... FOR "MOVIE COINCIDENCE OF THE DAY #2"

In which we take a look at a series of odd movie coincidences - scenes, jokes, dialogue, even specific camera shots shared between two seemingly unrelated films. Anyone who's sat through a particular scene in a movie and thought, "Gee, haven't I seen someone do this somewhere before?" will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Continuing with our horror movie theme (a week after Halloween - so sue me), I offer this comparison between two "classics" of the genre, Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) and Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). One is a haunted house movie in which a middle-class American family find themselves under attack from a malevolent spirit. The other is an atypical slasher flick in which a group of all-American teenagers fall victim to a razor-fingered psychopath who kills them in their sleep. Couldn't be more different, right? Yet they share a single scene on common - in which a character is dragged across the walls and ceiling of her bedroom by an unseen demonic force:

... FOR "THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE" - PART 10

Genre:

SCIENCE-FICTION/FANTASY

Defined:

Space battles. Time travel. Journeys into the mystical unknown. The Science-Fiction/Fantasy films of 2000-2009 enjoyed a creative and financial resurgence unlike anything since the late 1970s, when Star Wars and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind ruled at the box office. Avatar, The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest passed $1 billion in worldwide grosses apiece, while Return Of The King took home 2004's Academy Award for Best Picture – the first Fantasy film in history to accomplish such a feat. The best genre titles aren't content to wow us with their Utopian futures and wondrous special effects; they also hold up a mirror to the social, political and philosophical issues of our times. They challenge us. The final frontier, indeed.

The Top Five:

5. Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009)

It might be too early to call it a great film, but J.J. Abrams' blockbuster relaunch of the U.S.S. Enterprise is certainly a great entertainment, which dives headfirst into action and never looks back. Like Batman Begins and Casino Royale before them, Paramount returned to the drawing board to offer a fresh perspective on what gave Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy and the rest such cross-generational appeal in the first place. Trekkies' hardcore devotion to canon, however, made a complete retrofitting next to impossible, so Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman busied themselves with a time travel plot that's both obvious and ingenious: obvious, because it's been done before, and ingenious, because the physics at play allow them free reign to tinker with the mythology without seriously uprooting the fan base. With its breathless pacing and candy-gloss textured set design, it makes an admittedly cultish sci-fi phenomenon officially "cool" again. And the cast is perfection.