Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters represents the latest salvo in Hollywood’s barrage of “gritty/clever” updates on classic fairy tales, the littermate of Mirror Mirror, Snow White and the Huntsman, Red Riding Hood, Beastly, etc. (It won’t be the youngest of the lot for long, with Jack the Giant Slayer and Maleficent on the way.) All things considered, it’s been a brutally banal run. In a risk-averse industry of copycats, uninspired genre/subgenre streaks are not all that unusual, but still, there’s usually a progenitor, a movie that blows up the box office and triggers the cascade. With a little...  read more

New Trailer For Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Hollywood just can’t get enough of the fairytale genre. This time, they’re taking Hansel and Gretel and turning them into leather-clad grown-ups that hunt witches. Huffington Post recently uploaded a trailer of the children’s classic reboot in all of its leathery glory....  read more

Salute Your Shorts: Tim Burton's Short Films (Part 2, 1983-2010)

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.Last week, we took a look at Tim Burton’s early, pre-professional works, a combination of odd side projects and student films he worked on for the first twenty-four years of his life. But the success, relative though it may have been, of “Vincent” made Burton a professional director and led his career on a very different path than those of the rest of the animators at Disney. For reasons still somewhat unclear, Disney continued to...  read more