Month: February 2004

If you’re looking to catch the early bandwagon for the next hipster band, you’re about six months late for TV On the Radio. Their summer ’03 debut EP, Young Liars, has already wowed and bored the pierced-and-tattooed cognoscenti, and we’re already reading about how last August they are. So silly. This Brooklyn trio is worth…

Seijun Suzuki’s heyday in the fifities and sixties was spent fighting constraints, both within Japan’s studio system and the not-particularly-respectable yakuza genre, his specialty. He made around forty films during this time, mainly splashy and stylish noirs with titles like Age of Nudity, Fighting Delinquents, and our favorite, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards.…

With the George Romero original now on DVD, there’s no reason not to brand the bound-to-be awful remake, due in theaters this month, as undead on arrival. Despite the limitations of a low budget, some iffy acting and an ending that feels like an A-Team episode, Dawn is, simply put, the best horror film of…

Collaborations between actor and director have created some legendary pairs—think John Ford/John Wayne, Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune, Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood. But none was more volatile, even violent, than the creative ferment between Germany’s Werner Herzog and the enfant terrible Klaus Kinski. The two childhood friends made five movies together in the seventies and eighties, including an…

With so much unwitting awfulness in theaters already, it seems like overkill to try to make something bad on purpose. But that’s the point of this often very funny, straight-faced spoof of 1950s sci-fi movies like Robot Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Writer/director Larry Blamire shows his affection for the semi-competent cinema of…

A reliable biography of French filmmaker Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve does not exist, apparently by his choice, which leaves us unable to verify the rumors that he was born of Mongolian nobility, or explain his choice to rename himself after the Magic Marker beyond its obvious utility as (ahem) a pen name. If you know his…