California Literary Review

Profile of Matt Smith

Bio:

Matt Smith graduated from the University of South Carolina with
degrees in Film Studies and History. He is particularly fond of
horror and action genre films, and his past and upcoming research has
dealt with propaganda films, national cinemas and animation. Matt
reads mostly detective and crime fiction, and though he is well into
his adult life, he also reads what some may consider an inordinate
amount of comic books each and every week. He is currently in the
very early stages of researching a book on animated propaganda films
and patiently awaiting the return of Firefly (one can dream!) to
television.

Email Address:

matthew [dot] boyd [dot] smith [at] gmail.com

Web Site:

http://www.shadowspodcast.com

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

  • Movie Review: Fast Five
    Posted on 30 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    There are plenty of car chases, explosions, fistfights, and gunfights to hold the proceedings together, which is lucky considering the plotting is so wafer thin. As ridiculous and sometimes plain dumb a film as Fast Five is, I have to give it credit for going all the way and at least making an entertaining flick to kick-start the summer blockbuster season.

  • Movie Review: 13 Assassins
    Posted on 30 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    His new film, 13 Assassins is certainly his most mature work to date, and with few exceptions, it plays much like a traditional chanbara, or samurai period drama. There are hints of classic Kurosawa, as well as the blood-soaked infusion of more explicit action flicks like Samurai Rebellion and the Musashi saga.

  • The Weekly Listicle – Car (and Chase) Movies That Don’t Run On Diesel
    Posted on 28 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    This week Fast Five – which, as its title rather subtly implies, is the fifth film in the enormously (and bewilderingly) successful The Fast and the Furious franchise – opens nationwide and car culture gets another sugary sweet adrenaline rush. We here at The Fourth Wall are celebrating car movies and car chases this week to give you, our faithful readers, worthy alternatives in a Vin Diesel world.

  • An Interview with Writer/Director Julian Gilbey
    Posted on 19 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    I like to think of myself sometimes as a bit of a Method director, so what the characters are gonna do, I wanna do. Now, when I say “method”, I don’t mean with the kidnapping, no, no – that’s more the fictional side of things! No, it was with the climbing and the mountaineering. … Now that’s not to say we didn’t have quite a lot of wingeing for the opening sequence up the mountain, and you know, the crew got scared, and a rock almost fell on somebody; that’s just bad luck, and mountains are not a safe environment.

  • ActionFest 2011 Wrap-Up
    Posted on 13 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    ActionFest: The Film Festival with a Body Count! Even though it’s only in its second year as a film festival, Asheville’s ActionFest has begun to pull a considerable amount of weight as one of the premiere genre festivals in the world. Festival director Colin Geddes is a fifteen year veteran of festival programming, and has [...]

  • An Interview with Michael Jai White
    Posted on 10 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    Michael Jai White in a publicity still for Never Back Down 2 Michael Jai White has had a pretty fantastic career, with roles ranging from Spawn and Gambol in The Dark Knight to his own bonafide cult classic Black Dynamite. He’s back this year with Never Back Down 2, which premiered at ActionFest 2011 and [...]

  • Movie Review: Hanna
    Posted on 09 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    Hanna is a force to be reckoned with, and she doesn’t really have an equal, even with all of the high-level assassins brought in to hunt her down. Saoirse Ronan is great in the role — wholly believable and empathetic.

  • A Report from the Red State Tour
    Posted on 04 Apr 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    A simple, right to the point poster announces a stark change in material. Filmmaker Kevin Smith has taken a rather novel approach to releasing his latest film, Red State: he’s doing it entirely by himself. In an unprecedented move at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, during which he also went head [...]

  • The Weekly Listicle – Evil Houses, Evil Locations…Simply Evil
    Posted on 31 Mar 2011 in Movies, Movies & TV

    Welcome to another entry in the Fourth Wall Weekly Listicle, a weekly tour through the cinematic netherworlds of your ever-faithful Film and TV crew. I know that the writers here share a somewhat notorious obsession with remaining a bit genre-centric, but with James Wan’s really fantastic haunted house flick Insidious hitting theaters this week, I [...]

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