(1972) dir. Wes Craven
viewed: 08/28/09
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), & The Last House on the Left (1972), all “video nasties” as the English deem them, all 1970’s horror “classics”, all have been re-made in the past 5 years. I don’t mean this as a comprehensive list, but a simple sampling to contrast the fact that [...]
Archive of entries posted on August 2009
The Last House on the Left
Walkabout
(1971) dir. Nicolas Roeg
viewed: 08/25/09
After seeing the brilliant Wake in Fright (1971) in re-release in Sydney while visiting Australia, I was inspired to see Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout, which bested Wake in Fright in 1971 at Cannes. Two great films about Australia released the same year, two films made by English directors. Whereas Wake in Fright disappeared to [...]
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(1964) dir. Jacques Demy
viewed: 08/23/09
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of those films that a lot of people love, and it’s one that I’d long planned to wait to see on the big screen, which wound up putting it out further and further from ever having seen it. So, finally queueing it and finally seeing [...]
The Music Man
(1962) dir. Morton DaCosta
viewed: 08/21/09
I grew up with The Music Man. It was televised every fourth of July, and I’m not sure whether that was nationally or locally, though I suspect it was more a local broadcast. It was one of my dad’s favorite movies. He loved Paul Ford and Hermione Gringold as the mayor [...]
Ashes of Time Redux
(1994) dir. Wong Kar-Wai
viewed: 08/20/09
There was a time, not too long ago, that Wong Kar-Wai was one of my favorite living directors. From Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1994), Ashes of Time (pre-Redux) (1994), and Fallen Angels (1995), he managed, with some aesthetic direction from frequent collaborator, cinematographer Christopher Doyle, to create a strange mixture of urban [...]
The Last Wave
(1977) dir. Peter Weir
viewed: 08/18/09
After traveling to Australia, I got interested in seeing some of the Australian films that I’d seen in the past and I queued up a few, sort of at random. I remembered Peter Weir’s The Last Wave from cable television in the 1980’s. An apocalyptic film, which was a theme of [...]
Ponyo
(2008) dir. Hayao Miyazaki
viewed: 08/16/09 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA
Ponyo is the latest film from the great, wonderful, amazing Hayao Miyazaki. It’s the softest and gentlest of his films since My Neighbor Totoro (1988), the most G-rated and little kid-friendly. His range in his audience is not necessarily huge, but this film is [...]
Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954) dir. Jack Arnold
viewed: 08/15/09 at the Red Vic Movie House, SF, CA
As I’ve oft-noted, I grew up loving “monster movies”, as I called them as a kid. So, when I saw that Creature from the Black Lagoon was playing in 3-D at the Red Vic, I put it on my calendar and was eager [...]
District 9
(2009) dir. Neill Blomkamp
viewed: 08/14/09 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA
The “stealth” movie of the summer, shot on location in Johannesburg, South Africa, starring a guy who was a friend of the director’s and promoted with some “on the sly” types of print ads that don’t really tell you much, District 9 is also [...]
Knowing
(2009) dir. Alex Proyas
viewed: 08/11/09
Knowing that Knowing was not going to be a very good film, I was still up for it because of my liking for bad Nicolas Cage movies. I’d read in the San Francisco Chronicle, and critic Peter Hartlaub (one of the only Datebook writers that I like at all) noted “If [...]
