(2005) dir. Cristi Puiu
viewed: 10/23/06
Strangely marketed as “The Most Acclaimed Comedy of the Year”, this is a Romanian film about a very ill 63-year old man and his passage from emergency room to emergency room as he quickly becomes more and more ill. Maybe it is a comedy, because as bleak as the story is [...]
Archive of entries posted on October 2006
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Kicking & Screaming
(1995) dir. Noah Baumbach
viewed: 10/21/06
I rented this rather exemplary 1990’s indie flick because I had gained some interest in director/writer Noah Baumbach after seeing The Squid and the Whale (2005) which he wrote and directer and then re-viewing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) which he co-wrote with director Wes Anderson. I guess, like Anderson’s Bottle [...]
Art School Confidential
(2006) dir. Terry Zwigoff
viewed: 10/20/06
Awful. Just awful. In fact, it’s hard to believe that anything written by Daniel Clowes of Eightball fame could be so completely devoid of cleverness or wit.
Director Terry Zwigoff who came to fame with the brilliant documentary Crumb (1994) and who had worked wtih some success with Clowes on the more [...]
F for Fake
(1974) dir. Orson Welles
viewed: 10/17/06
It’s kind of sad how few Orson Welles films I have actually seen. He’s one of those thousand-pound gorillas of cinema and well worth his weight…uh, this moved into some bad puns somehow regarding his obesity in later years. Not intended.
As a narrator, his voice is second to none. He exudes [...]
Equinox
(1970) dir. Jack Woods, Dennis Muren
viewed: 10/16/06
This was one of those Netflix recommendations, strangely a film that I’d never heard of, a campy, low-budget horror film that earned Criterion treatment. So, I got it.
It has that pleasing, low-budget quality of films from the 1950’s-1960’s that are earnestly created, cheaply acted and filmed, but full of [...]
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
(2005) dir. Michael Winterbottom
viewed: 10/14/06
Not particularly familiar with the “source” material as it is, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I understand to be a sprawling novel that is often cited as pre-post-modern in the play with its subject, its fractured narrative approach, and its humor. So, I can’t say [...]
The Departed
(2006) dir. Martin Scorsese
viewed: 10/13/06 at Century San Francisco Center
After a long week, I decided to try and leave work early and catch a movie. It had been a long time since I’d made it to the cinema and I was just looking forward to seeing anything, and The Departed was one of the more [...]
Brokeback Mountain
(2005) dir. Ang Lee
viewed: 10/12/06
Overall, it’s a good drama featuring some good performances and some nice cinematography. Despite The Hulk (2003), Ang Lee has proven himself to be a competent and commerically successful maker of these types of films in Hollywood. Yeah and the guys and the supporting cast are good. To be honest, from many [...]
Domino
(2005) dir. Tony Scott
viewed: 10/10/06
This movie “based on actual events” uses a modifier like “sort of” to tell you the real lack of truth as a bio-pic of Domino Harvey, a girl from a rich Beverly Hills family who ditched that life to become a bounty hunter, “before it became trendy”. Actually, in terms of adaptation, it [...]
District B13
(2004) dir. Pierre Morel
viewed: 10/08/06
Luc Besson, what happened to you? Okay, I think I can guess at that one. After making several interesting and fun action films with some real character, namely La Femme Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994), and one of my personal guilty pleasures The Fifth Element (1997), he had the misfortune of [...]
