(2008) dir. Carter Smith
viewed: 07/30/08
Last summer, at the airport on my way to a brief vacation in Los Cabos, I espied the book The Ruins by Scott B. Smith, which was a horror novel set in the Yucatán peninsula, a part of Mexico that I had previously visited. Even though I wasn’t headed to the [...]
Archive of entries posted on July 2008
The Ruins
The Bank Job
(2008) dir. Roger Donaldson
viewed: 07/28/08
Based on the 1971 bank robbery known as the Baker Street robbery, The Bank Job is an attempt at revealing some complicated backstory that was hushed up along with the robbery. How much of The Bank Job is fact or fiction probably doesn’t matter to most, though it is interesting that [...]
The X-Files: I Want to Believe
(2008) dir. Chris Carter
viewed: 07/25/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA
Dude. Was the last X-Files (1998) movie really 10 years ago?
Jeez. No wonder I couldn’t find my last post on this. I started in 2002.
I wasn’t a regular viewer of the show, even though I could tell it was the kind of thing [...]
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
(2008) dir. Guillermo del Toro
viewed: 07/25/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA
Back in 2004, I ventured to the theater to see the “original” Hellboy, which was also directed by Guillermo del Toro, a director who has moved out of the moderate obscurity into the relative mainstream with the success of his last [...]
The Sweet Hereafter
(1997) dir. Atom Egoyan
veiwed: 07/21/08
It’s hard to get excited about seeing a film about a busload of children dying in a frozen lake after a crash. Maybe it’s just me.
I guess that’s why it took me so long to get around to seeing Atom Egoyan’s critically acclaimed film about just such a thing. Why I [...]
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
(2007) dir. Julien Temple
viewed: 07/20/08
Director Julien Temple already made one excellent documentary about the 1970’s English punk scene, The Filth and the Fury (2000), a revisioning and revisiting of the Sex Pistols which really contextualized their songs in the culture of Britain at the time. Eight years later, he approaches the period again, this time in [...]
High School Confidential!
(1958) dir. Jack Arnold
viewed: 07/19/08
I’m not sure how this film shot up in my queue. There are a couple of possibilities. As a teenage drug exploitation film from the 1950’s, there is always that exploitation angle. Or perhaps, via my current non-cinematic appreciation of early rock-n-roll music, I might have discovered that like the much [...]
Fresh
(1994) dir. Boaz Yakin
viewed: 07/19/08
Recommended by a friend during a conversation about the brief burst of African-American inner city crime films that came out in the 1990’s that were directed largely by African American directors, Fresh was admittedly one of the films that I hadn’t seen. We talked more about Boyz n the Hood (1991) [...]
The Dark Knight
(2008) dir. Christopher Nolan
viewed: 07/18/08 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA
After re-working the Batman franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight (pleasantly simply titled sans colons and so forth), has been hotly anticipated. Of course, that anticipation only skyrocketed with the death of actor Heath Ledger, whose performance [...]
The World
(2004) dir. Zhang Ke Jia
viewed: 07/14/08
I’ve been developing an appreciation for director Zhang Ke Jia’s films this year, starting with Unknown Pleasures (2002) and more recently with Still Life (2006), but it wasn’t until I saw this film, The World, that I think I have fully crystalized my appreciation of his work.
Zhang Ke Jia is considered part [...]
