Cinema Basement

A review by Forrest  Humphrey  After a decade of absence, the Scream series has graced us once again to hang lampshades on recent horror trends and provide yet another psycho in the Ghostface costume to chase Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette around. The original trilogy existed to deconstruct the beloved slasher movies of the 70's and 80's. The fourth film was made to comment on the many reboots and remakes coming out at the time and this new film, if the title wasn't the giveaway, is here to tell us what it thinks about the new series of horror films that are reboots/sequels holding the same name as the original. AKA, 2018's Halloween , 2021's Candyman and more have come along, so its time for Scream to wink and nod while doing the same thing. Sidney, Dewey and Gale are all present as you'd expect, but they aren't the central protagonists. Instead, as with the aforementioned films, they are the experienced veterans here to be the rock for ...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich So here's my hot take for the day. I like this movie better than the popular show on Netflix. I think the show is very creative and fun and Neil Patrick Harris is awesome as Count Olaf. But I like the tone of this film better and Jim Carrey is much better as Olaf. He still has the humor and wittiness of Olaf but he is also an intimidating villain.  For anyone who doesn't know, the story revolves around the three Baudelaire children whose parents die in a terrible house fire. They are sent to live with Count Olaf, a failed actor who wishes to steal their fortune. The children must stay one step ahead of Olaf as they travel from bizarre relative to bizarre relative. Olaf pursues them, always in a disguise the children see right through.  Again I don't think the show is bad. I really don't. But I just like this more. I won't make this into a here's why the movie better than the show piece. So I'll stop with the comparisons. Carre...

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich I love '70s science fiction. It's a style of the genre that still shows up occasionally in films like Blade Runner 2049 and Under the Skin but science fiction is now usually more in line with Stars Wars. Though Star Wars really is slow compared to modern science fiction. Dune this year was more in line with '70s science fiction but still not the pacing of today's film, one of my favorite science fiction films of all time.  Bruce Dern is Freeman Lowell, a botanist in charge of a variety of planet life on a space ship. Plant life on Earth is becoming extinct and so ships are sent off with plant specimens to repopulate the earth with our leafy friends. And well I don't want to say anything else. This film is a wonderful mystery revealed slowly to us. We have Bruce Dern and his robot friends. That's it.  This film is glacially paced sometime. The '70s was all about that. Films took their time. Science fiction went from cheesy over...