad priest (Robert Carlyle) appears in the night, telling stories of snowbound starvation and cannibalism, the ragtag group sets out to investigate. What they find is a bloody disaster.

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Curio: We're at (Crimson) Peak Excitement

Alexa here with your weekly art appreciation.  The internet excitement over the release of Crimson Peak is at a fever pitch: Gothic romance! Tom Hiddleston sex scenes! Giant creepy Victorian house! Tom Hiddleston being sexy!  It's like fanfiction come to life.  Of course, the return of Guillermo Del Toro's visual sumptuousness brings its own excitement, especially for some visual artists out there. Little White Lies filled its latest issue with art inspired by the film; they're also curating an exhibition celebrating all of Del Toro's films, with an artist interpreting each film as a Victorian-era gothic book cover.

Here are some other creations I've spotted recently that were perhaps made during repeat viewings of the trailer. See them after the jump...

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Women's Pictures: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark

Welcome, guys and ghouls, to our special October edition of Anne Marie's "Women's Pictures!"

 This month, rather than focusing on 5 films by 1 female director, we will be watching 5 films by 5 female directors with 1 thing in common: horror. Because what's the one thing scarier than working in a boy's club industry? I reached out on social media to ask the internet what it wanted to see, and got an overwhelming response for these five films. Going chronologically, the first film on our list is a vampire flick by beloved Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.

In true 80s Bigelow fashion, Near Dark is a grim action thriller; part Western, part gang movie, part family drama, with enough explosions and gruesome special effects that you might miss the moralistic AIDS allegory underneath. Whenever the mainstream heaps praise on Kathryn Bigelow, their focus is usually on the fact that Bigelow does not work in "women's genres," which is to say films with "feminine" themes or plot lines. However, beneath the edgy synth soundtrack, the sex, violence, and hair gel, Near Dark is a surprisingly conservative film about the redemptive power of family. More...

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