Tag: Marc Olsen

Catching up with SXSW coverage, here’s Mark Olsen’s report on “Attack the Block“… Fan favorites Simon Pegg and Nick Frost release their new film “Paul” this week, but in Austin on Saturday night it was another project related to the “Shaun of the Dead” duo and their director pal Edgar Wright that had audiences lined up around the block outside the Alamo Ritz theater: Joe Cornish’s “Attack the Block,” about what happens when a gang of English thugs encounter some otherworldly creatures. Though the film is the feature directing debut for Cornish, the British writer-director-performer is no novice. He is well-known in England for the television comedy program “The Adam and Joe Show” and has more recently worked as a writing partner to Wright on “The Adventures of Tin-Tin: Secret of the Unicorn” and “Ant-Man.” Wright, an executive producer on “Attack the Block,” was ...

Marc Olsen checks in with ”The Innkeepers” at 24 Frames, our must-read sister blog. Here’s an excerpt… Sara Paxton in “The Innkeppers” (Dark Sky Films) Ti West does not believe in ghosts. The 30-year-old writer/director/editor of “The Innkeepers,” which will have its world premiere Saturday as part of the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, considers himself a skeptic when it comes to matters of the supernatural. But while shooting his previous film, the slow-burn satanic horror flick “The House of the Devil,” strange things happened at the hotel where the cast and crew were staying. So strange that West ended up writing a script about a haunted hotel. The Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Conn., not only provided the inspiration for “The Innkeepers,” but West was able to shoot there as well. In spring of last year, the production ...

Marc Olsen sat through “Season of the Witch,” here’s an excerpt from his review for the Los Angeles Times… Directed by the perennially hollow Dominic Sena from a script by Bragi Schut, “Season of the Witch” is all seams. It never balances out its competing desires to be a rollicking medieval adventure, a thoughtful meditation on faith and even a buddy road movie. What’s most disappointing, though, is how Nicolas Cage seems to be sleepwalking through so much of it. He and Ron Perlman are such odd, idiosyncratic actors that they give any scene of the two of them just talking a freewheeling, offhanded energy, like outtakes from an unseen Hope and Crosby picture. But there are only occasional glimmers of Cage’s singularly eccentric line-readings or moments when he turns conventional reaction shots on their head. Mostly they crop up ...