(1997) dir. Michael Haneke
viewed: 09/26/07
I don’t know why it took me so long to “discover” Michael Haneke, but it’s been quite a revelation. Though I’d caught his 2003 film Time of the Wolf back when I wasn’t working on this film diary, it wasn’t until I saw Caché (2005) that I was so struck by his [...]
Archive of entries posted on September 2007
Funny Games
Inland Empire
(2006) dir. David Lynch
viewed: 09/24/07
David Lynch has long been one of those divisive directors, not politically, or morally, but really around pretention and comprehension. From his earliest days with his uber cult film Eraserhead (1977) through to his strange and beautiful Mulholland Dr. (2001), he’s really cultivated a “love him or hate him” persona and [...]
White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(2007) dir. Steven Okazaki
viewed: 09/22/07
An earnest documentary about “The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, White Light/Black Rain is a poignant and well-made reminder of the horrors of the atomic bombs and their aftermath in Japan, though mostly focused on the survivors.
It’s a terrible tale. The power of the bomb was so vast, its effects so [...]
Dragon Wars: D-Wars
(2007) dir. Hyung-rae Shim
viewed: 09/21/07 at AMC Van Ness 14, SF, CA
When I started seeing trailers for this movie on t.v., and I had not begun to have heard of it, I recognized the potential for pure movie badness. I exclaimed to friends about how seeing Dragon Wars was a top priority for me, despite [...]
3:10 to Yuma
(2007) dir. James Mangold
viewed: 09/21/07 at AMC Van Ness 14, SF, CA
A big fan of Westerns, I, like many others, have come to deal with the genre as a dying form. A historical quirk of 20th Century popular culture. The further and further our culture moves from a time when the worlds of the Western, [...]
Eastern Promises
(2007) dir. David Cronenberg
viewed: 09/14/07 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX
I didn’t come around to David Cronenberg as early on as I should have. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know. Between Dead Ringers (1988), which I didn’t appreciate at the time, Naked Lunch (1991), and Crash (1996), I was thinking that he [...]
Air Guitar Nation
(2006) dir. Alexandra Lipsitz
viewed: 09/12/07
Documentaries are interesting things. I’ve been really getting into documentaries lately. They’ve been on the rise for the past several years, more and more are getting produced. So much so, that they’ve begun to develop subgenres and style types that can be filtered down on. And Air Guitar Nation, a totally [...]
The Thin Blue Line
(1988) dir. Errol Morris
viewed: 09/11/07
I don’t know how I managed to have never seen this movie earlier in my life, but I’ve become quite a fan of Errol Morris since and had been meaning to get around to seeing it. The film that really cinched Morris for me was the far more fascinating film Mr. [...]
The Lives of Others
(2006) dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
viewed: 09/06/07
This film won last year’s oscar for Best Foreign Film (an increasingly myopic perspective for an award, honestly) over Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which was considered by several critics that I’d read to be their surprisng yet “correct” choice. I don’t know, maybe this is due to some [...]
The Omega Man
(1971) dir. Boris Sagal
viewed: 09/05/07
Part two of my I am Legend double feature, 1971’s The Omega Man is a film that I grew up with. I saw it several times as a kid and always found it creepy and depressing. It’s one of those flicks that played a lot on Saturday afternoons, and what with [...]
