TheRetroCritic

Tim Burton's latest, Big Eyes , tells the true story of 1950's-60's artist Margaret Keane and her relationship with then-husband Walter Keane in what is the director's first biopic since Ed Wood . Though the film does explore Margaret's (Amy Adams) art and its popularity, the focus here is on how Walter Keane's (Christoph Waltz) appropriation of his wife's work changed her life in a time when women had little say. After Margaret allows Walter to take all the credit for her big eyed creations (despite a clear initial reluctance), the become something of a sensation and the couple's lifestyle improves radically over the course of only a few years but the cost of giving up her artistic rights become too much for Margaret who is soon forced to live a lie. Tim Burton directing Ed Wood made perfect sense: a big fan of horror and sci-fi B-movies, the man behind the likes of Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks!  wanted to pay homage to another hugely enthusiast

In this 47th episode, Adam (aka The RetroCritic) and fellow film buff Jamie discuss movie news, their best and worst of 2014, review The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies , Dumb And Dumber To  and talk retro stuff. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE Email us here if you have any questions, requests or contributions:  bigrewindpodcast@gmail.com Or simply comment below :) Oh and you can also find us on  iTunes  and now  Stitcher  where you can subscribe to the podcast and download every episode thusfar! @TheRetroCritic #TheBigRewind retrocriticblog.blogspot.com thebigrewind.blogspot.com youtube.com/TheRetroCritic youtube.com/Cablogula

Who knew that 20 years and one sub-par prequel later, Dumb And Dumber would actually receive its long talked-about sequel starring one-off hit comedy duo Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels? Suck me sideways... Somehow, the Farrelly Brothers made it happen and this year we were treated to more dumb in the cartoonishly-titled Dumb And Dumber To . The film was a box-office hit in the U.S. and has been doing surprisingly well all over but was it truly worth the wait? Is Harry and Lloyd's comeback a glorious one or an Icelandic Snow Owl-style catastrophe? Being a die hard Dumb And Dumber fan since childhood myself, the bar was raised pretty high in terms of expectations but, admittedly, the idea of seeing a sequel with these guys alone was enough of a treat that I could forgive a heck of a lot. And so I did of a sequel boasting some great jokes and energetic, ridiculously fun performances from the two leads but also an unfocused, uneven script, a lazy storyline and a whole string of

With all the many movie versions of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" out there, it's rather difficult to pick one to talk about but, growing up, one of the most stand-out versions for me personally had to be Mickey's Christmas Carol , a 1983 Disney short feature with, obviously, Scrooge McDuck (voiced by Alan Young) taking on the role of the iconic grump Ebeneezer Scrooge. Of course, many other classic Disney characters portray key roles from the story: Mickey is Bob Cratchit, Goofy is Jacob Marley, you've got Donald Duck as Scrooge's nephew, Daisy Duck as Scrooge's old flame (which is weird when you think about it), Minnie Mouse as Cratchit's wife, Jiminy Cricket as one of the ghosts, even Chip and Dale show up for a cameo. Pete pops up near the end as the ghost of Christmas future, mostly to terrify younger viewers. As a kid, that last part, Scrooge falling down a fiery pit inside his own grave as a hooded Pete laughs his butt off, nearl

After the resounding success of Twilight , director Catherine Hardwicke went on to direct a more teen-friendly, melodramatic take on a classic Grimm tale with Red Riding Hood . The film, it turned out, had very little to do with Little Red Riding Hood and was mostly just a thinly-disguised excuse to have yet another supernatural love triangle plot involving werewolves and young girls with mixed emotions. Oh, and Billy Burke. Gotta have Billy Burke. Amanda Seyfried is Valerie, the red hood-wearing gal who falls for a woodcutter when her family decides to set her up with another young man who is much more well-off. This is all mostly irrelevant and uninteresting and the movie itself seems more interested in its "whodunit" plot which involves a telepathic werewolf (don't ask) who is terrorising the village and some nonsense about how Mars, when aligned with the Moon, can affect the werewolf's bite or whatever. The big question throughout the film being who cou

What's this?! A movie that's both perfect for Christmas AND Halloween, not to mention a treat for Burtonites and Oingo Boingo aficionados? What. Is. This? It's The Nightmare Before Christmas , of course. Henry Selick's stop-motion Disney classic based on the gothic surrealism of Tim Burton who contributed the story and the characters while Danny Elfman not only took on the music and the lyrics but voiced the Pumpkin King himself, Jack Skellington, during the songs with Chris Sarandon on voicing duties the rest of the time. The film quickly became a Christmas and Halloween tradition since its plot cleverly merged both holidays in a unique way without coming off as overly gimmicky. After a thrilling opening number, "This Is Halloween", which introduces us to Halloweentown and its spooky inhabitants (vampires, witches, you name it), we finally meet Skellington, the bony showman who has been making the best out of every single Halloween, wowing the to

I break my own promise to not go and see another Hunger Games movie by... Going to see the new Hunger Games movie .

Review now available on the new website . 

Here's a movie which, on paper, couldn't have sounded like a good idea. Peter Sellers playing an Indian guy in a film where basically nothing in the way of a plot happens? Ok... Luckily, with Blake Edwards directing, Sellers' slapstick genius at its peak and that kitsch 60's charm in full force, The Party manages to not only recapture some of that Pink Panther magic but work completely as its own concept movie. The concept being that pretty much the entire film takes place during a party in one single location: a giant fancy Hollywood home complete with parrots, defective toilets, button-operated furniture, alcoholic waiters and many more things conveniently designed to give Peter Sellers' candid character plenty to trip on, fall into or mistakenly destroy. Hrundi V. Bakshi (Sellers) is a bumbling film extra who accidentally explodes a set he's working on and is soon told he'll never work in Hollywood again. Through a clerical error, however, in

I review Christopher Nolan's latest. It's called Interstellar , in case you don't know.