May 2009
1 post
Chè: Part One and Chè: Part Two (Steven...
Practically an $65 million experimental film, or at least a conceptual art object above all else. First half is the more conventional of the two, with a genuinely rousing climax. It’s probably necessary for context, but I could have done without the interview segments and UN speechifying—too familiar from a thousand other biopics. Second half is repetitive and punishing—the...
January 2009
1 post
The Archies: The top 27 things in the world, 2008
Archies explanation
Archies Hall of Fame: Achewood
Bánh Mì
The Wire, Season 5
“Saro”
Silent Light
Brunch at Motley Cow
Plankton
Tichu
Iowa City
Merlin Mann
Z’mariks Noodle Cafe
The Ibiza Rhapsody
Chumby
The Road
Animal Collective
November 4
“Seven”
Comics Curmudgeon
Things
“She’s Gone” video
Lamy Safari - Lime Green...
1 tag
Top 40 Things in the World (2006)
Archies time!
Valentine for Perfect Strangers
I’m Alan Partridge
Emergency & I
Mountain Dew LiveWire
Dulcie dancing to “Sexyback”
Walt & Skeezix Book One
Coconut Curry Chicken at Pei Wei
The MacBook Pro
Ruby on Rails
The Upside Down Show
Dulcie’s whale sheets
The Name of the World
Achewood
Ys
November 7
“Almost Everything is Boinga...
April 2006
1 post
1 tag
Four non-kid songs I sing to Dulcie at night-night...
Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths - Disappointment
Duncan - Paul Simon - Religious hypocrisy and sexual awakening
A Day in the Life - The Beatles - Cosmic indifference
Here Comes a Regular - The Replacements - Alcoholism
January 2005
3 posts
1 tag
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (Stephen...
Second on the Skandies roundup, this was the first kids movie I actually attended with a kid since I myself was a kid. Believe me this feels much less creepy than sitting there by yourself in the middle of packs of kids and their beleagured parents. Even if your kid is really way too young to actually watch the movie. I have not seen the SpongeBob TV show, though I’m very curious about it due to...
1 tag
Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, 2002)
For the last few years my Januaries have been mostly taken up by a mad scramble to see a heap of 2004-eligible titles before the deadline for the Skandies poll I participate in. The first title this year is Oasis, out on dvd, a South Korean film about the doomed romance between a mentally slow misfit and a woman with severe cerebral palsy. A Hollywood version of this story is simply too horrible...
1 tag
La Dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Since the birth of my daughter 17 months ago, I’ve been able to mostly keep up with the new releases I want to see, and I can still sneak in dvd’s a few times a week, but the number of repertory screenings I’m able to get to has dipped severely. In fact, last year I saw only 4 older films in a theater, and one of those (THX 1138) was in a multiplex. (The others were The Battle of Algiers, The...
May 2004
2 posts
1 tag
The Ladykillers (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 2004)
I finally caught up with this, and yep, by my reckoning it’s the Coens’ worst movie, and by a decent margin. I was expecting something more mainstream than their usual fare (why did I think this? The awful trailer? The presence of Tom Hanks? The fact it’s a remake?), but it’s pure Coens–blatantly unreal setting, crude stereotypes, silly accents, violent slapstick, egregiously elaborate dialogue....
1 tag
Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004)
Lean and mean and unpretentious (perhaps to a fault), and, like most “serious” horror these days, more gory than scary. Romero in ‘79 could only dream about Snyder’s CGI-enhanced mayhem–like when a speeding truck plows through a group of zombies, knocking each flat with a smear of blood and a sickening thud. I need to rewatch the reputedly deeper original (which I haven’t seen since high school...
January 2004
1 post
1 tag
21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, 2003)
Tragic, philsophical, and serious as a heart transplant, with hand-held camerawork, grainy photography, and three huge, nakedly emotional performances. Arty Oscar bait, in other words. Unlike Pulp Fiction or The Sweet Hereafter (or even Iñárritu’s debut, Amores Perros), the scrambled chronology doesn’t really provide any particular narrative payoff—it’s interesting on a...
April 2003
1 post
1 tag
Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe,...
Ho-hum documentary only a tiny step removed from those bland, promotional “making of” docs slapped on mediocre DVD’s. The subject–Terry Gilliam’s disastrous aborted production The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which left his investors $30 million in debt–seems to promise Quixotic acts of filmmaking hubris on top of bureaucratic nightmares right out of Brazil, but what we eventually find out is that...
September 2002
4 posts
1 tag
Chess Fever (V.I. Pudovkin, Nikolai Shpikovsky,...
A goofy trifle, with as far as I can tell no revolutionary content whatsoever. Pretty lame, really. C
1 tag
The Crazy Ray (René Clair, 1925)
For about 10 minutes (that’s two-thirds of the running time), the gorgeous images of a sleeping Paris had me enraptured. Then came the half-hearted plot resolution and the strange, clipped ending. B-
1 tag
No Such Thing (Hal Hartley, 2001)
I’ve been going around for years telling everyone that I am not a Hal Hartley fan, but this is the third film in a row of his I’ve been taken with, so I officially recant. I think it’s that lately he’s been integrating his sometimes painfully arch quirks into a more expansive and accessible emotional framework. No Such Thing’s problems are right there on the surface, readily identifiable...
1 tag
The Joyless Street (G.W. Pabst, 1925)
Ridiculous happy ending aside, this is a servicable expressionist melodrama– fiery and hysterical, with nice tracking shots. Pabst’s camera loves Asta Nielsen and especially Garbo (who has many opportunities for that signature roll of the head), but his characters never really feel like more than thematic constructs; I found myself missing the psychological complexity of more sophisticated...
June 2002
1 post
1 tag
Dogtown and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001)
The strength of this paean to a group of rebellious and innovative 70s-era skateboarders lies in its gorgeous and dynamically edited archival footage and photographs: I’d never before thought of skateboarding as an art form (as the movie claims more than once) but this stuff sure made me a believer for 90 minutes. Unfortunately, though, this is first and foremost a bid for immortality, and the...
April 2002
4 posts
1 tag
Scratch (Doug Pray, 2001)
A solid, informative documentary on turntablism. It looks nice (it was actually shot on film), it’s paced and edited with flair, and Pray clearly knows the right questions to ask his subjects. Never quite transcends being “solid” and “informative”, though. B
1 tag
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg,...
The 20th-Anniversary Abomination, “improved” with cutesy CGI and some judicious sound work. I thought Spielberg had a smidgen more class than George Lucas, but I was wrong. Anyway, I remember bawling my eyes out at this as a 13-year old, but I was surprised at how little of it was actually burned into my skull. For instance, I think I had no idea, back in 1982, that E.T. and Eliott are actually...
1 tag
No Man's Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001)
At its heart, this is a small story–three characters trapped between enemy lines in the Bosnian war–and as long as Tanovic hones his focus accordingly, this is a exceedingly tense and well-told absurdist war comedy. Unfortunately, though, the movie loses some of its restraint when dealing with the journalists, bureaucrats and UN peacekeepers who all but take over its second half. And it all seems...
1 tag
Brotherhood of the Wolf (Christophe Gans, 2001)
I naively assumed that the Matrix-inspired speed-manipulated action shots featured in the trailer of this howler were just the product of said trailer. Wrong. This French horror/martial arts/adventure/romance/costume drama/social tract isn’t afraid to crank all of its genres up to eleven, and it’s largely successful at being even more crass and laboriously “spectacular” than anything found in...
March 2002
5 posts
1 tag
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
I admit it. Extended sketch comedies are a blind spot for me. This is about 85 minutes of painfully obvious “satire” sprinkled with five or six genuinely funny moments, most of them funny because they’re kind of weird and inexplicable. Somehow, I bet even thoroughly reviled specimens of the genre like Joe Dirt and The Ladies Man have similar funny/strange moments, though I’m not about to run to...
1 tag
The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)
I have mixed feelings about this classic, a record of the Band’s star-studded last performance. There’s no question it’s beautifully shot and edited–this is Scorsese at the peak of his powers–and though I can question the need for the studio performance footage that’s mixed in, it’s hard to argue with those who say this is one of the best concert docs ever. That said, I can’t get around the fact...
1 tag
Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2001)
The Good: stunning imagery (pairs of wooden legs floating down from the sky on parachutes, groups of multicolored burqas moving across the desert). The Bad: some clunky poetry (in English), and (yes-even-semi-documentaries-from-Iran-can-suffer-from) terrible acting. And I’m not asking for Glenn Close with a kitchen knife, but why do many Iranian movies just stop dead in their tracks? B-
1 tag
Hell House (George Ratliff)
Considering its subject–a Fundamentalist Christian “haunted house” designed to alert teenagers to the depravity of modern culture through a series of lurid skits–this documentary is surprisingly even-handed. There’s no evidence in the film that the Hell Housers are anything but sincere in their beliefs, and the movie is largely free of blatant critical commentary (though one of the funniest scenes...
1 tag
Home Movie (Chris Smith)
Definitely a disappointment coming after American Movie. Smith’s look at five highly unusual houses and their owners purports to explore living environments as physical manifestations of their owners’ life stories, but the material we see doesn’t resonate with this idea much at all. What makes it to the screen is a set of fairly deft, fairly funny, sometimes uncomfortable (yes, in a Mike Schank...
February 2002
1 post
1 tag
Ali (Michael Mann)
Grand and ambitious and overlong: par for the course for Michael Mann. The two key sequences–a dynamic opening-credits-plus montage that crackles with intelligence, and a moving tour through Zaire culminating in Ali the man confronting Ali the legend–work like gangbusters. The fights go for ultra-realism and sadly are a bit of a wash. As a biopic, it’s more impressionistic and fragmented than is...
January 2002
2 posts
1 tag
The Legend of Rita (Volker Schlöndorff, 1999) [V]
Though this is based on the life of a real East German terrorist, Schlöndorff doesn’t spend much time with our heroine in violent outlaw mode–the film puts more emphasis on her awkward assimilation into the proletariat she so vocally champions. Bibiana Biglau, in a wonderful performance, plays Rita as dogmatic and proud but startled by the way humanity breaks through cracks in ideology. It’s...
1 tag
A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard)
That Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman grossly distort the life of John Nash, though I can’t deny it bothers me, is not, in and of itself, why this is a bad movie. (Here’s an article detailing the changes.) Goldsman does comes up with one decent idea (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about), and the dilemma faced by the movie’s Nash, played in a skillfull performance by...