Search the Cinema Head Cheese Archives!

Showing posts with label Dan O'Bannon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dan O'Bannon. Show all posts

April 28, 2014

Movie Review: "Jodorowsky's Dune" (2014; Sony Pictures Classics)

...say you have a standard; a set standard, once innovative and unique. A standard, which initially might have instilled a sense of 'wow', amongst the masses, and now, is wholly accepted as 'the norm'...maybe even to the point of yawn-inducing. Then, as the cliched phrase goes, "...just when you've thought that you've seen everything under the sun, along comes..."; an artist, known and reputed for outrageousness...an embraceable outrageousness, with a respectable following, mind you, but clearly, a level of imaginative 'over-the-top' craziness, with an underlining hint of wisdom...'thinking outside the box', as yet another cliched saying goes. And so, that artist takes that now.monotone standard, filters it through a different set of eyes, and suggests quite literally turning that standard on it's head...breathing new life into it, and yet, retaining the crust of what the standard stood for and meant...

...for this viewer, I love 'what if' scenarios. I became amoured with the 'what if' concept, at an early age, when the artistic and creative 'power-that-be', scribbling away at Marvel Comics, ingeniously came up with a unique and absolutely 'off-the-wall' comic book series, which took many of the super-powered hero standards...at a minimum, tweaked their histories...their mythos, here and there, and at most, quite literally shook the contents of the standard into a frenzied mish-mash...stood back, and gandered at what the outcome would be, storywise and direction, given the changes. As the result, some unique, creative...even bizarre and surreal ideas came to pass, and Marvel's "What If...??" series proved a phenomenal favorite, back in it's day...

October 16, 2011

Movie Review: More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead

This may come as a shock to some readers but the very first zombie movie I was exposed to as a youth wasn't Night of the Living Dead, nor was it Dawn of the Dead. Amazingly, it was Dan O'Bannon's cult classic Return of the Living Dead. I love all three films with "Night" being at the top, but ROTLD really molded my genre tastes when I watched it at the tender age of eight years-old. The documentary More Brains! A Return to the Living Dead compiles some enjoyable facts from the first film and a heaping helping of extras in one handy dandy package.