Email Author Mark Holcomb

2004 Stories by Mark Holcomb

• Broken Wing

  published December 14, 2004

  Remaking a movie that anybody with cable can watch twice a week seems a little foolhardy, particularly when the update is as perfunctory as John... More >>

• Film

  published November 30, 2004

  Somewhere amid the pulse-quickening image drool of the Blade franchise lurks an intriguing pop fable about the lunacy of (and attraction... More >>

• It's the Balm

  published October 19, 2004

  At some point on the curve, "eagerly anticipated" gives way to "fat chance"—just ask devotees of Keri Hulme or My Bloody Valentine. Or... More >>

• Film

  published October 19, 2004

  The slasher subgenre was cloned into oblivion years ago, but rogue bone-pickers continue to churn out one-shot resurrections intent on tweaking... More >>

• Film

  published October 19, 2004

  Running the gamut from stark social realism to character-driven comedy to purgative religious allegory, Maryo J. de los Reyes's Magnifico... More >>

• Film

  published October 19, 2004

  Like the current, seemingly never ending presidential campaign season, James Wan's Saw starts off incomprehensibly, turns nasty in a hurry,... More >>

• Books

  published September 21, 2004

  Most grown-up TV babies are unduly devoted to some crappy show or other, but it's a preoccupation that's usually indulged in private: It doesn't... More >>

• L.A. Inconsequential: Erstwhile Teen Sleazeball Hits the Wall

  published September 14, 2004

  That old saw that you should never meet your literary heroes ought to extend to their memoirs: Too much anguished explication of thorny... More >>

• The Truth Is Way Out There in Derivative Missing-Kid Flick

  published September 14, 2004

  It's tempting to write off The Forgotten sight unseen as just another entry in the perplexingly durable kid-in-jeopardy genre. But as... More >>

• Con Heir

  published August 31, 2004

  In 2002, Sony Pictures Classics released Nine Queens, a taut con-job caper movie from Argentina. Though heavily indebted to David Mamet's... More >>

• Once Upon a Time in the East: A Chinese B Western

  published August 24, 2004

  Sony Classics' entry in the summer action import sweepstakes, He Ping's Warriors of Heaven and Earth, is a fitfully rousing but too... More >>

• Film

  published August 17, 2004

  How do you siphon the laffs from a surefire gut-busting premise like city slickers stuck in the sticks, pursued by inbred yokels and randy... More >>

• Film

  published August 17, 2004

  Research shows that if you've seen three Godzilla movies you've seen 'em all, so it's fortunate that several of Toho's lesser-known monster... More >>

• Happy Landing: Childish Aussie Crashes Into Burg in Storybook Charmer

  published August 3, 2004

  While not on a par with the inspired mock-pubescent hysteria of Napoleon Dynamite, Jeff Balsmeyer's similarly binomial Danny... More >>

• Film

  published July 20, 2004

  Reportedly the most successful homegrown film in its native Burkina Faso, longtime director Daniel Kollo Sanou's leisurely, deliriously barbed... More >>

• Film

  published July 13, 2004

  A tedious deconstruction/send-up of '80s slasher flicks, Make a Wish fails on both counts: Combining all-gay characters with traditionally... More >>

• Meow Nix

  published July 13, 2004

  Nothing captures the essence of summer-blockbuster desperation quite like a billboard featuring an Oscar-winning actress on all fours. Or maybe... More >>

• 400 Grams and a Mule

  published July 6, 2004

  Like a super-concentrated plot thread from Traffic, only without parallel story lines for pressure-relieving diversion, Joshua Marston's... More >>

• Film

  published June 15, 2004

  No Triplets of Belleville, this French animated feature was hatched as an idea for a video game, and it shows: With its hasty computer... More >>

• Physician, Steel Thyself: Quirky Quebec Villagers Set a Trap

  published June 8, 2004

  Crowd-pleasing, easy-to-mimic film formulas are like undetected viruses: Eventually they turn up everywhere. Witness Seducing Doctor Lewis,... More >>

• The Return of the Giant Hydraulic Penis

  published June 1, 2004

  More than a decade ago, Shinya Tsukamoto established himself as Japanese cinema's arch-poet of sexual hysteria with the festival favorite... More >>

• Beat Happening

  published May 25, 2004

  The legend of the Beats pivots on one of the counterculture's hoariest clichés: Sensitive, creative misfits—Allen Ginsberg, Jack... More >>

• Books

  published May 25, 2004

  Ex-Kerouac flame and tireless memoirist Joyce Johnson continues her incisive dissection of late-20th-century boho Manhattan in Missing Men,... More >>

• The Buried Life

  published May 25, 2004

  Cult writers typically spend their lives in wretched obscurity and their literary afterlives in a state of ever narrowing veneration; precious few... More >>

• Hello, Dolly!: Bad Seed Fails to Take Root in Cloning Thriller

  published April 27, 2004

  Last year's cinematic dead-kid-apalooza makes the leap from think-piece topic to overextended formula with Godsend. Working from the... More >>