Archive for February, 2008
There was a surprisingly big turnout (150-175) on a Tuesday night at the Castro Theatre for this double feature, and it was a smart pairing. Two likeable protagonists in over their heads, in paranoid 70’s thrillers that feature B-movie milieus, stand-ins for the Zapruder film and unexpected violent deaths amidst an unraveling social fabric.
Arthur [...]
Your enjoyment of this film rests almost entirely on how much you like Will Ferrell. I like him a lot and so enjoyed this, despite its being pretty bad. Most of the genuinely funny moments feature Will Arnett, who is a special, shiny genius. Amy Poehler (Arnett’s real-life wife, playing his skating partner/sister) is also [...]
Continuing with my slo-mo Val Lewton-athon, Cat People comes with a reputation, which it lives up to. Simone Simon does a great job as an atypically sympathetic femme fatale, and Jane Randolph’s Alice is atypically brave and noble as the ‘new type of other woman’. The men in the film do less well - Oliver [...]
First surprise: top-billed Donald Sutherland and Burgess Meredith don’t show up until 40+ minutes in (and Meredith isn’t around all that long).
Second surprise: Sutherland’s character is named Homer Simpson.
All the characters in this film are creepy; this took me a while to notice since some of them are extremely creepy. And the chaos [...]
I finally caught up with this after hearing about it for years, and found it a little less than fulfilling. I wasn’t sure which parts were to be taken literally and which not; I didn’t understand why some scenes were in color and some in black and white; I was confused why the title [...]
Raymond Chandler is a great crime writer - that’s a given. The Long Goodbye is not one of his better books, but it’s still definitely worth a read if you like him. Here’s the thing, though: if, like me, you read it only a month after you read Dashiell Hammett’s collected Continental Op stories, you’ll [...]
Mean-spirited, hyper-violent cartoon. It makes the mistake of pausing in the evisceration of its cast for some late-inning heartstring-tugging, and the introduction of insulting Moral Grey Area nonsense. A shameful waste of the guy who played Richie Aprile on The Sopranos, whose bug-eyed intimidato glare prompted my favorite line ever from Tony (”…and [...]
Fritz Lang’s 1960 swan song. Crisp, good-looking, tightly edited, insanely intricate and an obvious influence on the Bond films. If this film had nothing going for it apart from the seance room of the blind psychic, it would still be worth seeing.
Keywords: Luxor Hotel, surveillance, hypnotism, Gert Frobe, blind psychic, clubfoot, megalomania, mirror, Interpol, camera, [...]
The acting is great, the directing is great, the screenplay is great, the photography is great, the music is great, even the font used for the titles is great. So why is this film so terrible?
Things I learned from watching this film:
Falling down a deep hole in the middle of a desert is a bad [...]
Brad Bird is clearly one talented chap. He also thinks that he is in a minority, and I agree. The Incredibles suggested that if everyone was special then really no one was, and that elitism is a good thing as long as it’s based on merits. Ratatouille expands on these ideas: no everyone’s going to [...]