TNMC

Check out my choices for the ten....or should I say thirteen...best DVDs of 2004. 

Marc Cherry, creator of the series Desperate Housewives, has been hinting that one of his characters is going to hit an unfortunate end.  In a recent interview with Z-100's Elvis Duran, James Denton, who plays Mike Delfino, said the axe falls this week with the episode "Guilty."  So we decided to break down the odds to see who is most likely to get bumped off.

A measure of any good horror film is if it still instinctively affects a fan of the genre many years past its initial viewing; if the visceral impact is still there, and what that impact is.  A fine horror film needn’t be thought-provoking, just reliably fright-inducing: horror films for me have always been about poking and prodding at something deep inside the psyche, stirring up some base response at the reptillian core of the brain.  Hopefully, that response radiates cold shards of fear and dread, and leaves me wanting for more.  For this Halloween, I present a modest but well-thought-out catalogue of frightening fear flicks, spanning over eighty years and a broad spectrum of themes.

Within just a few pages of the script, my worst fears were to be realized. This was another movie about a serial killer. Ever since Silence of the Lambs exploded on the national consciousness, serial killer movies have become a significant genre and virtually none of them have approached the brilliance of Lambs. Worse, most of them are mired in cliches and predictable storylines. So to find yet another one in my hands, I found my interest rapidly waning. It took me a couple days to get through the first twenty pages. I was easily distracted from it by just about anything, making progress glacial in pace. I couldn't get through a page without hearing Charlie Kaufman's dissection of serial killer stories from Adaptaion. It was most definitely not helping.

The 20th Century Fox panel included clips and a Q & A for Alien vs. Predator, a preview of Elektra, and a Q & A with the director and cast of the upcoming Fantastic Four.

Sony pictures previewed "The Grudge" starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (who later did a Q & A), Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and a preview for the upcoming film "The Forgotten."

After attending a record setting San Diego Comicon for the weekend (over 100,000 people were in attendance on Saturday), I have to confess to still being shell shocked from the whole experience.  Hordes of people dress as Anime, Video Game, Move, and Comic book characters roamed the crammed convention center.  And that’s not even addressing the ren, goth, and original creations that people paraded about.  As always there were too many panels, too many speakers, and too many sights to be seen to be able to report on everything.  But I did manage to attend a fair bit in my time there.

 

The Day After Tomorrow has come, and is one of the Event Movies of summer 2004.  A big budget, big cast, big name director, and big ideas demand attention, and the constant hype surrounding the release has ensured a fairly high level of awareness and interest with the movie-going public.  An enormous number of people have seen the movie, and its box-office numbers have been near the top of the list since it was released.  It’s a success story.  There’s something about it all that I don’t understand, though.