Authors — Farihah Zaman
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Lady Vengeance: Interview with Guillermo Del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, best known for directing aesthetically impressive, intellectually thoughtful horror films like Mimic and Pan’s Labyrinth, steps into a slightly different role this summer by presenting Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of one of his favorite films as a child. I spoke to del Toro about his decades-long dream of bringing this film to life, the connection between horror and spirituality, and what makes a dark basement so damn scary. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opens in theaters on August 26th. Filmmaker: I wanted to start by asking how you began working on the […]
by Farihah Zaman on Aug 12, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: Rewatching (and Saying Goodbye to) Harry Potter
For the last ten days, the conclusion to the massively popular Harry Potter series has been jerking tears and dredging up boatloads of cash, and it seems its total box office domination is far from over. In honor of this momentous occasion I decided to undertake the unoriginal but ambitious quest of watching all of the previous films in the week leading up to the premiere. The Potter-palooza culminated in a midnight screening of The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in a strip mall multiplex near the rural Michigan town where I was vacationing, complete with buttered popcorn, limited edition 3-D […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jul 23, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: The Man Who Fell to Earth
It was only a matter of time before this trippy sci-fi film featuring a disarmingly strange but impossibly stylish early-1970s David Bowie as an alien navigating Earth would make the rounds once again. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, a cult classic whose Criterion Collection DVD has been out of print for years, has just finished a near-entirely sold-out run at New York City’s Film Forum on a beautiful new 35mm print and will be touring the rest of the country in the coming months. While the film seems dated at times, downright incoherent at others, its reflection […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jul 8, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: America, America
The appearance of a fictional version of the President of the United States is a hallmark of many genre films, particularly of the earthly disaster variety, in which the impending destruction of the planet, or at least the country warrants a visit from our Commander-in-Chief. In some cases, the character is a way for the filmmaker to get into some mild politics, to take a sly jab at a particular administration through spoofing or lampoonery. In other cases the POTUS depiction has an element of wish fulfillment, in which the filmmaker projects his ideal leader in a crisis situation. Like […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jul 1, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: 2011 New York Asian Film Festival
Running for nine solid years and organized by the folks over at Subway Cinema, the New York Asian Film Festival is a genre lover’s dream — a carefully curated crop of new films from Korea, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and anywhere else on the continent they can get their hands on a good movie, watched in the company of equally discerning fans. The 2011 edition is kicking off on July 1 with the film Milocrorze: A Love Story, a genre-bending samurai romance in the form of a musical variety show, from Yoshimasa Ishibashi. I’m intrigued already. I remember the first time […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jun 17, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: Trollhunter Review
Any genre fan will tell you that when it comes to movie beasties, delayed gratification is key. It is considered classic good form to mount anticipation via quick glimpses of scales/fur/claws, or unnerving detritus left in the creature’s wake, all leading up to the spectacular fashion in which the monster will finally emerge. Rather than bend completely to convention, Trollhunter, with dry Scandinavian aplomb, breaks with this rule of horror suspense by having the grizzled titular character run out of the woods, shout “TROLL,” and cause his disbelieving companions to disperse chaotically amid earth-quaking snorts and stomps. The troll isn’t […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jun 10, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: Poster? I Don’t Even Know Her
In an impressive show of state pride and clever programming, the Alamo Drafthouse, the much-lauded Austin-based movie theater chain run by the same folks behind nerd art and t-shirt purveyor Mondo and annual genre film festival Fantastic Fest, is doing a roving summer screening series called The Rolling Road Show. Each of its ten lovely Texas cult classic films, from The Searchers to Bonnie and Clyde to Blood Simple, will be shown outdoors in a town related to the film. To promote the series, the Drafthouse worked with artist Jason Munn to create new, graphically minimalist posters for these films, […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jun 3, 2011 -
Lady Vengeance: Summer Box Office’s Revenge of the Nerds
Summer is a strange and wonderful time when many of the rules of regular conduct cease to apply, and this pertains not just to the frequency of ice cream consumption and the blessing of “summer Fridays.” Many people have an image of how genre films are usually consumed – by dedicated genre fans, in a quirky downtown arthouse theater, perhaps, or via DVDs shipped from Hong Kong while alone on the couch wearing a snuggie — but in the summer, the entire country seems to develop a taste for blood or kung fu. Independent genre features continue to be released, […]
by Farihah Zaman on May 30, 2011
