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The Karate Kid is a story of two lost souls, sans fish bowl, and a classic archetype of the surrogate father-son dynamic. Jaden Smith puts his cute kid mojo to work as Dre, who’s uprooted from his childhood home when his widowed mother is transferred to China as part of her job. The local handyman, Mr. Han, takes compassion on him when he’s continually beaten by bullies who are almost as skilled in kung fu as the handyman. Naturally, Mr. Han’s kung fu is better, both because the hero’s journey requires it to be, and because Mr. Han is played by Jackie Chan. As conventional as the story is (and familiar, given that it’s a remake of a beloved 80s classic), it works because it is a completely artless approach to a well-worn story.

Professionally executed from beginning to end, the exact purpose of Samuel Bayer’s New Nightmare (a.k.a. Nightmare Redux) isn’t really clear. Apart from the vibe that it’s trying to be a crowd-pleaser, the precise aim of how it expects to do that is muddy. Barely a remake, it’s more of a retread, gathering up some of the original film’s more indelible scenes, reshuffling them, and dealing them from the bottom of the deck — apparently at random — in an attempt to catch established fans off guard while simultaneously re-entrenching those scenes in the minds of a new generation that might (rather unbelievably) not be at all familiar with the source material.

The United States celebrates its Memorial Day in honor of fallen servicemen and women on Monday.  In remembrance for all fallen soldiers in countries around the world, we at Playtime have devised their favorites from war and anti-war cinema, all capturing the spirit of human struggle.

Matthew Kessen

Apocalypse Now (d. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) - Apocalypse Now is, to many, a definitive war movie. The book on which it is based, however - Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - actually has nothing to do with war. The novella’s Kurtz instead goes …

Now that the Academy has had its say on the supposed best films of 2009, we at Playtime have taken the occasion to reflect not only on the past year, but the last decade, and the best it had to offer. These lists by our contributors are anything but authoritative — we’re not experts, we’re enthusiasts — but if our survey of the decade in cinema isn’t comprehensive, it is full of conviction. The films on our lists may not be the “best of the decade,” but each of us believes that they are the best that we’ve seen. The Aughts were a fertile and creatively fecund ten years for filmmaking around the world, and the films offered here reflect that. Enjoy.

The Playtime Staff discuss Oscar-winning pictures, past and present. And we slapfight a little over Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, because that’s the kind of shop we run here.

Part of the fun of watching a Scorsese film is being surprised by the brio with which he stages and edits his sequences; his camera roams fluidly or the composition pops like a flashbulb perhaps the narrative even takes an unexpected turn that doesn’t feel like a prosaic “twist.” Shutter Island, however, looks and feels exactly like you’d expect it to for any film with this synopsis: “U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner arrive at an isolated psychiatric facility for the criminally insane in the mid-1950s to investigate the disappearance of a patient who murdered her children. As ominous clues are raised that suggest a deeper, darker mystery, Teddy begins to question the motives of everyone around him, and perhaps his own sanity…” Guess the twist. Go ahead. Guess.

When it comes to fan films (as opposed to other media), resource constraints tend to impose upon the creativity a little more heavily, since the creation of an aesthetically successful motion picture requires a delicate alchemy combining the best of every kind of artistic medium invented to this point. It can be expensive, and it can be even more difficult to find collaborators whose enthusiasm for a project is matched by their skill. That’s why a fan film as tremendous as Grayson, directed by John Fiorella, is a major accomplishment. Beyond being such a great example of the fan film, it arrived at a pivotal moment in pop culture, emerging as the quintessential superhero film of the decade.

James Cameron hates humanity. In the decade plus since Titanic confirmed him as Hollywood’s fiducial king of the world, Cameron’s right wing militarism has found a way to harmoniously converge with his leftist, egalitarian ecological supremacy in Avatar. That Cameron has been a leading pioneer of special effects throughout his entire career is not in question; that Avatar represents an incremental step forward is also unquestionable. But this is not a triumphant return. It’s a political screed of addle-brained intensity that lashes itself to the golden bough of “relevance” and instead rings a loud, clear note of bitter misanthropy.

Strasbourg is a city in northeastern France, soaked in the history of Western civilization. It is older than the Julian calendar; it has changed hands and names, and it has been at the forefront of seismic shifts in culture and the site of some of humanity’s darkest moments. I’ve never been there, and it strikes me as odd that Strasbourg is not a city that surfaces much in pop culture. In the context of Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia, the most incredible contextual reference to Strasbourg to me is that Strasbourg was the home of Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press.

Perhaps the primary reason that Cold Souls has drawn comparisons to Spike Jonze’s film is because they both touch on metaphysics — apparently an area best addressed in the 21st century by celebrity culture. When a recognizable public figure gets all meta, it’s easy to take metatext as metaphysics. Secularism hasn’t left us much recourse to traditional spirituality. Whereas Being John Malkovich recycled the concept of the homunculus to explore role playing and immortality (and, of course, their intersections with art), Cold Souls literally distills these themes to an essence that can be bottled up and stored in New Jersey at a very reasonable price.