The Twilight sequel opened with 80 million on Friday, shattering The Dark Knight’s record of 67 million a year ago. Astounding stuff.
Full disclosure – I haven’t read the novel.
The Road is a painfully bleak look at a world (or at least northeast USA) some 9 or 10 years after a widespread disaster. We are not privy to the actual details of what went down (I have not seen 2012 but I doubt the bombastic Mayan apocalypse was this movie’s precursor) but enough waste was laid to kill most nonhuman life by the time the viewer arrives on the wintry scene.
Have a (decade old) Coke and a smile!
A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are heading south, but we don’t know what they hope to find when they get there – if ’south’ can be described as a destination. Perhaps warmth or remnants of civilized society exist somewhere closer to the equator. Armed with a couple backpacks, a stuffed animal, one gun and two bullets the father instructs his son on how to end them both should the worst happen. So very early on we are shown that every man is for himself in this ‘new’ world and we sense immediate danger and despair lurking all around - our two familiars scurry to hide in a forest as a group of men pass by on a truck and we very quickly find out why the man trusts no one. The helplessness and hopelessness on display is suffocating. Only the young boy has retained his innocence and some optimism. He wants to see the good in everyone no matter what his father says.
Posted in 2009, Coming Soon, Movies, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (trailer)
Director: Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, Invincible, Rescue Dawn)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Obviously I’ll go see any Werner Herzog movie, but I have to admit that I’m more looking forward to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, with Michael Shannon. It’s hard to be 100% excited for a movie starring either Nicolas Cage or Eva Mendes, much less both of them.
Metacritic: 69
The Blind Side (trailer)
Director: John Lee Hancock (The Rookie, The Alamo)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
I’m not thinking that this movie looks all that interesting. In fact, it looks like one of those movies where the trailer is a perfect 2-minute digest of the film itself. Woman meets kid, kid plays football, kid’s life is changed – and so is the woman’s! People cry. Fin.
Metacritic: 50
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (trailer)
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Pretty much as it sounds, a documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet.
Metacritic: not listed
The Messenger (trailer)
Director: Oren Moverman
Personal Interest Factor: 7
No, not a reissue of Luc Besson’s ill-fated Joan of Arc film. It’s a film starring Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson as officers in the Army’s Casualty Notification Service. Good reviews since it premiered in Venice.
Metacritic: 75
Planet 51 (trailer)
Director: Jorge Blanco
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I suppose the true genius of Pixar is that they make animated family movies that I actually want to see. It happens very rarely otherwise; off the top of my head, I only remember Monster House and a few stop-motions that fit that bill. That said, this doesn’t look as bad as most.
Metacritic: 39
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (trailer)
Director: Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
As with most sequels, it’s tough to have much interest without seeing the original, especially when the sequel is by most accounts an inferior movie. Aside from that, funny story: I just now realized that there are two Weitz brothers. Chris did Golden Compass. Paul did In Good Company. They both did About a Boy. Fascinating. I’m not kidding – I never knew there was more than one Weitz. Just hadn’t been paying that much attention.
Metacritic: 45
Visual Acoustics (trailer)
Director: Eric Bricker
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Documentary about the career of Julius Shulman, “the world’s greatest architectural photographer.”
Metacritic: 67
Posted in Openings | 4 Comments »
Part eight of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2007. 2008 will run shortly after this and then we’ll tackle 2009 (and the decade as a whole) in the month of December.
1) Best of 2007?
2) Worst of 2007?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2007 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?
Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely.
Posted in 2007, Lists | 10 Comments »
Predict the weekend gross of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.
BONUS 1
Will Planet 51 gross over or under 7 million dollars?
BONUS 2
Will 2012 drop over or under 66%?
SUPER MASOCHIST BONUS:
Review New Moon for the blog and earn 2 extra points.
All points WILL BE CARRIED OVER to the main contest.
The deadline will be Thursday at noon EST. Nice and loose. Let’s get everybody back in the house with this one (Nick, Rob, Juan and God willing, Rhymerguy, etc) so we’re set for next week.
Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments »
It was fifty years ago tomorrow that The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coup), the debut feature from François Truffaut, premiered in the United States. It was the first of what would be a five-film collaboration between Truffaut and actor Jean-Pierre Léaud that would cover twenty years in the life of Truffaut’s fictional alter-ego, Antoine Doinel. Along with Breathless, it is the signature film of the movement known as the French New Wave, but has transcended that label and become a classic in its own right. As I stop to consider the question, I realize it is my favorite French film, and would be in my top twenty or so of all time. A few years ago I received as a gift the Criterion boxed set of the Antoine Doinel films and yesterday popped The 400 Blows into my DVD player, watching the film for at least the third time.
Truffaut was only twenty-seven when he directed this film. He had been a critic, a disciple of Andre Bazin, and was among the daring young men who would leap from the pages of Cahier Du Cinema to the big screen, turning away from the silly romanticism of post-war French cinema and embracing the themes and style of a wide variety of other types of film, notably American B-pictures and Alfred Hitchcock. Though The 400 Blows is the quasi-autobiographical tale of a troubled boy searching for identity, the major subtext is a reverence for the image.
The title is a literal translation from the French, but it is meaningless to Americans, as the phrase is French slang that is roughly equivalent to “painting the town red” and has nothing to do with receiving a beating of any kind (the supplemental materials lists a few dozen alternate titles Truffaut considered, including The Vagabonds, Antoine Runs Away, or Down With School). Antoine is a thirteen-year-old boy in a largely loveless home. His mother is distracted and pays him little attention, more concerned with carrying on an extra-marital affair. His father, who is in reality his step-father, is a more likeable figure, but has no real connection to the boy. The autocratic school system is no succor, as the teachers are depicted as cruel brutes who inflict literature rather than teaching it (it is notable that Antoine’s love of Balzac comes not from school, but from his own intellectual curiosity).
Antoine is more interested in playing hooky with his friend, where they go to the movies or just hang out. He is in constant trouble for lying (most notably when he tells the teacher that his mother has died, a Freudian infraction if there ever was one) and then stealing a typewriter from his father’s office, which lands him in reform school. There is no snuggly reconciliation of family in this film (the next Doinel film, a short also on this disc, Antoine and Colette, reveals that Antoine is living on his own at the age of seventeen), but instead a search for identity that exists outside the boundaries of family. It is an anti-Hallmark card.
So on the one-hand we have something of a Dickensian journey of a young man, but on the other hand this is a film about the healing power of film. From the very first scene, when schoolboys pass around a forbidden photograph of a pin-up girl, the power of imagery is repeatedly explored. We see Antoine and his friend, René, going to a carnival where they ride “The Rotor,” a spinning contraption that is the same mechanism as the zoetrope. Other carnival patrons watch from above as those inside are spun around in a centrifuge. Truffaut, Hitchcock-like, gives himself a cameo as one of those being whirled. Then there are two instances where Antoine goes to the movies. In one of them, a rare enjoyable outing with his parents, they attend Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us, a bit of cinematic log-rolling as Rivette was one of Truffaut’s New Wave cohorts. And finally there is the magical, brief scene in which young children watch a puppet show, and we see not the show, but the faces of the kids as they are transported by what they see.
The pleasures of this film are many. There is plenty of comedy, ranging from the Our Gang-ish scenes of a boy’s slapstick struggle with his leaking pen and composition book to the scene, lovingly lifted from Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, where a gym teacher leads his charges on a run through the city, but he fails to notice that the boys drop off in dribs and drabs until there are only two boys left on the run. I especially liked the way Truffaut depicts Antoine as a boy who is growing up too fast, a kind of miniature adult. The shot of him lying back on his bed, smoking a cigarette while reading Balzac, is both funny and sad, and the way he shakes hands with René after being told by his father to say goodbye to him has a grim, fatalistic humor to it.
A lot of this has to do with Léaud, of course, who gives one of the most amazing juvenile performances in the history of film. The greatness of his work is best exemplified by the interview scene with the psychiatrist near the end of the film, where he discusses his dislike of his mother in frank, startling terms–we learn that his mother was talked out of an abortion by his grandmother, who actually raised him until he was eight. In this way the film ties into many of the American juvenile delinquent films of the fifties, but without the full-throated sensationalism. I never cease to marvel at the quick dart of the eyes and silly smile that Léaud gives when the psychiatrist asks him if he’s ever slept with a girl. It’s pure gold.
I learned for the first time that The 400 Blows was shot completely M.O.S. (without sound) and all of it was dubbed in later. Truffaut thought this was perfectly acceptable, as he was used to seeing American films dubbed into French, and because he was operating on a shoestring it allowed him to work without heavy and expensive sound equipment (he shot the film on the streets of Paris). Truffaut, in what was new then but is commonplace these days, would have the sound from one scene overlapping after a cut to another scene, as he figured the human ear could track the transition.
Then finally there is the closing shot, one of the most iconic in film history, a zoom to a freeze-frame, the first time a film had ended in that manner. Antoine has run away from the reform school to seek out the sea (he tells René that he doesn’t want to join the army, but wouldn’t mind the navy). When he finally reaches it, the film stops at his moment of self-liberation, but the look on his face doesn’t suggest triumph, but instead uncertainty. Truffaut and Léaud would carry forward Antoine’s story two more decades, but in a certain sense it ends right here, forever frozen in time.
Posted in DVD, Old Movies | 4 Comments »
Immediately followed by the kick-off of the all-new, all-different HAGEBOC II on the 23rd. Rules to follow. Maybe even prizes.
It’s the most magical time of year and it begins on Monday…or Sunday if I have time. Something like that.
Posted in AGEBOC, HAGEBOC, Second Ever Twilight Box Office Challenge, Setboc | 5 Comments »
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (trailer)
Director: Troy Duffy (The Boondock Saints)
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Never saw the original, although I vaguely remembering it being released. Didn’t realize it has a big enough following to justify a sequel a decade later.
Metacritic: 26
Gentlemen Broncos (trailer)
Director: Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
I understand that I should see one of Hess’s movies one day before bashing him, and I won’t insult anyone by defending my behavior in this regard. But there’s something about his movies that instantly and thoroughly repel me, and the thought of sitting through one is anathema to me. So my sincere apologies to Hess for the unjustified dismissal but I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.
Metacritic: 28
The House of the Devil (trailer)
Director: Ti West (The Roost)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Allegedly decent little horror film. Woman on the run from psychos, etc. Not a fan of horror in general, and when I get sucked into one I usually regret it (e.g., The Descent), so I’ll probably leave the enjoyment of this to others.
Metacritic: 74
Pirate Radio (trailer)
Director: Richard Curtis (Love Actually)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
A few weeks ago I praised Ang Lee for not using super-obvious song choices in Taking Woodstock. It appears that Curtis has done exactly that for this movie – the trailer advertises music by The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, etc. Maybe Curtis has used obscure and/or counterintuitive selections by those bands, a la Wes Anderson, but I doubt it. This looks like the kind of movie that pats Boomers on the back for being alive when “My Generation” was new.
Metacritic: 56
Skin
Director: Anthony Fabian
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Interesting-sounding movie out of South Africa, about a black child born to white parents apparently unaware of their own black ancestry. Starring Sophie Okonedo and Sam Neill.
Metacritic: 65
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon (trailer)
Director: Mary Mazzio
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Documentary about inner-city teens competing in an “annual business plan competition.”
Metacritic: 47
2012 (trailer)
Director: Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
I was working as a projectionist when Independence Day came out, and I remember a co-worker of mine, Geoff, had dismissed the movie beforehand as trash. He grudgingly joined the rest of us for a screening, and changed his tune after the alien attack. “OK, I was wrong!” he said, unprompted, as that scene ended. I think we all felt the same way. Point is, that kind of all-out disaster mayhem was a real kick back in the day. But 13 years and a million disaster movies (half of them by Emmerich himself) later, do I really need to see that same scene stretched out to feature length? I doubt it. Been there, done that.
Metacritic: 50
Posted in Openings | 5 Comments »
A couple of months back filmman did a post on several movies that he couldn’t understand why they were considered classics. Inspired by that, I’ve decided to start off a similar discussion on TV series and have listed a couple of acclaimed TV shows whose appeal I’ve largely missed. I could’ve listed more but decided to limit it to ones that would be known internationally.
Curb Your Enthusiasm –Despite the enormous critical acclaim and cult popularity it has received and despite me being a big fan of ‘Seinfeld’, it took me a long time to getting around to seeing this series. Indeed, the fact that Larry David was the star and creator of this show made this more appealing as I felt ‘Seinfeld’ went into dismal decline in its last couple of seasons once he left.
I eventually got around to watching Series 1 (made in 2000) recently and while it did have some inspired moments, overall not only did I not find it particularly funny but at times it was an ordeal to get through as David’s character is either such a obnoxious dolt or he is put in such painfully awkward situations that it’s painful to watch. Sure, you could argue similar things about ‘Seinfeld’ but imo they were a lot more entertaining to watch.
Even the genuinely funny moments (such as the obituary in the ‘beloved Aunt’ episode) were usually based on a Borat-style shock humour instead of genuine wit and cleverness.
If I’d watched this when it was released back in 2000, I would’ve said it was a vastly inferior, lazy retread of Seinfeld and would never catch on. So much for what I know.
M*A*S*H – There’s probably no other series from the 1970s that has endured as much as this show did. Here in Australia, it has been repeated constantly on both free-to-air and pay-TV since it finished its run over 25 years ago and continues to have a strong following. It was enormously popular with critics over the course of its tenure, being nominated for multiple Emmys in each of its 11 seasons. And today, it’s probably considered the highpoint for American sitcoms in the 1970s.
But for all that, while I’ve enjoyed aspects of the show it’s never been a show I’ve particularly admired. In part because most of the characters were tediously one-note; Frank Burns was almost always obnoxious and stupid, Sherman Potter is always shown to be wise, Hawkeye Pierce always is rebellious yet does the right thing, etc… Even by sitcom standards the character behaviour I found regularly telegraphed and that made the show rather deadening for me.
The other reason I’ve never really taken to the show is in relation to the 1970 Robert Altman directed film that it came from. That film had a much more harsher tone and with more layered, believable characterisations. The heroes of the movie Hawkeye and Trapper John almost venture into ‘anti-hero’ territory in that while they often attack those who deserve ridicule, they on occasion can be abrasive and cruel. These ‘anti-hero’ elements were absent from the TV version (perhaps not surprisingly considering the medium) and on occasion heavy-handed moralising took its place (especially in the latter seasons of the series). In that context, it’s no surprise that Altman apparently hated the TV series.
Today the reputation of the M*A*S*H TV series has probably surpassed that of the movie, which is understandable in a way because – having gotten rid of the rougher elements of the film – it became a much more agreeable package for a wider array of people. But imo the film is clearly the superior effort.
Anyway, feel free to add your ‘classic’ TV shows over the years that you think are overrated.
Posted in Curb, MASH, Television | 2 Comments »
When the wolfbane blooms,
And the moon is full and bright.”
And the moon is full and bright.”
Although vampires have been dominating pop culture lately (when haven’t they, really?) the werewolf is also keeping a steady presence. They exist in the Twilight books and films, and Benicio Del Toro is starring in a new version of the tale set for release soon. But I am drawn back to the original films–the Universal horror films of the ’40s, in which the templates for these things were created.
As part of their Legacy series, Universal has released multi-disc sets of all of their monsters, and I recently took a look at those in the Wolf Man boxed set. To see all of them, it necessitated crossing over into the Frankenstein and Dracula sets as well. All told, there were five films featuring the Wolf Man, with two others incorporating the theme but were not part of the canon.
The Wolf Man was the third member of the trinity of Universal monsters, originating in 1941, well after Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. He was the only one of them who was not based on a literary source. In fact, he was mostly the brainchild of screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who took some Eastern European folk tales and remade them. Turning into a wolf when the moon is full? Can only be stopped by a silver bullet or knife? Wears the sign of the pentagram? All of these were products of Siodmak’s imagination, which have carried forward to all werewolf tales that followed.
Posted in DVD, Old Movies | Leave a Comment »
An Education is a fine, engrossing character study set in a particular time and place, and studded with fine performances. The only thing keeping it from absolute excellence is a conventional structure that ultimately lets a little air out of the film’s tires.
The setting is Twickenham, England, a suburb of London. The time is 1961. The protagonist is Jenny, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, played by Carey Mulligan. She is smart and has an ambition to be accepted to Oxford, or rather that is the ambition of her father, a bumptious but meek man (Alfred Molina) who is both a tightwad and a dullard. Her mother, Cara Seymour, has drifted into a life of obsequiousness to him, though flashes of personality indicate that Mulligan is her mother’s daughter.
Enter David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), a rakish older man who gives Mulligan a lift in his sports car in a driving rainstorm. He is witty and dashing, and knows how to have fun, which earns Mulligan’s affection immediately, as she wants to shake off the dust off her provincial town and listen to French records, read books, and be a full-blown Bohemian. Sarsgaard wants to show her things, and together with his friends, Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike, they paint the town red, going to swanky restaurants and classical music concerts.
Sarsgaard is the kind of guy who can want something from someone and manage to spin it so he can make it seem like the thing he wants is the other person’s idea (he does with Molina when he wants to take Mulligan on a weekend trip to Oxford, dropping the name of C.S. Lewis while doing it). Of course this means he’s a man of slippery ethics, as Mulligan finds out while witnessing what kind of business he and Cooper are in. But she’s too dazzled by him to let it bother her, despite the protestations of a sincere English teacher (Olivia Williams) and an officious headmistress (Emma Thompson).
After all, her parents don’t object. In 1961 a 34-year-old man could court a teenager without too many eyebrows being raised, and Mulligan realizes that her father thinks her being provided for in a marriage to a man of means equals an Oxford education. Therefore when she discovers a secret about Sarsgaard her entire world crumbles.
The film is based on a memoir and written by novelist Nick Hornby, and the screenplay crackles with clever dialogue. The direction, by Lone Scherfig, is unobtrusive–this is not the work of an auteur. The smartest thing Scherfig does is let her writer and cast dominate, particular the lead. A lot of ink and pixels have been expended on how this is a star-making turn for her, and I’m not disagreeing, as its a performance of incredible poise and depth. Her facial expressions at certain points in the film will linger with me a long time, and I feel, after just under two hours in her company, that I know the character she creates well.
The supporting cast is just as strong. Sarsgaard has played these sorts of shifty types before–he’s an actor that specializes in ambiguity–but it’s strong work (his best performance remains the one he gave in Shattered Glass as a man with impeccable integrity). Molina, touted as a surefire Oscar nominee, is good, but the part is the flimsiest in the film. He’s a man who’s afraid of life–he has to be dragged to a fancy restaurant because he’s worried he won’t know how to order a starter–and he’s funny, but there’s something phony about the character. He gets a speech at the end that’s supposed to tell us all about him, but instead it only makes him more obscure. Williams, who previously played a different kind of sympathetic teacher in Rushmore, is quietly effective as a woman whom Mulligan initially wants to be nothing like, but later finds she has a lot to learn from.
It’s the film’s final moments that knocked it down a peg for me. I’ve seen too many films that climax with a character receiving a letter from the college they hope to attend to see it pop up in a film like this one, and then a voiceover narration by Mulligan closes the film. I’m not against voiceover narration, but it hadn’t been heard at all up until the final minute of the film, so it was awfully jarring to hear it, especially since the dialogue was particularly trite.
That quibbling aside, this film has a wonderful look and great performances, and is one of the better films of the year.
Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments »
With the release of A Christmas Carol, it would appear that the holiday movie season is officially upon us. I’m not too excited about that movie, but there are a few other interesting movies out this week.
Bliss
Director: Abdullah Oguz
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Turkish film about a young woman who escapes an honor killing by fleeing her small village.
Metacritic: 76
The Box (trailer)
Director: Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Previously reviewed on this site by Nick, who concludes that it’s “a step in the right direction” for Kelly after Southland Tales. That sounds good to me … I didn’t hate Southland Tales as much as everyone else.
Metacritic: 45
A Christmas Carol (trailer)
Director: Robert Zemeckis (Contact, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Beowulf)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
Zemeckis used to be a favorite of mine, but I confess that I don’t understand the appeal of his motion-capture movies. This one looks pretty bad, both in the sense that it doesn’t look very good, and in the sense that it actually looks bad. Maybe the movie looks better, but so far it doesn’t seem like the motion-capture stuff is advancing at all.
Metacritic: 54
The Fourth Kind (trailer)
Director: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Personal Interest Factor: 1
The fifth kind: anal probes. The sixth kind: nattering on about your abduction to a disbelieving, state-appointed psychiatrist. The seventh kind: being brainwashed by aliens into seeing stupid horror movies.
Metacritic: 34
The Horse Boy (trailer)
Director: Michel O. Scott
Personal Interest Factor: 3
Documentary about parents who take their autistic child to the outer reaches of Mongolia in order to treat him.
Metacritic: 63
The Men Who Stare at Goats (trailer)
Director: Grant Heslov
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Reviews haven’t been the greatest, but it looks like fun to me. Director Heslov co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck with Clooney.
Metacritic: 56
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (trailer)
Director: Lee Daniels (Shadowboxer)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Tough call on this one. A lot of good reviews, dating back to Sundance. But I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t look like two hours of pure misery.
Metacritic: 76
(Untitled) (trailer)
Director: Jonathan Parker (Bartleby, The Californians)
Personal Interest Factor: 4
Comedy starring Adam Goldberg, set in New York’s art world. Haven’t really heard anything about it.
Metacritic: 59
Posted in Openings | 7 Comments »
“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.” – Mohandas Gandhi
Hillsong United started out as a band playing music for their local church (Hillsong) in the youth ministry (also called United) in the late 1990s. As their talents matured and the songs caught on they made a commitment to release an album every year “as long as God keeps bringing us songs.” Their popularity continued to extend beyond their home in Sydney, Australia and reached the far corners of the Earth. In 2005 they embarked on a 2-1/2-year world tour (not contiguously) that took them to places they had only heard of and opened their eyes to things they had only read about. They decided to document their journeys and this movie (as well as last year’s double-album and the continuing movement at www.i-heart.org) is the result. I’m almost positive they set out to make a concert DVD & CD project but along the way it turns out everyone was more touched and changed than they originally thought possible.
The purpose of the film is summed up fairly well in the final trailer by United frontman (if you can call him that) Joel Houston when he realizes that the streets the band travels down to get to the concert venues are likely to be unchanged by what happens inside the venue itself. “Maybe we’re missing the point,” he laments.
Posted in 2009, Movies, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain.
Posted in Random | 40 Comments »
Crap, it’s Friday. I almost forgot to do Openings! Perhaps it’s because there’s really nothing going out this week that seems at all worthwhile. Nonetheless, my apologies for being a few hours late.
Bronson (trailer)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Pusher II, Pusher 3)
Personal Interest Factor: 6
Prison story that won some hype at Sundance, especially for the performance of Tom Hardy as over-the-top psycho “Charles Bronson” (there’s a long true story here if you want to look it up). Anyway, since I’m blessed with an abundance of time, I’ll probably check this out sometime next week out of boredom as much as anything else.
Metacritic: 69
Labor Day (trailer)
Director: Glenn Silber
Personal Interest Factor: 1
Documentary of the 2008 election filtered through the eyes of SEIU – partly financed by SEIU.
Metacritic: 18
This Is It (trailer)
Director: Kenny Ortega (Newsies, Hocus Pocus, High School Musical 3: Senior Year)
Personal Interest Factor: 3
For more than a decade, I’ve made an effort to see films that get Ebert’s 4-star rating, but this is the second time in the last month that I’m going to have to take a flat-out pass (the other was We Live in Public. Perhaps not coincidentally, both films are documentaries of a sort, and even more to the point, both trade in a sort of celebrity-worship culture that I have no interest in or use for. Besides which, random Michael Jackson rehearsal footage constitutes a movie these days?
Metacritic: 67
21 and a Wake-Up
Director: Chris McIntyre
Personal Interest Factor: 2
Never heard of this before, but both Chicago critics hated it. Based on the director’s stay in an Army hospital during the Vietnam era.
Metacritic: not listed
The Yes Men Fix the World
Director: The Yes Men
Personal Interest Factor: 5
The Yes Men are what you might call industrial pranksters; they do stuff like pose as corporate representatives for companies that they don’t represent to take responsibility for disasters that the real companies certainly do not take responsibility for. That’s all well and good – I have no real sympathy for corporate interests in general – but, well, eh.
Metacritic:
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
