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Showing posts from June, 2012
BLOOD AND LORE:  CABIN IN THE WOODS REVIEW “…nobody wants to see vampire killers… or vampires… Apparently all they want to see are demented madmen running around in ski-masks, hacking up young virgins.” Peter Vincent (Roddy MacDowall), Fright Night (1985) If someone unexposed to horror films from the past 35 years or so were to watch a marathon of several of these films back to back (and let’s say none of them were sequels), how many would it take before he or she began to predict what’s going to happen next? For an American film audience culture that has by now endured the irony-heavy Scream franchise and the gloomily unironic spate of “torture porn” from auteurs like Eli Roth and others, can there truly be any genuine shocks in horror anymore? Cabin in the Woods film attempts to answer that question with a wink and a nod. The new film features five college-aged protagonists, each fitting a certain stock cliché to be found in assorted horror films: the jock/de facto le
GWYN AND BEAR IT This author is a week or so behind in tackling this particular hip-hop related scandal, but unlike the average shelf-life of a Twitter post, it still bears further discussion.  Indeed, Twitter is at the center of this particular celebrity faux-pas. It seems that Gwyneth Paltrow -- A-list movie actress, wife of Coldplay bandleader Chris Martin , and mother to quaintly-named children Apple and Moses, found herself in a foot-in-mouth social networking fuss when she typed a tweet "Niggas in Paris for real" while at a Jay-Z/Kanye West concert (Paltrow and her husband are apparently godparents to Jay-Z and Beyonce 's baby Blue Ivy.)  http://tinyurl.com/7tg2txr For the uninitiated, "Ni**as in Paris" is a Jay/Kanye song, though on radio and in the music-video it is officially referred to simply as "Paris"-- go figure, right? In interviews, such as with Tanning of America author/hip-hop manager Steve Stoute , Paltrow is upfron