(2007) dir. Craig Gillespie
viewed: 04/28/08
Who would think that a comedy about a man and his sex doll would be a chick flick?
Actually, this comedy/dramedy, though featuring a sex doll, is the kind of movie my mom would have loved. It’s a sweet-natured film about a gentle, troubled small town man and his emotional delusion (his belief [...]
Archive of entries posted on April 2008
Lars and the Real Girl
The Golem: How He Came into the World
(1920) dir. Carl Boese, Paul Wegener
viewed: 04/25/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
Believe it or not, this is a film that I had been wanting to see for years and years, almost all of my life. As I have often noted, I grew up loving “monster movies” as I called them at the time and [...]
1941
(1979) dir. Steven Spielberg
viewed: 04/23/08
Oddly, this film was one of the first ones that I queued back in 2002 when I first started using Netflix. And then it finally made it to the top when I was using it in my “numbers” movie fest, which I abandoned. Though, I did finally get to see it.
In [...]
Wristcutters: A Love Story
(2006) dir. Goran Dukic
viewed: 04/22/08
An oddball romantic comedy, pretty much made with a guarranteed cult following, Wristcutters: A Love Story came and went pretty quick, but I am willing to guess that it’ll find a following on DVD like many other such films. Saying “other such films” is a bit of a misnomer, though. It’s [...]
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem
(2007) dir. Colin Stause, Greg Strause
viewed: 04/21/08
The two top monsters of the 1980’s, the Alien (1979) and the Predator (1987), were long fantasized about battling it out. Apparently, they first found their battleground in comic books and later in AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004). I remember the discussions as well that eventually found their filmic [...]
My Blueberry Nights
(2007) dir. Wong Kar-Wai
viewed: 04/20/08 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA
I used to really like Wong Kar-Wai films. I still have great fondness for Days of Being Wild (1991), Ashes of Time (1994), and Fallen Angels (1995). And though Wong Kar-Wai has not been as much a part of the Hong Kong film [...]
Monster Zero
(1965) dir. Ishirô Honda
viewed: 04/18/08
The latest foray into the original Godzilla series with the kids was queued up with the title of Invasion of Astro Monster, but since we watched the dubbed version, the original U.S. release of the film, we saw the film that I recalled from childhood as Monster Zero, the second Godzilla [...]
Juno
(2007) dir. Jason Reitman
viewed: 04/16/08
Like Little Miss Sunshine (2006) the year before it, Juno was the Hollywood Indie (oxymoronic indeed), the “little” film that could. Not exactly art house fare, these films feature “quirky” characters doing “quirky” things. And their success depends on the feelings that they arouse in their audiences. While not the heavy sap [...]
Leatherheads
(2008) dir. George Clooney
viewed: 04/15/08 at the Vogue Theater, SF, CA
George Clooney’s attempt at making a classically styled screwball comedy certainly has its heart in the right place and seems to have a ripe setting for a crack-up comedy, that of the pre-corporatized, barely legitimate “professional” football of the 1920’s. I thought that the trailers [...]
Southland Tales
(2006) dir. Richard Kelly
viewed: 04/14/08
Man, this movie really was bad!
Director Richard Kelly, whose 2001 film Donnie Darko became a cult fixture, decided to go for the grandiose in his first follow up film, Southland Tales. It’s apocalypse again, a strangely 1980’s brand of nuclear apocalypse, with nuclear bombs laying waste to Texas and other parts of [...]
