(1940) dir. Raoul Walsh
viewed: 01/26/09
I’ve been on a tear of old Warner Brothers features from the 1930’s and 1940’s, a fair amount of Humphrey Bogart and a solid amount of Raoul Walsh films. This is the fourth Walsh film I’ve seen in the last 6 months. How many more people do you know that can [...]
Archive of entries posted on January 2009
They Drive by Night
Waltz with Bashir
(2008) dir. Ari Folman
viewed: 01/25/08 at the Clay Theater, SF, CA
Waltz with Bashir is the aptly much praised Israeli film about the memories of the 1982 Lebanese War and the Shabra and Shatila massacres. The film is considered an animated documentary, as the narrator finds himself triggered into a recovery of repressed memories of great [...]
True Romance
(1993) dir. Tony Scott
viewed: 01/24/08
When it arose in conversation recently, I decided it was time to revisit True Romance, one of the multi-part ignition of the Quentin Tarantino universe. Of course, True Romance was disdained, I believe, the script he had sold to fund his break-through film, Resevoir Dogs (1992). And this film and Natural [...]
Lynch
(2007) dir. blackANDwhite
viewed: 01/23/09
What does the mind of an artist look like? What is the state at which the threshhold of genius is crossed? What separates genius from non-genius?
Lynch is a documentary, loose and often as opaque or non-sequitur-like as many of the thoughts and creations of its subject, filmmaker/artist David Lynch. Much of the [...]
10,000 BC
(2008) dir. Roland Emmerich
viewed: 01/20/08
Wow. It’s really great to see pre-history come alive like this.
The caveman (or caveperson, as they like to be known) film is really a fairly small genre. And really, these folks aren’t even cavepeople. They are part of a change from the hunter-gatherer culture to the agrarian periods, a step on [...]
Mirrors
(2008) dir. Alexandre Aja
viewed: 01/16/08
I’d been watching so many really good films lately, I felt like I needed to take a break. So I queued up a couple of guranteed groaners hoping to get a little variety in my viewing and writing. It’s kind of exhausting being effusive all the time.
Directed by French filmmaker Alexandre [...]
The Gleaners and I
(2000) dir. Agnès Varda
viewed: 01/16/08
Long ago, 2000 or 2001, I noted this film when it came out and placed it in my queue of films to remember to see. It’s a documentary by notable French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who is perhaps best known for her brutal, amazing film Vagabond (1985) about a young woman who [...]
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
(1992) dir. David Lynch
viewed: 01/13/08
David Lynch, I think, is one of the most important American directors of his generation. But because I never really followed the television show Twin Peaks, I never got around to seeing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, also perhaps at the time remaining within the backlash that came at him [...]
Pépé le Moko
(1937) dir. Julien Duvivier
viewed: 01/12/08
Pépé le Moko fits well within several types of filmic explorations that I am currently on. A post-WWI French film about a criminal hiding out in the Casbah in Algiers, Pépé le Moko is played by the suave and handsome Jean Gabin, who I’d recently watchin in Touchez pas au grisbi (1954). The [...]
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(1932) dir. Mervyn LeRoy
viewed: 01/11/09
An excellent pre-code flick, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is Hollywood social criticism and drama in effective, realistic, and iconic ways. Directed by Mervyin LeRoy (Little Caesar (1931)) and starring the excellent Paul Muni (Scarface (1932)), it’s pretty primal, gritty, pre-noir, yet with some truly noirish character. Based on a book [...]
