(1921) dir. Victor Sjöström
viewed: 04/27/07 @ The Castro Theatre, SF, CA
As part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Castro Theatre showed a new print of the silent classic, The Phantom Carriage, which, to be perfectly honest, I’d never even heard of. But on top of showing it, Jonathan Richman scored and performed alongside [...]
Archive of entries posted on April 2007
The Phantom Carriage
Smokin’ Aces
(2007) dir. Joe Carnahan
viewed: 04/26/07
I’d read that director Joe Carnahan was an interesting, not too well known filmmaker, and despite or perhaps because of the silly over-the-top trailer for the film, with group after group of assassins all honing in on the penthouse suite of a Lake Tahoe hotel to kill a magician/entertainer/mob crony. It [...]
A Bullet for the General
(1966) dir. Damiano Damiani
viewed: 04/22/07
Something put me in the mind of Spaghetti Westerns, so I queued some up. Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General came up first. I didn’t know much about it specifically and frankly beyond Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci’s Django (also from 1966), I haven’t really explored the genre/period despite fully [...]
The French Connection
(1971) dir. William Friedkin
viewed: 04/16/07
Hard to find fault with this gritty, action-packed policier, which has a well-earned reputation as a top-quality cop flick. I’d never seen the film. Another one of those movies that “everybody” has seen. Now I am in that category.
So much has been written about this film and its car chase sequence [...]
The Saddest Music in the World
(2003) dir. Guy Maddin
viewed: 04/15/07
The concept of this movie seemed kind of interesting. Isabella Rossellini is a legless but always gorgeous beer queen in Winnipeg during the Depression who invites representatives of all countries to come for a contest for who can create The Saddest Music in the World. While there is a lot of [...]
Night of the Comet
(1984) dir. Thom Eberhardt
viewed: 04/14/07
Of all the varying movies that came out of the 1980’s, the big ones, the small ones, the obscure, the moderately obscure, for some reason, Night of the Comet managed to have made an impression on me. Classified as horror, it’s pretty light-weight. It’s more of an odd, post-apocalyptic teen film, [...]
Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof
(2007) dir. Quentin Tarantino
viewed: 04/11/07 at CinéArts @ Empire Theater, SF, CA
The second half of the Grindhouse double feature is Quentin Tarantino’s homage to car race road movies, which is actually a pretty obscure subgenre. Whereas Robert Rodriguez seemed to totally manage to capture the spirit and the style of the genre, Tarantino likes to insert [...]
Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror
(2007) dir. Robert Rodriguez
viewed: 04/11/07 at CinéArts @ Empire Theater, SF, CA
I had a bit of a conundrum about how to log this movie, as it has been released as the first half of Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s homage to late 1970’s to early 1980’s trash-pop-genre cinema, something that Tarantino actually made a [...]
Freaks
(1932) dir. Tod Browning
viewed: 04/08/07
The word unique is definitely abused in regards to its application of meaning “the only one” or “without like or equal” (definitions borrowed from http:www.m-w.com), and people have tried to disabuse this by suggesting that there cannot be levels or “unique-ness”, meaning how can something be more “unique” than something else [...]
The Host
(2006) dir. Joon-ho Bong
viewed: 04/06/07 at Embarcadero Cinemas, SF, CA
This Korean Godzilla-esque horror film had been getting a fair amount of buzz, and though I didn’t know a whole lot about it, I had it up there on my list of films to see. Directed by Joon-ho Bong, whose Memories of Murder (2003) was an interesting [...]
