the blog of nathan loding

What I wanted when I sat down to watch The Wolf­man was quite sim­ple: some gore, a good (no, great) effect when tran­si­tion­ing, and some gothic imagery. What I got was exactly that – and noth­ing more. I must admit that I enjoyed myself through­out. Yes, it’s mind­less, and brought noth­ing new to the story. But it was fun, vio­lent, and dark.

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The vision of the world after apoc­a­lypse is noth­ing new to cin­ema. Nor was it to books when McCarthy’s orig­i­nal book was pub­lished. A gray world that is des­o­late and fore­bod­ing, ashy and vio­lent. Gangs run amuck, tak­ing hostages; few good men still exist, the hard­ships of their new life tak­ing obvi­ous tolls. The dif­fer­ence with The Road is that it’s per­sonal and up-close. The Road has man­aged to take the essence of the book and present it to us suc­cess­fully on the screen.

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With the teenage vam­pire craze under way it’s hard to find a good vam­pire movie any more. (Although I’m not really cer­tain I can blame Stephanie Meyer for it, good vam­pire movies were hard to come by before.) This is one that makes a valiant, orig­i­nal attempt at reclaim­ing the genre. Unfor­tu­nately, the film turns a lit­tle too grotesquely comedic in the mid­dle of the sec­ond half for it to have been a bril­liant picture.

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