Jonathan Crocker

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (voted one of the worst movies ever). Mission To Mars (Rolling Stone: “DePalma has never made a dull movie. Until now.”). Red Planet (Variety: “Mission To Mars had style to burn compared to Red Planet”). Ghosts Of Mars (killed John Carpenter’s career for nine years). Doom (one of Time magazine’s 10 Worst Ever Videogame Adaps). Mars Attacks! (Budget: $100m. US box-office: $38m). Mars Needs Moms (the biggest box-office bomb of all time).

If history has taught us one lesson, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie about Mars, it had better star Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lady with three boobies. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

Grim, bilious and maddeningly unsurprising, Tim Burton’s journey down the rabbit-hole Frankensteins together severed portions of two Alice books and Lewis Carroll’s epic poem Jabberwocky but ends up missing… what? Its “muchness”? Dodging a corset and a snooty suitor in the tedious intro, Alice (Defiance starlet Mia Wasikowska) is now a 19-year-old runaway bride who grapples with her own bodily changes and ill-fitting clothes before donning a suit of armour, decapitating a dragon and drinking its blood. This isn’t Uncle Walt’s Wonderland, for sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bobbing helplessly like a tiny cork, a 12-year-old boy drifts alone in the middle of the freezing Atlantic Ocean. With every minute, he’s dragged further and further away from his father, who’s also been caught in the rip current that’s left them treading water far out to sea.

Darkness falls. By now, the father can barely see the boy. He’s scared. His son has autism. Jellyfish begin to sting them both.

The man calls into the night: “To infinity…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

1. The real… Rocky Balboa

It ain’t how hard you can hit… Sly Stallone based Rocky Balboa on no-hope heavyweight slugger Chuck Wepner after seeing him battle invincible world champion Muhammad Ali in an extraordinary fight in 1975. No one expected Wepner to last three rounds. But he took everything Ali could throw – then floored the champ with a bodyshot in the ninth. “Hey, I knocked him down!” grinned Wepner as he went back to his corner. “Well done,” replied his trainer. “But he looks really pissed off now…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

“I’ve seen the movie. It’s fantastic,” says Prince Of Persia’s star Jake Gyllenhaal. His director Mike Newell is even more pleased with it. “It’s colossal,” he nods. Their producer Jerry Bruckheimer backs them both up. “I thought it was brilliant,” he declares. “I loved it. It was just amazing.”

Typical. Hollywood types giving themselves a big pat on the back. Actually, no. They’re not talking about Prince Of Persia. They’re talking about the movie that everyone’s (still) talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

As he touched the cold trigger of his handgun, Nicolas Cage paused to contemplate what he was about to do. Stood smiling in the middle of his gun sights was a tiny, blonde, button-cute 12-year-old girl. His daughter, in fact. Suddenly, eating a live cockroach didn’t seem so bad. ‘We really have to make it clear there’s a bullet-proof vest underneath there,’ he thought nervously to himself, as he smiled reassuringly back at her. ‘This is a weird day… A very weird day.’ He squeezed the trigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

1. Fish Tank

Powerful, punishing, funny, beautifully observed… Way too easy to lob adjectives at Brit writer/director Andrea Arnold’s superb second movie. The film you probably missed this year is the film you can’t afford to.

Watch the trailer or find out more…  Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Just after he finished making True Lies, James Cameron picked up the phone and called Stanley Kubrick. They spend a day together watching Cameron’s film in the basement of the house in the English countryside where Kubrick was now a virtual hermit. Kubrick was fascinated by Cameron’s effects shots, wanted to know exactly how he’d hung a man on the missile of a harrier jump-jet and fired him through a skyscraper. Cameron must have been thrilled. He’d finally returned the favour. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

1. Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981)

“I was hired by a very unscrupulous producer. He put me with an Italian crew who spoke no English, then fired me a couple of weeks into the shoot and took over directing. Turns out, he’d done that on his two previous films. He wouldn’t show me a foot of film that I’d shot, so I went in and ran the film for myself. I made a few changes – I don’t know if the editor ever noticed – and it was fine. So I thought, ‘I actually can do this. I just fell in with a pack of thieves and whackos.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

Joel is taller, wears dark suits. Ethan is shorter, dresses down. Joel looks over to your left shoulder while he’s talking. Ethan looks over to your right shoulder. Sometimes they’ll interrupt each other. Sometimes they’ll finish each other’s sentences. They’re, y’know, kinda funny lookin’. No one really understands the Coen brothers or their movies. But everyone loves them. Their latest movie is called A Serious Man. It’s about… well, try asking them. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]