(2009) dir. Todd Phillips
viewed: 07/26/09 at the Oaks Theatre, Berkeley, CA
The funniest movie I’ve seen since Superbad (2007).
The Hangover is a great conceit. A group of friends go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. They get so wasted that they don’t remember anything. They awaken to a series of increasingly crazy mysteries, including primarily what happened [...]
Archive of entries posted on July 2009
The Hangover
G-Force
(2009) dir. Hoyt Yeatman
viewed: 07/25/09 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA
Did Disney’s 3-D mixed animation and live action film about a team of kick-ass guinea pigs catch your attention? Even if it was just on the movie posters plastered in the Muni stations, on the buses, billboards, what have you. In a time past, I [...]
The International
(2009) dir. Tom Tykwer
viewed: 07/24/09
The International is a silly thriller about an evil bank, run by evil people, who kill anyone who finds out about the fact that they buy and sell weapons from Asia and the Middle East, funnelled toward Africa, manipulating politics, and keeping a firm grip on the megalithic industry. And while [...]
Snoopy Come Home
(1972) dir. Bill Melendez
viewed: 07/24/09
The kids enjoyed A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) so much that quick on the list of films to watch together was Snoopy Come Home, the second of four feature films to star the Peanuts gang. I’d strongly remembered Snoopy Come Home from my childhood, remembering it to be one of those [...]
The Inglorious Bastards
(1978) dir. Enzo G. Castellari
viewed: 07/20/09
Not to be confused with Quentin Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Inglorious Bastards is the 1978 Italian-made War film that Tarantino set out to re-make into his new film, though from what I understand, it’s now more of a touchstone than source material. Still, I thought it would [...]
The Unborn
(2009) dir. David S. Goyer
viewed: 07/19/09
As I was sitting in the theater watching the trailers before Public Enemies (2009), one of the trailers was for a movie (as yet to open this coming weekend called Orphan (2009) which not only looks pretty bad, but also suffers from the trailer showing the entirety of the story problem. [...]
Public Enemies
(2009) dir. Michael Mann
viewed: 07/18/09 at the California Theater, Berkeley, CA
After seeing the trailer for Michael Mann’s John Dillinger film, Public Enemies, I decided to prep by watching a couple of Dillinger films, Max Nosseck’s Dillinger (1945) and John Milius’ Dillinger (1973), as a primer in the lore of the notorious Depression Era gangster/bank robber. [...]
Push
(2009) dir. Paul McGuigan
viewed: 07/16/09
In this day and age, subgenres beget subgenres to levels of potential minutae that really only make sense if we’re doing a biological categorization of movies. I don’t really mean that it in a pejorative way. Does it matter?
The only thing that would really matter would be originality, brought to bear [...]
Lady of the Pavements
(1929) dir. D.W. Griffith
viewed: 07/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
The final of three features that I caught at the Silent Film Festival this time around, D.W. Griffith’s Lady of the Pavements turned out to be a much more interesting experience as part of the festival than it could have been merely on its own. [...]
The Fall of the House of Usher
(1928) dir. Jean Epstein
viewed: 07/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
This version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher was not something that I was familiar with prior to this year’s Silent Film Festival. And I have to say, that on reflection, as I read through the well-researched and interesting program [...]
