Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
October 13, 2025 October 13, 2025 | Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896

Search Results

Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of jhunewsletter.com - The Johns Hopkins News-Letter's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query.

3 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.

Man on Fire is schlock-on-a-stick

(04/29/04 5:00am)

Sometimes film trailers reveal more about the real nature of a film than they're meant to. The trailers for Man on Fire show a scene in which crazy ol' Christopher Walken describes the film's main character, Creasy (Denzel Washington), saying, "Creasy's art is death, and he's about to paint his masterpiece." In this great line lies the interesting premise: Creasy has dedicated his entire life to bloodshed and is now prepared to execute his most fully realized piece to date. But after seeing Man on Fire, it's clear that Walken is not actually talking about the film's main character, or death. What he's really talking about is director Tony Scott, who is the true artist, and Man on Fire is his masterpiece of schlock.

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2004/04/man-on-fire-is-schlock-on-a-stick-16228

Kill Bill II overdevelops simple characters

(04/15/04 5:00am)

Watching Kill Bill Vol. 2, one is reminded of a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in which the narrator talks to a professor about the cartographers of his country. In their quest for greater accuracy and detail, the cartographers make maps with increasingly smaller ratios of scale, until finally they create a map with a 1:1 ratio. The farmers object, saying it would block out the sun, and so the map is never used. In making Kill Bill Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino made the same mistake as the map-makers: By trying to make his characters larger than life, he burdened the vision of his movie as a re-working of vintage kung-fu movies' violent chic.

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2004/04/kill-bill-ii-overdevelops-simple-characters-30620

Hellboy is a little devil of a movie

(03/31/04 5:00am)

Director and screenwriter Guillermo Del Toro's new film Hellboy is an adaptation of Mike Mignola's long-running comic book series of the same name. It follows the exploits of a big red demon, Hellboy (Ron Perlman), who, toward the end of World War II, was brought from hell to earth through an inter-dimensional portal by the Nazis, but was then intercepted by U.S. troops.

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2004/03/hellboy-is-a-little-devil-of-a-movie-49006