Genre Film
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Antiviral: The Spawn of the Spawn of David Cronenberg
Imagining a future in which celebrity worship has become the new world order hardly strains the brain, but first-time filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral creates this scenario with such casual logic and vivid detail that very little imagination is required to make the leap from current reality to future absurdity. In this world, we no longer want to hear, as a society, that stars are just like us, we want them to be other, god-like. There is also a yearning to be close to them; the ritualistic collection of autographs or buying Kim Kardashian’s used hair dryer on eBay has morphed […]
by Farihah Zaman on Feb 8, 2013 -
Eat Your Brains Out, Twilight: Reviewing Warm Bodies
As the writer of a genre column, I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the balance between “classic” and “updated” when it comes to monster movie tropes in vampire, werewolf, and zombie fare. How much can a new offering stick to the proscribed strictures of, say, werewolf lore without feeling stale or, at best, adequate? How far can a new film stray from those details without sacrificing the pleasing familiarity we all love, a dependence on immutable truths like zombies are slow, and vampires go poof in the daylight? Every film should have the opportunity to make its own […]
by Farihah Zaman on Feb 1, 2013 -
Cold Weather and Everything You Wanted to Know About Genre
Honestly, what the hell is up with genre these days? It’s a tricky thing to get a handle on, but we all have an idea of what’s happening in the independent film world: as production financing has dried up in a world where cinema is, simply put, not generating as much revenue as it used to, independent filmmakers who might be more at home making “art” flicks have decided to mix their interests with more familiar genre narratives. Catfish, which generated more intellectual-thought-content-per-minute than any other 2010 release, was sold as (and contained elements of) a Blair Witch-esque thriller, set […]
by Zachary Wigon on Feb 2, 2011 -
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tokyo Sonata
KYÔKO KOIZUMI, INOWAKI KAI, TERUYUKI KAGAWA, AND YÛ KOYANAGI IN DIRECTOR KIYOSHI KUROSAWA’S TOKYO SONATA. COURTESY REGENT RELEASING. Over the past decade or so, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has established himself as one of the most interesting genre directors in world cinema. The Japanese writer-director was born in Kobe in 1955, and first made 8mm shorts while studying Sociology at Rikko University. He began directing features in the early 1980s, working on direct-to-video titles, including yakuza movies, and studied under the tutelage of directors Shinji Somai and Kazuhiko Hasegawa. He then had minor successes with films like the college-set drama The Excitement […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 13, 2009
