Cinema Basement

A review by Brooks This is an easy documentary to track down and watch. It's currently available on Netflix and is only about forty-five minutes long. It is also one of the most compelling and eerie documentaries ever made. Not only a music documentary about the history of blues, especially deep fried southern blues, it is also a study of an American folklore tale that many people might not know about.  The documentary tells the story of Robert Johnson, who is considered by many to be not only the greatest blues musician of all time, but quite possibly the greatest guitar player of all time. Johnson was active in the early '30s and was known as kind of a hack guitar player. Local blues players would tell Johnson to get away from guitars before he broke a spring. So Johnson disappears for a year and a half. No one sees him. One day he shows back up at a blues joint with a guitar and asks to play. He blows the crowd away, doing things with the g...

A review by Brooks Rich There is a five year gap between Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Inglorious Basterd s. I had kind of written Tarantino off personally after the failure of Grindhouse , I truly think Death Proof is one of the worst films, short or otherwise, ever made, and honestly I didn't care for Kill Bill Vol. 2 . So when Tarantino returned with an alternative history film about World War 2 I was dubious. Also a little confused. Like what, Tarantino made a film about Jewish Americans hunting down and killing Nazis in a fictionalized Nazi controlled France? Ok. Sure whatever. So do I like this film? Yes. I don't love it and I think it doesn't fully work as a whole but yes I like this film and I think it has two of the best scenes of modern cinema. The opening scene is astonishing where the SS show up to French dairy farm looking to see if they are hiding Jews. This scene introduced western audiences to the majesty that is Christoph Waltz, who Tarantino would direct to t...

A review by Chris Lee Ah, Quentin Tarantino. Hollywood’s weird, eccentric brother. When Tarantino is in the room, you know he’s in the room. His films carry an identity too-often poorly parodied, and rarely mistakable. Personally, I’ve enjoyed every single one of the man’s ventures, minus Jackie Brown , which I just haven’t seen. (Editors Note: See? I told you it's the forgotten Tarantino) Of the films I have seen, and, being an action-film connoisseur, I have to say, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 , which I consider a single film, is my very favorite.  The 2003/2004 action drama follows “The Bride”, a character devised on the set of Pulp Fiction by Tarantino and BFF Uma Thurman. The Bride is out for revenge against her former allies, all of whom were part of a clan of highly-skilled assassin’s, known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, managed by the ruthless and titular “Bill”. I’ll leave the reason for her revenge out, as it’s revealed early on, and is compelling enough ...

A review by Brooks Rich Jackie Brown is the Tarantino film that people seem to forget. I understand that to a degree. It had the misfortune of coming out after Pulp Fiction , an atom bomb in the film world that would change the landscape of cinema. Of Tarantino's first three films it is the lesser of them to be fair but that makes it the lesser of three films that feature one of the greatest debuts of all time and one of the greatest films ever made. Jackie Brown is a fun smart crime caper and deserves much more love than it gets. The immortal Pam Grier, seriously one of the most badass awesome women ever, is Jackie Brown, a flight attendant who moves money for arms dealer Ordell Robbie, played by a totally awesome Samuel L. Jackson, who works with his live in girlfriend Melanie, played by Bridget Fonda, and recently released ex con Louis, played by Robert De Niro. When Jackie is busted at the airport by ATF agent Ray Nicolette, played by Michael Keaton, and LAPD detective Ma...

A review by Brooks Rich I can't believe I haven't discussed David Fincher on this blog yet. I'm also impressed this is the movie I'm choosing for his first coverage on here because Se7en is one of my all time favorite movies, I argue the best crime thriller of the '90s, and Alien 3 is a cinematic disaster with a fascinating history. But instead we're discussing The Game , a deeply under appreciated film in Fincher's filmography and one of the best movies about paranoia ever made. Michael Douglas is Nicholas Van Orton, a wealthy man who is about to turn the age his father was when he committed suicide. His brother Conrad, played by Sean Penn, gives him an unusual gift, an appointment with a strange company called Consumer Recreation Services, who sell Nicholas on an interactive experience, basically where his life is turned into a game. But as the game goes on Nicholas begins to wonder exactly how on the level CRS is and what their final goal is as they ...

Godzilla Month: Gojira A Film Review by Forrest Humphrey  What other way would their be to begin my 4-film dive into the Godzilla franchise than to review 1954's Gojira, the film that kick started what the Guinness Book of World Records just recognized as the longest continuously running franchise in the history of cinema. With thirty five films and counting, Godzilla has had more appearances in movies than any fictional character with the possible exceptions of Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. But all thirty four of those films trace their lineage to this one film, and in the eyes of many, this remains not only the best Godzilla film, but one of the single most important and influential monster movies ever made and one of the most seminal works of Japanese cinema.  And why is that? Well, let's get into it. The film was directed by Ishiro Honda, a friend and frequent collaborator with another beloved filmmaker Akira Kurosowa, and it draws inspiration from his time in Wo...

Godzilla: A Month in Review -By Forrest Humphrey With the release, and under performance, of Warner Brother's recent “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” fresh in everyone's minds, I would like to address a common argument people, and many fans, make in favor of the film's poor writing and bland, uninspired characters: that Godzilla is always badly written or even more baffling, that the films are actually “supposed” to be poorly written. Now, there is no denying in many cases that regarding the original Japanese films, of which there are currently thirty-two, this holds true, they have almost always been low budget B-movies meant to entertain, but there are a few cases where the films really tried to be something more than popcorn material, and I would like to take a closer look at four films in particular that I believe succeeded in being not simply great Godzilla films, but works of cinematic quality in terms of writing, theme, special effects, cinematography and ...

A review by Brooks Rich We now come to the end of our brief look at Joe Carnahan for forgotten film Friday. We have arrived at his best film hands down, The Grey . Despite the box office success of this film, and it's high critical consensus, I still think it is not as popular as it should be. This is Joe Carnahan's masterpiece. A startlingly bleak look at what it means to survive and face our own mortality. Moviegoers went into this film thinking it would be Taken with wolves after seeing Liam Neeson and wolves in the trailer. Yeah, that's not what this film is at all.  Liam Neeson is John Ottway, a man who kills wolves for an Alaskan oil company to keep the workers safe. On a plane trip back home, a storm crashes the plane and a handful of survivors are left stranded on the frozen tundra. What's worse? A pack of wolves is not happy to have this human encroachment and start to pick off the men, one at a time. Ottway eventually becomes the leader of the group, determ...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I get warm feelings thinking about this film. It came out right as I was graduating high school. It was directed by a guy I looked up to and he found a way to take a strange show from the 80’s and breathe new life into it while being respectful to the source material. It seems like a lot of people forget that this movie happened but I didn’t and that’s why this wonderful series exists. The A-Team deserves a revisit from the populous at large because it was years ahead of its time. I say this because 22 Jump Street pretty much stole its plot and just added Ice Cube. I’lll get there but let’s talk about the business of this movie! The A-Team was Carnahan’s follow up to Smoking Ace’s, the best Tarantino movie he never made. What Carnahan managed to do was assemble an insanely talented cast and one that is filled with A-list actors or soon to be ones. This movie makes $57.3 million on a $17 million dollar budget proving he can move up to the bi...

A review by Brooks Rich Today we have a brief feature on director Joe Carnahan, a criminally underrated director who deserves a bigger career than he has. Most of you will probably know Carnahan from his 2011 film The Grey. But Caranhan was working well before that. We'll begin with the 2002 police procedural he wrote and directed, Narc.  Jason Patric is Nick Tellis, an undercover narcotics officer in Detroit assigned to look into the murder of another undercover cop. Tellis is teamed up with Henry Oak, played by Ray Liotta, a detective who knew the murdered cop, and together the two follow a trail of clues into the seedy underworld of drugs to try and find out what happened.  There's eight million cop films out there and it’s true that parts of Narc feel familiar… but Carnahan brings grittiness and brutality to this story. This is an ugly world filled with ugly and violent people. The film opens with Tellis' cover getting blown and a chase through the streets that leads ...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman Few films change cinema. Few films become a part of the cultural zeitgeist as much as this film would become. Pulp Fiction is endlessly quotable and one of those movies that once you see it, changes the way you look at dialog. It changes the way you look at story telling, and the way you see how a movie can come together. Tarantino, on his second film, finds a way to out do the incredible Reservoir Dogs. He takes everything we love about Reservoir Dogs … the pop culture references, the witty dialog, the burst of tactile violence … and turns them all up to 100. And he does this al the while he’s deciding to double down on the idea of telling a non-liner story.  To talk about Pulp Fiction is to talk about how much the 90’s changed American cinema for ever. It is to talk about a cultural touchstone.  Pulp Fiction saved careers. I know it’s a fact now, but at the time John Travolta’s career was all but dead. Short of the Look Whose Talking films hi...

A review by Brooks Rich Let's talk about the rock and roll film, particularly the rock and roll films of the '80s. Most people probably think of the films starring the Beatles and Elvis when I mention rock and roll films, but I want to look at the films inspired by the punk movement of the late '70s and early '80s. Films like Streets of Fire and Repo Man. These films were all about teenagers and young adults using music to escape the real world and rebel against the establishment. Usually it was dudes in bands when it came to these films. but not so with today's film, the sadly, very, forgotten 1982 film…Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. I won't get too much into detail because I know 99% of you have never seen this film and I don't want to spoil too much. But let’s discuss some of the film’s themes going on and what it says about the music industry, and fame in general. Influenced not only by the American and British punk scenes, this soundtrack...

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman Time destroys all things. I believe that is true the older I get. I find things that I loved when I was younger very rarely have the legs to survive the great lens of time. This week I discovered a film I loved as a child is a racist, sexist, badly edited, badly shot piece of trash. That film is Rush Hour and my god this film has aged so badly.  The brilliance of talking about this is getting Brett “Trash Basket” Ratner. Some films are made a certain way by director on purpose and some are even if the director never intended for that. Rush Hour is everything that Ratner has been accused of or even admitted too. The film seems to relish in demising the strengths of Jackie Chan. It calls him horribly offensive words for terrible bits and you can tell that this is the stuff that got Ratner to sign on. That his love of Jackie’s marshal arts was where his love ended. Ratner’s filmography is littered with films like that look you in the eye and make you...

A review by Brooks Rich Think about some of the greatest films ever made. How did they start off? In The Godfather we have the great I believe in America scene where a man begs Don Corleone to kill the men who wronged his daughter. In 2001 we have the evolution of humans from apes when they touch the monolith. In Jaws we have the brutal attack of a woman by an unseen monster that lurks beneath the surface of the ocean. In Reservoir Dogs we have a gang of tough guys about to pull off a heist sitting around a table at a diner and discussing the works of Madonna. This was the world's introduction to Quentin Tarantino. The first lines of dialogue are spoken by the man himself, preaching about the meaning of Like a Virgin . For those who haven't seen Reservoir Dogs, oh my God go and watch that film immediately. This is easily one of the greatest debut films ever by a filmmaker and there are legit arguments to be made that this is the best debut feature film of a director of al...

I've struggled to find the words to introduce our coverage of one the most important voices in American filmmaking. Tarantino is as important for the landscape of cinema as the classic directors like Hitchcock, Spielberg, Kubrick, Scorsese, Kurosawa. Tarantino's first two films were atom bombs in the industry, kicking off the independent wave that we saw in the '90s. Also need to acknowledge films like El Mariachi from Robert Rodriguez and Clerks from Kevin Smith, which helped in that shift in the filmmaking scene. Film was in a weird place from the late '8os into the early '90s as audiences interests shifted away from big blockbusters. Films like Pulp Fiction caused the indie boom and led to a focus on more realistic stories. We will go in chronological order as we explore the works of Tarantino, all leading up to the release of his ninth film later this month, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood .