(2004) dir. Hubert Sauper
viewed: 06/28/07
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
That is, unless you create a giant fishing industry, funded and run by foreign business and exporting all the fish flesh to the EU. And what does this [...]
Archive of entries posted on June 2007
Darwin’s Nightmare
The House on Telegraph Hill
(1951) dir. Robert Wise
viewed: 06/25/07
San Francisco noir! Robert Wise! These were the appeals of this film that I wasn’t terribly familiar with otherwise.
Robert Wise was one of those solid American directors who made good films through several decades and crossing many genres. I’ve written about The Body Snatcher (1945) & The Curse of the Cat People (1944), [...]
Heaven’s Gate
(1980) dir. Michael Cimino
viewed: 06/23/07
I’d been interested in this film for years, one of the greatest Hollywood box office bombs, a failure that destroyed United Artists and changed the free rein that major American directors had grappled for in the 1970’s, it is cited as the catalyst for this wave of change. It killed director Michael [...]
El Topo
(1970) dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
viewed: 06/22/07
Man.
This is one of those movies that almost everyone has seen and is typically considered a piece of surrealistic midnight movie genius, as is director Alejandro Jodorowsky. But not probably by everyone. And that would include me.
I mean, I like the idea of this. On the surface it sounds interesting, some [...]
May
(2002) dir. Lucky McKee
viewed: 06/20/07
I never heard of this film til I saw it in the video store and on Netflix. I didn’t know anything about it. But it just kept cropping up, staring at me. So, this was the last of my little lowbrow horror fest, even though it fell out of sequence in [...]
The Bridge
(2006) dir. Eric Steel
viewed: 06/20/07
This very controversial documentary, not merely about the Golden Gate Bridge, but more specifically about people who jump to their deaths from it, ultimately is a remarkable and compelling film, whose inherent voyeurism is part of the parcel but certainly pushes far beyond that. Filmed under some surreptitious pretenses, the filmmakers got [...]
Ghost Rider
(2007) dir. Mark Steven Johnson
viewed: 06/18/07
Man, I go and dis on Nicolas Cage, laughing in his virtual face about his immensely bad choices for movie roles, which I really emphasized after seeing him in the horrible re-make of The Wicker Man (2006), and then seeing trailers for Ghost Rider and Next (2007), which also looks laughable. And I [...]
Turistas
(2006) dir. John Stockwell
viewed: 06/17/07
Gotta love a film titled like a Spanish term for diarrhea.
Yet another new sub-genre arises from the horror realm. Target audience: backpackers in second or third-world countries, getting caught up in butchery. You know, American, English, Australian (whitey-white) tourists (preferably with Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue-clad bodies) are perfect fodder for poor, desperate, [...]
Blood and Chocolate
(2007) dir. Katja von Garnier
viewed: 06/15/07
Teen angst, doomed love, Bucharest, Romania, werewolves.
Adapted from a book of the same name, which is a pretty awful name if you ask me, we have a movie about werewolf teens from a long lineage of super-humans and a romance between a pretty “wolf girl” and a goofy American artist [...]
Primeval
(2007) dir. Michael Katleman
viewed: 06/15/07
Based roughly (very roughly) on the legendary, though real crocodile, Gustave, who inhabits Lake Tanganyika, Burundi, and is rumored to be over 23 feet long and weighs in at nearly a ton, Primeval is a strange mix of Anaconda (1997)-like horror film about a monster man-eating predatory animal and a weak [...]
