Lady Vengeance
by Farihah Zaman
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Lady Vengeance: Interview with Sundance Filmmaker Eve Sussman
Although Sundance is predominantly known for indie dramas and social issue documentaries, the New Frontiers section provides a loving home for particularly odd ducks. Unlike many projects in New Frontiers, which are presented as installations or other new media formats, Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was screened in a conventional theater. However, the film’s text, 300 bits of voiceover, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 images are live-edited by an algorithmic computer dubbed the Serendipity Machine that creates a randomized sequence, meaning each screening is entirely unique. Not only does Sussman’s piece turn the idea of the mystery genre on its ear,… Read more
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Lady Vengeance: Last Minute Gift Guide for Genre Buffs
Still not sure what to get your comic-book-obsessed little brother? Forget to pick up something for mom that satisfies her cinematic blood lust? The following gifts are Lady Vengeance approved, and most arrive just in time for December 25th. For the Low-Brow Art Lover: Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art (Gallery 1988/Kevin Smith, $25) The currently out-of-fashion but undeniably hard-working Kevin Smith has teamed up with the LA-based Gallery 1988 to collect the best in good, pulpy, sometimes downright dirty artwork inspired by cult films. The aesthetic style and subject matter is fairly diverse, meaning there’s something for everyone. … Read more
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Lady Vengeance: The Genre Fan’s Guide to Jim Henson
By now many have experienced the clever, goofy, unfiltered joy of The Muppets, a film whose success reflects the plight of its characters – out of the spotlight for far too long and working their way back into the the public consciousness. While the film’s potent mix of charm and nostalgia is undeniable (if you didn’t tear up during the performance of Rainbow Connection, you’re inhuman), it might leave some of us hungry for more, and I don’t mean the soft stuff. While the film is true to one facet of Henson’s work, he was a mad, prolific genius who got involved with… Read more
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Lady Vengeance: The Bride Wore Black Review
Loaded with recognizable tropes just begging to be tampered with, genre film is fertile spoof material, as can be evidence by obvious examples like the pointless Scary Movie franchise, or even within the same film as in those slasher film that knowingly straddle the line between terror and comedy, or B-Movies so tongue-in-cheek campy they function both as a good-humored critique of the genres the are playing against as well as a standalone narratives in their own right. Francois Truffaut’s sometimes goofy, sometimes chilling 1969 film The Bride Wore Black is genre lampoonery in the hands of a French auteur,… Read more
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Lady Vengeance: Halloween Dream
While theaters all across America have been raiding the vault to bring us horror favorites throughout the month of October, there’s just nothing like catching something gory, bloody, spooky or flat out disgusting on Halloween night, sweating in your topical costume and getting sugar-high on candy corn. Here are my All Hallow’s Eve picks from a few special theaters around the country, and if you don’t happen to reside in one of the cities below, there is always Netflix and Amazon streaming, several options on demand, and a typically killer lineup on Turner Classic Movies, including Lady Vengeance favorite Village… Read more
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Lady Vengeance: Genre Picks from the Philadelphia Film Festival
Last night marked the opening of the 2011 Philadelphia Film Festival, and although this year kicked off with the decidedly non-genre film Like Crazy (as opposed to 2010, which began with the enjoyably batshit Black Swan), the festival has a history of featuring well-curated action, horror, science fiction, fantasy and just plain weird fare. For those lucky enough to attend the festival, or simply tracking the program for edification purposes, a good place to start is the festival’s dedicated genre lineup, once going by the name “Danger After Dark” but re-dubbed “The Graveyard Shift” after political infighting dramatically split the group… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
