(2002) dir. Aki Kaurismäki
viewed: 04/18/03 at Castro Theater, SF, CA
I saw this film as what will probably be my only venture out to the San Francisco International Film Festival this year. I would love to have seen some more films but my schedule isn’t working with the festival’s schedule this year. It’s a [...]
Archive of entries posted on April 2003
The Man Without a Past
Roger Dodger
(2002) dir. Dylan Kidd
viewed: 04/19/03
This cynical dark comedy sort of succeeds despite itself. If it succeeds at all, it certainly does so despite it’s direction and cinematography, which I had read was bad but was personally really awed by its badness. The hand-held camera work felt like a bad night on ER at [...]
Little Otik
(2000) dir. Jan Svankmajer
viewed: 04/04/03
Little Otik, Jan Svankmajer’s latest semi-animated Surrealist film, tells the story of a childless couple who create a child and its resultant monstrosity by roughly hewing a figure of a baby from a scraggy tree stump. The child’s hunger overgrows all else, turning their “baby” into an insatiable beast [...]
Far From Heaven
(2002) dir. Todd Haynes
viewed: 04/12/03
Todd Haynes’s homage to the 1950’s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Far From Heaven, is an interesting cinematic experiment. In a sense, it bears some resemblance to Gus Van Sant’s 1998 grand homage of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film, Psycho. Van Sant took homage to an utterly “psycho”-tic level, in [...]
The Happiness of the Katakuris
(2001) dir. Takashi Miike
viewed: 04/05/03
Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris could easily rank among the more unusual films that I have seen in recent times. A mixture of black comedy, pseudo-horror, and musical, the film was once (somewhere that I do not recall, quite accurately referred to as “The Sound of Music meets Motel [...]
Full Frontal
(2002) dir. Steven Soderbergh
viewed: 03/29/03
This film, which seems like Soderbergh’s flaccid attempt at regaining some “indie” credibility now that he has become one of Hollywood’s “made men,” having garnered a directorial Oscar for Traffic (2000). Having discovered that his sensibilities for filmmaking seem to thrive in mainstream production, perhaps he felt that he had [...]
Auto Focus
(2002) dir. Paul Schrader
viewed: 04/01/03
Back in film school, I TA’ed a Critical Writing class that did a small survey of the films of Paul Schrader. He was the professor’s choice, not one that we had any input on. Previous to this, I had seen only a couple of his films, and really didn’t [...]
