Film diary

A lot of foley artists and sound designers in the ’70s and ’80s seemed to have this fetishistic preoccupation with footsteps. In any scene where people were on the move, the soundtrack focused on footfalls to the exclusion of all else. The foley was produced with what I’m guessing was a maximum of three different kinds of shoes (loafers, heels, tennis shoes) on two different surfaces (asphalt, linoleum-tiled concrete). Despite being thoroughly unconvincing, it dominated… See more →

The Crazies arrived in 1973, five years after George Romero’s auspicious debut (Night of the Living Dead) and five years before his masterpiece (Dawn of the Dead). As a low-budget doomsday thriller, it lands directly between those two films as well, making great use of what he learned from Night’s confined space (paranoia, a winking cynicism, and subtle but devastating irony) while sketching out in long form what he would later condense into Dawn… See more →

Remember when Nirvana exploded and every major label scrambled to sign any band they could find that was even remotely similar? Well, if The Sixth Sense is Nirvana (and given how quickly M Night Shyamalan squandered whatever goodwill his breakout hit engendered, I hesitate to draw the comparison), then The Others is Bush.

The themes, tone, essential plot points, and even the color palette are all lifted directly. To its credit, this is not immediately… See more →

When I recently finally saw the first Hostel, I was surprised by how fun it was. Eli Roth’s first feature, Cabin Fever, had not endeared him to me, and that plus Hostel’s reputation for being a torture porn standard-bearer alongside the idiotic and gimmicky Saw films had done little to persuade me. But I had to admit Hostel was competently made and showed both the reverence Roth has for his influences and the glee… See more →