Josh Tate

Any aficionado of L.A cult movie offerings worth his or her salt has come to appreciate both Phil Blankenship of Ameoba Records' series of midnight putridity at the New Beverly Cinema and the skewed, truly debased programming of Hadrian Belove of the Silent Theater. Saturday night, these two titans of trash joined forces to expose a wider audience to Dangerous Men. By a show of hands, only about 10 members of the audience at...

Chan-wook Park cemented an already burgeoning reputation among passionate cinephiles with his 2003 film Oldboy. While his latest effort, Thirst, doesn't rise nearly to that level, it is an alternately fascinating, rigorous and maddening piece of cinema. Loosely based on Emile Zola's novel Thérèse Raquin, the film follows Sang-hyeon, a Catholic priest who is accidentally transformed into a sort of vampire by a failed medical experiment (note: Zola's novel does not have Christian vampires). Sang-hyeon...

If you're planning to see one movie this weekend, you should re-jigger your schedule and see four! Funny People would be an excellent place to start. It's Rogen, Apatow and Sandler's best film to date (LAist review here). Sure, it's not a straight comedy, but it is damn funny. You'll leave the film in a good mood, but that will quickly turn into righteous anger once you've seen The Cove. The best movie at the...

The lazy response to Judd Apatow's Funny People will be that it isn't as, well, funny as his two previous films, The 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up. The subtext of that observation, of course, is that it isn't as good as those other films, and that is a howlingly wrong presumption. True, Funny People is not Apatow's funniest film, but -- true also -- it is his best. While not a straight comedy,...

Australia's least-scary horror villain -- Bandageman. | Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing I don't know if I've gotten even nerdier, or if documentaries have gotten even better, but half the films I've seen or wanted to see this year are non-fictional in nature. Which is why I'm stoked for DocuWeeks 2009, playing through the end of August at the Arclight. Sponsored by the International Documentary Association, the festival features compelling characters & stranger-than-fiction stories...

It may seem like a thankless struggle at times, but I will not rest until everyone who needs to see Battlestar Galactica has seen Battlestar Galactica. I don't think there has ever been a show so great that has been viewed by so few. Remedy that today! I sort of like the graininess of my current Spinal Tap DVD, but if you'd rather see Nigel, David, Derek and, uh, Liam in delicious 1080P than today...

Other than The Cove, I didn't see a better film this year at the Sundance Film Festival than Humpday (review here). It's inventive; it's challenging; it's odd but, most of all, it's funny. Very, very funny. The premise may scare some away -- two straight friends decide to have gay sex for a porn film festival -- but the treatment of the material is so perfect that I can't imagine anyone not loving it. While...

Quiznos returns to more traditional marketing | Photo courtesy of The Cisela Foundation | International Film Circuit, Inc. If you're anything like me, your Fridays are packed with dead bodies. No? Make some time this week to rectify that situation. The Warner Grand's deadly double of The Giant Gila Monster & The Giant Spider Invasion features radiation, rock & roll, and most importantly, a raffle for a dead body at intermission. Once you've won,...

Rarely do major film studios finance films as ambitious as Watchmen and with the middling success the film enjoyed, it's likely to become rarer still. Which is a damn, damn shame. Zach Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel has its share of issues, but he did manage to get Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach and Nite Owl (II) just about perfect which is a huge triumph. Watchmen is a film that deserved greater financial support...

While it didn't manage to top the records of the deplorable Transformers 2: Racist CGI Moron Porn, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince did enjoy a fantastic weekend as it set a record for the franchise and easily won the weekend ($79.5M | $159.6M). Ice Age 3: More Ice Age placed second ($17.7M | $152M) while the aforementioned Transformers 2: Revenge of the Stupid gathered in a richly undeserved $13.7M ($363.8M). As expected, last week's...