(2005) dir. Paul Provenza
viewed: 01/27/06
A 90 minute documentary about a joke that when told succinctly, only takes a minute to convey. Though comedians brag about stretching the joke out for hours and riffing on it like jazz musicians, it really is a pretty straightforward joke. There is something here about comedians riffing and making stuff [...]
Archive of entries posted on January 2006
The Aristocrats
Flightplan
(2005) dir. Robert Schwentke
viewed: 01/29/06
This is the second “airplane thriller” subgenre flick that I have seen in the span of a week. And it’s another toothless PG-13 thriller, too. Also, this could perhaps also be filed under “mother-loses-child-and-no one-believes-that-her-child-was-there”, which was maybe done to the nines in the 2004 Julianne Moore film, The [...]
Hoodwinked
(2005) dir. Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards, Tony Leech
viewed: 01/21/06 at the Loews Metreon Theatres, SF, CA
I was really surprised by Hoodwinked. When I saw the trailer for it, the cheap-looking computer animation really put me off. I honestly thought, that while I am ending up seeing more and more kid-oriented animation with my son, that [...]
Red Eye
(2005) dir. Wes Craven
viewed: 01/25/06
Wes Craven’s PG-13-rated Red Eye is a lean, entertaining thriller, but one with limited impact. In many ways, this is a pretty by-the-books sort of flick, nothing really surprising or challenging in it. Rather, the whole point of it, I guess, is that it’s trying to be exactly what [...]
Oldboy
(2003) dir. Chan-wook Park
viewed: 01/20/06
I’d been reading about this film, which hit local theaters last year, and it sounded interesting. A man is picked up off the street and then imprisoned in a room, like a hotel room, for 15 years without human contact. Already a bit of a kook, he becomes more [...]
Big Fish
(2003) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 01/14/04 at Loews Theatre at the Metreon, SF, CA
Tim Burton, at his worst, makes visually appealing and generally entertaining films. And, Big Fish is probably Tim Burton at his worst yet, because, while this is fairly visually appealing and mostly entertaining (or entertaining enough), it is a sappy attempt at making a [...]
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds
(1984) dir. Hayao Miyazaki
viewed: 01/21/06
Interestingly, I saw this film when it was initially released in the United States as Warriors of the Wind back in 1985. Japanese animation was much less pervassive back then, even virtually obscure. And though I had actually had some prior experience with Hayao Miyazaki, I had never heard of him [...]
Zathura: A Space Adventure
(2005) dir. Jon Favreau
viewed: 02/17/06
Zathura strives to be the kind of kid-friendly adventure stuff that seemed relatively prevalent in the 1980’s. It’s actually adapted from a story by the guy who wrote Jumanji and it’s basically similar (I guess — I never did see Jumanji), in that everything that happens is because of some [...]
Inside Deep Throat
(2005) dir. Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
viewed: 01/14/06
This documentary about the most famous of porn films, 1972’s Deep Throat, seemed like a pretty sure bet. The cultural effect of the film, the politics that it touched off, the human aspect of the film on its collaborators, all of this easily makes for the material of [...]
Wedding Crashers
(2005) dir. David Dobkin
viewed: 01/11/06
I don’t usually watch comedies because they make me feel like I have no sense of humor. I think it’s a genre that must be incredibly hard to do because so many comedies and utterly unfunny. I can’t really even think of too many that I like whole-heartedly and [...]
