The latest writing from all your favorite Screengrab refugees
by Andrew Osborne
If my calculations are correct, I’ve written and directed seven 48 Hour Film Project movies since 2006 (all available for screening at the Bait Shop Cineplex) — and the latest is above, an entry in the 2011 Providence competition (featuring a great soundtrack by a band called The Atom)!
Can you solve the mystery?
by Andrew Osborne
Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it. This hybrid of an oater and an extraterrestrial-invasion saga opens with Jake (Daniel Craig) awakening in the 1873 Arizona desert with a mysterious metal bracelet on his wrist and no idea who he is or how he got there.
by Vadim Rizov
Despite its title, El Bulli: Cooking In Progress isn’t so much a food documentary as a depiction of a refined industrial process. For foodie types, Ferran Adrià’s three-Michelin-stars establishment is one of the most important homes of molecular gastronomy (or, as he defines it when imagining nervous diners’ reactions, all that stuff using liquid nitrogen).
by Leonard Pierce
So, because I am a self-hating jerk, I was flitting around a bunch of the right-blogs yesterday, to see what horrifying inhumane garbage they had to say about the Norway slaughter. And one of the most common threads, especially at Ace of Spades and Confederate Yankee, was a variant of “He should have tried that shit in Texas”. Implying, of course, that a well-armed population would have cut the massacre, and any like it, well short: a clever way to make the absurd argument that strict gun laws are to blame for massive gun deaths.
Summer vacation is in full swing, which may explain why there’s less writing than usual here from the gang what used to contribute to Nerve’s beloved and/or largely forgotten Screengrab pop culture blog…
…but in the meantime, please to enjoy a pre-Comic Con interview with Exiler Andrew Osborne regarding his Image comic Blue Estate!)
After 10 years, seven movies, six Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers, four directors, two dead parents, one grating house elf, and incalculable amounts of CG wizardry, pubescent growing pains, budding romances, and apocalyptic fire and brimstone, we’ve finally arrived: Bespectacled Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) squares off against amphibian-faced Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
PopMatters’ Michael D. Stewart has kind words for Image Comics’ Blue Estate (scripted by Screengrab-In-Exiler Andrew Osborne):
“Blue Estate has had an improbable run of success with three issues thus far redefining the pulp noir genre for the 21st century. But surely this must end. Perhaps not.”
by Leonard Pierce
Occasionally, I’d like to share somewhat longer excerpts from things I’ve read and been impressed by than my usual slender quote-of-the-day offerings. Here’s the first, from Hannah Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954:
A lame-brained zombies + evil wizards hybrid, special effects man Brian A. Metcalf’s feature debut Fading of the Cries (his previous directorial credits include 2006′s 24: The DVD Board Game) boasts lots of green-screen work, blurry and unconvincing action and a lot of alternately turgid and deliriously silly exposition. Writer Michael (Thomas Ian Nicholas), apparently hasn’t read a great deal of ghost fiction: he wonders what it means when he hears disembodied laughter in his new house’s attic at night.
