The first known Ouija boards date back to 11th-12th century China. They were outlawed by the Qing Dynasty, but the practice spread across India and into the Roman and Greek empires and has remained to this day. The word “Ouija” was coined in 1901 by a man named William Fuld who started selling them as toys. His estate sold the business to the Parker Brothers in 1966, which sold it to Hasbro in 1991. Photo courtesy Universal Pictures.
How does Hasbro — Hasbro! — have a successful line of movies?
An obviously haunted Ouija board appears in Debbie’s (Shelly Henning) house. Weird stuff happens and she ends up dead. Her best friend, boyfriend and assorted others find the same board and the pattern repeats. The group stumbles around the edges of the decades-old mystery of the family that used to live in the house and the horrors they summoned into it.
The most bizarre thing about Ouija is that it’s kind of good. All the fundamentals of a good ghost story, a past of violence cropping up in a present of uncertainty, are in place.
An hour of shooting stuff and then suddenly 20 minutes in this apartment. Photos courtesy Columbia Pictures.
Sometimes a movie doesn’t need a particular hook to look really, really good. Fury is just another war movie, but it looked better than that. It isn’t quite.
Lt. Aldo Raine Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) has lead his tank crew across Africa and Europe into the heart of Germany during World War II, killin’ gnatsees killing Germans as they go. At the start of the film, the tank crew has lost its first member, a gunner. They’re soon assigned Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a typist who has never seen a tank, as his replacement. The core of the movie is Wardaddy turning Ellison into a killer.
Fury is designed expressly to make the audience uncomfortable. The film is a portrait of a group of men who are so constantly close to death it no longer has any effect on them. Wardaddy’s primary goal is to keep his crew alive and he goes to great extremes to do this. The film, in turn, goes to great extremes to explain how particularly tall his task is.
Tim Mooney (Ansel Elgort) and Brandy Beltmeyer (Kaitlyn Denver) don’t feature heavily in the movie, but they do in the promotional material. This is critical — they are vital in the audience’s mind without having to actually be central to the film. Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Men, Women & Children. Pretty broad subject, isn’t it?
Based on Chad Kultgen’s 2011 novel, the film follows a wide range of high schoolers and parents as they navigate the new world of communication media. The Trubys, Don (Adam Sandler) and Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt), no longer desire each other sexually. Their son, Chris (Travis Tope) has become addicted to domination porn on the Internet without their knowledge. The Mooneys, Kent (Dean Norris) and his son, Tim (Ansel Elgort), deal with their wife and mother’s recent abandonment. Brandy Beltmeyer (Kaitlyn Denver) deals with her mother, Patricia (Jennifer Garner), monitoring her every post and message on electronic media. Joan Clint (Judy Greer) takes racy pictures of her daughter, Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia) in an attempt to jump-start an acting career. And Allison Doss (Elena Kampouris) navigates the cold world of body-image issues and self-imposed malnourishment after becoming annorexic with the help of Tumblr chatroom Pretty Girls Don’t Eat.
This movie is all about sex, but not sexy sex. It’s about unsexy sex.
Dracula Begins Dracula Untold is a cliché-addled movie, ridden through with examples of everything moviemakers are consistently getting wrong right now.
Charles Dance is wonderful as the unnamed master vampire, who offers Vlad III a Faustian bargain to protect his homeland from the Turks. This storyline is largely ignored for the rest of the movie. Photos courtesy Universal Pictures.
In its bizarre version of Vlad III Tepes’ (Luke Evans) story, the Transylvanian prince was raised a child soldier in the Turkish army. Vlad was a feared warrior, killing thousands on the battlefield in service of the Ottoman Empire, earning him the moniker “The Impaler.” Ten years later, Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper) requests another batch of 1,000 child soldiers, and Vlad kills several messengers in response. The sultan marches on Transylvania, which has no standing army. Vlad makes a deal with an unnamed master vampire (Charles Dance) for the power to single-handedly defend his country.
The film is a computer-generated museum of annoying habits in action and horror movies from the last few years.
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