Archive for March, 2008
This is much more successful and enjoyable than Death Proof. It has much more ridiculous action, more hackneyed dialogue, a much less comprehensible plot and is generally much sillier. It even uses the ‘Grindhouse’ device to much better effect, including a great gag with a missing reel that revealed important character information about the hero, [...]
Peter Bogdanovich directed this entertaining 2001 film, which dramatizes what has apparently been a perennial Hollywood rumor: that a jealous William Randolph Hearst fatally shot a man during a cruise on his yacht and had it successfully covered up. The period details and performances all seem right. Edward Herrmann plays [...]
Wonderful title (merely typing it was fun); weak film. I’d heard as much, so it wasn’t too much of a letdown. I was however disappointed that the title is in fact explained, if off-handedly – I’d read that it was not, and I liked that idea. [...]
I first saw this about 18 months ago, and when I watched it again the other night I found that
I didn’t remember 95% of it
Some things I did remember were not, in fact, in the film (and I don’t think they were in Fire Walk With Me either - that’s the first [...]
Disappointing. It wouldn’t have been if I had watched it before I read all those reviews telling me this was much better than I expected, but I did read them and consequently it wasn’t quite as good as I expected. 28 Days Later is a pretty great film, and the sequel is most successful when [...]
At first I liked the leisurely pace of this and enjoyed the characters, then I started getting antsy. As charming as John Cusack and Kevin Spacey are, they’re relied on too much - Cusack particularly, as audience surrogate in the milieu his character memorably describes as “Gone with the Wind on mescaline”. [...]
I’ve wanted to mention this web comic strip for a while now, but I was waiting for a particularly good edition. Two came along over the weekend that are great, and not too bizarre to put off a newcomer. The first fills me with excitement for my own impending nuptials:
First Dance
and the second makes me [...]
Insanely brutal, grim and pointless tale of a London hoodlum’s rise and fall; he’s played by Malcolm McDowell and (in the flashbacks that take up most of the film) Paul Bettany. As the character is supposed to be hardly there, anyway, it’s hard to tell how well either of them are [...]
I didn’t really know what to expect of this film. Tarantino is well known as a fan of genre films and B movies, but when those really are your influences and you set out to make a great B movie of your own, you get Doomsday (which I haven’t seen, but most likely will - [...]
What the hell? No cats, no curses. That poster is just a flat out lie. It’s an ingenious scheme from Val Lewton - you can get money to make a sequel to a successful film, but you really want to make a totally different film that bares almost no relation to the first. The solution [...]