TheRetroCritic

The Squid And The Whale was Noah Baumbach's first big hit as director and put him on the map as one of the new indie filmmakers to look out for. The film, which was co-produced by Wes Anderson, was a short-and-sweet look at a dysfunctional family in the 80's. This was obviously a personal story for Baumbach to tell and he puts the awkwardness of having your parents go through a divorce and having to grow-up during that time across extremely well. These characters are, in part, cruel and selfish and, in part, likeable and naive so you can't help but identify with them a little bit, even when they're at their worst. As the pretentious loser father Bernard, Jeff Daniels is spot-on: the character's sheer inability to not think about himself for one second, the fact everything he says to his kids is wholly inappropriate, that he doesn't even treat his son's new girlfriend to lunch and his questionable relationship with Anna Paquin's student makes him pr

Yaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh!

The first Crank movie may have looked, at first glance, like just another run-of-the-mill Jason Statham actioner but it turned out to be something quite different: a high-octane pastiche poking fun at the action genre through a purposely far-fetched concept and an endearing willingness to go all out no matter what logic dictates. It was fresh, it was new, it was original. ... Sequel, anyone? Oh sure you'd have thought that Jason Statham crashing down into a car after falling out of a helicopter would have confirmed the end of that franchise but not so! For one thing, Statham bounced off the car so right there, here's a film with similar rules to those old Road Runner cartoons so anything's possible at this point. Crank 2: High Voltage picks up right where the first movie left off as the Chinese, who are still evil apparently, literally scrape Statham off the ground and proceed to replace his heart with some plastic doodad. Just for the f*** of it. Or, actually,

In this 48th episode, Adam (aka The RetroCritic) and fellow film buff Jamie discuss movie news, review   Star Trek: Generations and The Blair Witch Project , watch shameful cat videos and talk retro stuff. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE Email us here if you have any questions, requests or contributions:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes  and now  Stitcher  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #TheBigRewind retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

With Michael Keaton's comeback pretty much sealed and ready to take effect, I thought I'd revisit one of my own personal movies starring the actor: Night Shift . The film, directed by Ron Howard of all people, is a comedy in which Henry Winkler plays mild-mannered morgue attendant Chuck who is made to work the night shift with ebullient, fast-talking new recruit Bill (Keaton). While their completely different personalities fail to gel initially, Bill's constant flow of ridiculous business plans finally leads to an idea Chuck ends up going along with. Chuck's neighbour Belinda (Shelley Long), a prostitute, is left pimp-less after some shady goings-on involving the competition and Bill's plan to become "Love Brokers" with Chuck soon becomes a reality. The unlikely duo is soon working with a group of prostitutes, running their totally legit business harmoniously. Soon enough, of course, their success becomes threatened and Chuck's relationship with B

Tim Burton's latest, Big Eyes , tells the true story of 1950's-60's artist Margaret Keane and her relationship with then-husband Walter Keane in what is the director's first biopic since Ed Wood . Though the film does explore Margaret's (Amy Adams) art and its popularity, the focus here is on how Walter Keane's (Christoph Waltz) appropriation of his wife's work changed her life in a time when women had little say. After Margaret allows Walter to take all the credit for her big eyed creations (despite a clear initial reluctance), the become something of a sensation and the couple's lifestyle improves radically over the course of only a few years but the cost of giving up her artistic rights become too much for Margaret who is soon forced to live a lie. Tim Burton directing Ed Wood made perfect sense: a big fan of horror and sci-fi B-movies, the man behind the likes of Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks!  wanted to pay homage to another hugely enthusiast

In this 47th episode, Adam (aka The RetroCritic) and fellow film buff Jamie discuss movie news, their best and worst of 2014, review The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies , Dumb And Dumber To  and talk retro stuff. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE Email us here if you have any questions, requests or contributions:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes  and now  Stitcher  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #TheBigRewind retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

Who knew that 20 years and one sub-par prequel later, Dumb And Dumber would actually receive its long talked-about sequel starring one-off hit comedy duo Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels? Suck me sideways... Somehow, the Farrelly Brothers made it happen and this year we were treated to more dumb in the cartoonishly-titled Dumb And Dumber To . The film was a box-office hit in the U.S. and has been doing surprisingly well all over but was it truly worth the wait? Is Harry and Lloyd's comeback a glorious one or an Icelandic Snow Owl-style catastrophe? Being a die hard Dumb And Dumber fan since childhood myself, the bar was raised pretty high in terms of expectations but, admittedly, the idea of seeing a sequel with these guys alone was enough of a treat that I could forgive a heck of a lot. And so I did of a sequel boasting some great jokes and energetic, ridiculously fun performances from the two leads but also an unfocused, uneven script, a lazy storyline and a whole string of

With all the many movie versions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" out there, it's rather difficult to pick one to talk about but, growing up, one of the most stand-out versions for me personally had to be Mickey's Christmas Carol , a 1983 Disney short feature with, obviously, Scrooge McDuck (voiced by Alan Young) taking on the role of the iconic grump Ebeneezer Scrooge. Of course, many other classic Disney characters portray key roles from the story: Mickey is Bob Cratchit, Goofy is Jacob Marley, you've got Donald Duck as Scrooge's nephew, Daisy Duck as Scrooge's old flame (which is weird when you think about it), Minnie Mouse as Cratchit's wife, Jiminy Cricket as one of the ghosts, even Chip and Dale show up for a cameo. Pete pops up near the end as the ghost of Christmas future, mostly to terrify younger viewers. As a kid, that last part, Scrooge falling down a fiery pit inside his own grave as a hooded Pete laughs his butt off, nearl

After the resounding success of Twilight , director Catherine Hardwicke went on to direct a more teen-friendly, melodramatic take on a classic Grimm tale with Red Riding Hood . The film, it turned out, had very little to do with Little Red Riding Hood and was mostly just a thinly-disguised excuse to have yet another supernatural love triangle plot involving werewolves and young girls with mixed emotions. Oh, and Billy Burke. Gotta have Billy Burke. Amanda Seyfried is Valerie, the red hood-wearing gal who falls for a woodcutter when her family decides to set her up with another young man who is much more well-off. This is all mostly irrelevant and uninteresting and the movie itself seems more interested in its "whodunit" plot which involves a telepathic werewolf (don't ask) who is terrorising the village and some nonsense about how Mars, when aligned with the Moon, can affect the werewolf's bite or whatever. The big question throughout the film being who cou