CineNiche

May 10, 2021 - May 16, 2021 Hello readers. What a confusing week? The CDC is telling people that if they are vaccinated they can be outside or inside uncrowded places without a mask. This news was taken as: Woo Hoo Open F*ckin' Season Folks! It's safe to say that some are worried that people may - as strange as it sounds - lie about being vaccinated. But, regardless, I have a doctor now. There were no more excuses. It's been over a year since I've seen a doctor and I suffer chronic pain in my head, stomach, lungs, and where the sun don't shine. But, it was COVID times. You can't see your doctor during COVID TIMES! Needless to say, that first visit was a whirlwind of complaints. Mostly from me, but my doctor confused me for a different patient right when he walked in the room. My lizard brain was like, "Call me whatever you want as long as you fix me." When I realized there was no joke, I corrected him. There's nothing like hearing your new doctor ...

Poster from Alamo Drafthouse Reviews and essays abound for Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon's Cabin In The Woods . Some compare Cabin to Scream while others are convinced that Cabin exceeds Scream as a post-modern text. We belong to the latter camp. If you haven't seen Cabin then you shouldn't be looking at reviews so long after the the film's release. In 1996 Wes Craven along with a brilliantly written script by Kevin Williamson breathed new life into the slasher film. They took all of the archetypical constructs of the slasher sub-genre and directly exposed them to the audiences while staying within the confines of the genre. This was not new, parodies had done this in the past, but Scream kept a straight face and managed to produce fear. Spoof and parody of horror has been around since the days of Abbot & Costello, but more direct to our discussion is the 1982 classic Student Bodies . Made in the midst of the early 80's slasher boom, Stu...

This is our formal declaration: Steven Soderbergh is not an autuer.  While others may have already came to this decision, we had hope.  With a director like Soderbergh with around 27 titles under his belt we had assumed there may be some subtle nuance of authorial style, some flourish that when seen one can say, "oh, there's that Soderbergh moment."  This is not to say there is no merit to his work, and overall we find his films enjoyable, but his mainstream fare is only entertaining the first time.  Contagion is no different. We at CineNiche believe Contagion to be a more horrific rendering of Wolfgang Peterson's Outbreak .  We were drawn to Contagion not by the overwhelmingly star studded cast, but by the theme of apocalypse.  Of course we had assumed the film would play out like the awesome first half of The Stand and on a lesser scale it does.  It creates a world of palpable paranoia while trying to maintain the logistics of an epi...