(1985) dir. Paul Verhoeven
viewed: 03/30/09
Director Paul Verhoeven has interested me for a number of years, a strange, perverse filmmaker, whose films are filled with sex, violence, irony and social criticism. Though I’d been aware of him for a number of years, it was when he made Starship Troopers (1997), that I came to see him in [...]
Archive of entries posted on March 2009
Flesh+Blood
Monsters vs. Aliens
(2009) dir. Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon
viewed: 03/27/09 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA
When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought: “Hey, that looks kind of fun.”
Well, that’s about right. Later trailers revealed the likelihood that the film was far less creative and interesting than the concept at first blush. The idea, [...]
Samurai Rebellion
(1967) dir. Masaki Kobayashi
viewed: 03/23/09
It was only last year when I started getting into Samurai films, and the ones that I’ve been watching have been the recommended ones through Netflix and most of them have been produced for DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is the best of World Cinema, pretty easily. I’ve been enjoying [...]
The Watcher in the Woods
(1980) dir. John Hough
viewed: 03/20/09
One of the local “mini-fests” that we have is the Castro Theatre’s “Midnite for Maniacs” film series, which features a lot of less-remembered films of the 1980’s among other tropes. The series is also interested in other pre-digital special effects fantasy films. Actually, that might be its primary trope, I don’t [...]
The Lower Depths
(1936) dir. Jean Renoir
viewed: 03/19/09
Back in 1995, when I was living in England, the BBC and Channel 4 were celebrating “a century of cinema” with documentaries and lots of “the greatest” of world cinema. It was a pretty good time to be there and not have a lot to do. It is when I was [...]
Let the Right One In
(2008) dir. Tomas Alfredson
viewed: 03/17/09
“The Swedish vampire movie.” That’s not how this movie was marketed, nor exactly descriptive of its character or story, but that’s the short-hand word-of-mouth way to describe it. I mean, how many more Swedish vampire movies can you think of? I don’t doubt that there are many. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr [...]
Cleo from 5 to 7
(1962) dir. Agnès Varda
viewed: 03/16/09
After watching Agnès Varda’s interesting 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, I decided that it was time to catch up and watch more of her films. Interestingly enough, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is currently doing a series on her as well throughout the month. Although I have the best [...]
Rififi
(1955) dir. Jules Dassin
viewed: 03/14/09
While I’ve been watching a number of French crime films of late, including Pépé le Moko (1937), Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and Le Doulos (1962) among others, one of the noted Criterion Collection films that I had still in queue was director Jules Dassin’s Rififi. Oddly enough, though this is indeed [...]
Quarantine
(2008) dir. John Erick Dowdle
viewed: 03/13/09
An unfortunate member of the hand-held camera perspective in which the camera is held by a character in the film (thus the entire film is assumed to have been shot on a camera “at the scene” rather than some omnisicent “regular” camera view), Quarantine is a re-make of a Spanish [...]
Watchmen
(2009) dir. Zack Snyder
viewed: 03/10/09 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA
The “it” movie of the moment, Watchmen, if you didn’t already know, is an adaptation of one of the most notable comic book series created in the 1980’s (some would argue “ever”). The comic, written in the waning days of the Cold War, imagined [...]
