T.A. Wardrope's Blog: News & Reviews

While I enjoy a good post-apocalyptic epic of brimstone and fury, there is little in the concept that has ever engaged my personal imagination. Lately I’ve realized this is because I don’t believe in a post-apocalypse. I can readily accept, as best a human can, any number of apocalyptic events. Seeing life on the other […]

Horror filmmaking has always had a solid footing in social satire. Okay, not always, but much of the time these movies find the world around them as scary as whatever beasties they may throw at the audience. From David Cronenberg (Videodrome) to Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), the horrors of society have provided plenty […]

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“A Bridge in the Fog” This is a pretty quiet film by Spielberg standards. Remarkably quiet considering it was also written by Joel and Ethan Coen and stars Tom Hanks. The film had brief run in theaters, which isn’t too surprising considering its low-energy and cerebral nature. Essentially, this is a film about a principled […]

“Apocalypse Then” As Hugh Glass (Leonardio DiCaprio) urges his trapper compatriots to get off the boat and into the forest, you can’t help but hear an echo of an earlier bit of survival wisdom. “Never get off the boat.” GIven that The Revenant is at its heart a colonial story in the tradition of Apocalypse […]

I was in a writer’s workshop with F. Paul Wilson a few years ago and the one thing he made very clear was that he didn’t want to hear anything about this movie. I hadn’t re-watched this since renting it on VHS many years previous, so I took his comments as the usual writer-not-happy-with-adaptation kvetching. […]

Back when I was in the business of pursuing screenwriting words of wisdom like they were fragments of the Grail, I came across one wisdom that has mostly stuck with me. What were those golden words? “No one wants to watch a movie about a writer.” Let me point out that this was after I […]

So, one way of talking about this film is to say something to the effect of “Foxcatcher in Hell”. There’s very little wrestling, true, but it raises the unnerving male bonding of “Foxcatcher” into even more psychotic levels. Mark Duplass (Josef) makes the film work, as the entire thing depends on the range of charm […]

Hot diggity dog! On the one hand this is “Die Hard with cannibals”, and that’s a good thing. Though Arthur (Patrick Wilson) begins the film with more broken bones than John McClane at the end of Die Hard. So maybe there’s no fair fight there. I feel sorry for anyone that walks into this movie […]

I guess I’ve mellowed with age because I’ve come to accept that Tarentino is going to be Tarentino and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. You can give the man one the most cinematic machines in existance and he’ll still come back you with a chat fest that is closer to theater than anything […]