8 years ago
All posts by Christopher Runyon
The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Wind Rises”
"The wind is rising! ... We must try to live!"
~Paul Valéry
The Wind Rises may be classified as a "biopic," but it is less a document of a man than it is of a dream: beginning with its birth, progressing through its lifespan, and then finally waving a tearfu...
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LAFF Reviews: “They Came Together”, “Nightingale”, and “The Well”
They Came Together
For over a decade, fans of the ludicrous summer-camp spoof movie Wet Hot American Summer have been waiting for the director/co-writer duo of David Wain and Michael Showalter to create a follow-up for their cult-classic comedy. Although we...
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LAFF Review: “Love is Strange”
Ira Sachs's new film Love is Strange opens with Ben and George being asked if their decision to marry is of their own free will. They, of course, say yes. And almost immediately after that, they are hurled into circumstances that are beyond their control, prec...
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LAFF Review: “Snowpiercer” is Spectacularly Off the Rails
Once upon a time, Bong Joon-Ho's ambitious sci-fi action film Snowpiercer was threatened with an Americanized edit by controversial industry magnate Harvey Weinstein. Fans of the Korean auteur (as well as fans of good sci-fi in general) were understandably ver...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “From Up On Poppy Hill”
As we've already established, Goro Miyazaki's Tales From Earthsea was Studio Ghibli's first disaster. Despite making lots of money at the Japanese box office, it also had the much more affecting consequence of being their first critically reviled film. Having ...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Secret World of Arrietty”
It's strange how much of a difference an English dub can make. That's how I watched The Secret World of Arietty when I first saw it two years ago, and I found it to be one of the Studio's lesser entries. Having watched it a second time for this piece, in its o...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Ponyo”
At this point in the retrospective, Studio Ghibli has been somewhat capitalizing on its international success by choosing distinctly western fictions to adapt, their last two films Howl's Moving Castle and Tales From Earthsea being adaptations of distinctly Br...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Tales From Earthsea”
As has already been documented on the Retrospective, I wasn't as big a fan of Isao Takahata's Pom Poko or Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns as many others were; but neither of them were explicitly "bad" movies. While I wasn't particularly amused by Pom Poko's ...
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“Oculus”: Turns Out It Was Just A Reflector
Not being able to tell what's real and isn't real in movies, let alone those of the horror genre, has become such an overused, pretentious cliche when it comes to faux-profound filmmakers. So much so that when a film like Oculus comes along and does it so damn...
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The Second Criterion: “The Last Temptation of Christ”
I was a hardcore Bible kid, growing up. From fourth to sixth grade, I went to a Baptist elementary school. After that, I went to a Baptist middle school. For high school, I was in a Catholic high school, Catholicism being my family's main religion and not near...
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