(2004) dir. Scott Crary
viewed: 09/28/06
Documentaries vary drastically in quality and vision and ability, but usually if the original subject is interesting enough, they are almost worth sifting through to an extent. Kill Your Idols is on the low side of mediocre in its quality and its subject matter might be more compelling in a better [...]
Archive of entries posted on September 2006
Kill Your Idols
Lady Vengeance
(2005) dir. Chan-wook Park
viewed: 09/27/06
The third and final film of director Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy” which included Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003) takes a more moralistic look into the meaning and effects of revenge. This time the narrative, as the title lets us know, is placed on a female figure, who like her predecessors [...]
Fists in the Pocket
(1965) dir. Marco Bellocchio
viewed: 09/25/06
Recommended by a friend, I didn’t really know anything much about this film before seeing it other than it verged on being a horror film. It isn’t what I would call a horror film, though I won’t try to get into exactly how I would define that. The film is a [...]
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
(2005) dir. Jeff Feuerzeig
viewed: 09/25/06
Madness and genius. Daniel Johnston seems to exemplify this duality. Though genius may be a bit of a strong term for him (he is clearly multi-talented and has often bursted with creativity), he certainly exemplifies the madness part.
This is a well-constructed documentary that utilizes home footage, lots of voice cassette recordings, [...]
Made in Sheffield
(2001) dir. Eve Wood
viewed: 09/25/06
A low-end documentary about the Sheffield, England music scene in the late 1970’s to the 1980’s. It’s an interesting phenomenon about how this music scene grew up around the avant-garde of Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League, basing their music on synthesizers that they constructed themselves, a whole different aesthetic from [...]
Dead Man’s Shoes
(2004) dir. Shane Meadows
viewed: 09/17/06
Recommended by a friend in England, Dead Man’s Shoes is the first film that I have seen by director Shane Meadows who seems to be compiling a number of somewhat notable films that are primarilly set in the British Midlands, an area that doesn’t have a long history of significant filmic [...]
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
(2004) dir. Wes Anderson
viewed: 09/09/06
I’d seen this film originally in the theater when it came out (during a period that I wasn’t updating this diary), and I’d enjoyed it significantly, as I had enjoyed Anderson’s other works, Bottle Rocket (1996), Rushmore (1998), and The Royal Tennenbaums (2001), and I guess was pretty primed to enjoy [...]
Scarface
(1983) dir. Brian De Palma
viewed: 09/08/06
For some reason, I had never seen this iconic 1980’s film from the significant, if not brilliant Brian De Palma. My personal favorite of De Palma’s was his poppy, strange adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie (1976), but his career has been marked by interesting, if not fascinating fare. Perhaps, Scarface [...]
V for Vendetta
(2005) dir. James McTeigue
viewed: 09/04/06
This overblown sci-fi/comic book adaptation comes stamped with the “hipness” of the Wachowski brothers, who wrote the script and the fact that director James McTeigue was their first assistant director on their Matrix (1999) series and that it has been adapted from a cult comic book from the 1980’s. That sort [...]
Vampyr
(1932) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer
viewed: 09/02/06
From childhood, I loved horror films, which at the time I refered to as “Monster Movies”, which I seem to have picked up from my mother. There wasn’t nearly the amount of literature on the films at the time, much less literature that could have been easily accessed and consumed [...]
