SelfIndulgent

At the tender age of 21, Dave Lombardo helped change modern music. The drummer was the propulsive force behind Slayer’s third album, 1986’s Reign in Blood: a record that upped the ante of thrash metal, kicked the doors open for further extremity and remains a landmark of the genre.“I don’t think we thought we were creating something special,” says Lombardo, now 58. “I don’t think we knew what we were doing. We just knew that whatever it was, it felt good.” Lombardo left and rejoined Slayer several times over their…

What is an Alejandro G. Iñárritu film if it not powered by a dizzying sense of movement? The now-iconic sequence from the Mexican director's debut Amores Perros follows a car crash with such propulsive energy and style that you almost forget to breathe. Amores Perros was the birth of a major filmmaking talent that would take the Mexican director further away from his roots and plant his genius in Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone- the biggest names have worked with him. Iñárritu has gone…

20th Century Fox For better or worse, Baz Luhrmann’s career has been almost entirely defined by excess. Sometimes it works, in the case of Moulin Rogue! and Elvis, but at the other end of the spectrum live self-indulgent slogs like Netflix bust The Get Down and 2008 epic Australia. In the buildup to its release, there was genuine awards season buzz gathering around the sweeping romance set against the backdrop of World War II, but in the end all the lavish tale had to show for it was a solitary Academy Award…

via MGM Despite boasting a star-studded cast, a hard-boiled plot, and the sort of interwoven web of narrative mystery that can regularly sink its hooks into critics and audiences alike, Paul McGuigan’s 2006 modern noir Lucky Number Slevin was tagged in many reviews with the dreaded verbiage of “self-indulgent” and “pretentious”. However, a lot of people disagree with that opinion, at least based on the film’s enduring popularity. Over 150 critics may have deemed it worthy of a middling 52 percent score on Rotten…

via Universal Having been showered in praise adulation, and no shortage of awards season glory after helming the game-changing Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson finally had carte blanche to write his own Hollywood ticket. For his next move, he opted to do what plenty of filmmakers in his position could only dream of, by remaking his favorite-ever movie King Kong. Armed with an eye-watering $207 million budget (which made it the most expensive production in history at the time), Jackson set out to deliver…