(2009) dir. Shane Acker
viewed: 09/27/09 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA
Produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov, 9, director Shane Acker’s feature film debut, is a richly animated and designed science fiction fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world in which machines have eradicated all life. Rated PG-13 and quite full of darkness and scares, I [...]
Archive of entries posted on September 2009
9
Trumbo
(2007) dir. Peter Askin
viewed: 09/27/09
Trumbo is a documentary about Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, adapted to an extent from a theatrical piece written by his son Christopher Trumbo and heavily populated with excerpts from letters that he wrote to various people throughout his life. The film’s approach includes several semi-dramatic readings of these letters by a [...]
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(2009) dir. Gavin Hood
viewed: 09/27/09
What an un-great title for a movie: X-Men Origins: Wolverine. You know, that would have been pretty lousy title for a comic book. All it indicates is branding and that this is a series of stories that go back to tell the “origin” of a superhero from the X-men team of [...]
Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
(1983) dir. Richard Marquand
viewed: 09/19/09
Richard Marquand? Director of a Star Wars movie? Sure, for the hardcore, that’s probably one of the initiation things. But seriously, ????
Writing about any of the Star Wars movies always feels a little weird for me. I mean, as a kid, they were the most incredible things in the world to [...]
Babe
(1995) dir. Chris Noonan
viewed: 09/18/09
Babe, the pig.
Babe is a great childrens’ film from 1995, a rare thing, really, if you get down to it.
Back in 1995, those heady days before I had any children, I still had enough of an affinity for children’s films to seek them out, at least on video or DVD, if [...]
Boxcar Bertha
(1972) dir. Martin Scorsese
viewed: 09/15/09
I think I’d had this in my queue for some time, Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Boxcar Bertha, produced by the legendary Roger Corman who gave many a young filmmaker their first shot at filmmaking, though typically in the form of some form of exploitation or horror film. And it’s this [...]
Brighton Rock
(1947) dir. John Boulting
viewed: 09/12/09 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
The Pacific Film Archive and the Castro Theatre are doing a series on British noir, which is an interesting thing, given that it’s considered to be a very American style (though brought to America by multiple European immigrant directors). And unfortunately, I couldn’t get out [...]
Nightbreed
(1990) dir. Clive Barker
viewed: 09/11/09
There was a day that writer Clive Barker was considered to be the “next big thing” in horror writing. At least, such is my memory of such a thing. I recall people reading all his books and his movies were anticipated. Frankly, I think that this was primarily in response to [...]
Trouble the Water
(2008) dir. Carl Deal, Tia Lessen
viewed: 09/11/09
While I’d long planned and wanted to see Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the disaster that it wrought on Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, but its daunting length, I think has kept me from it thusfar. This documentary, running at a more usual 90 minutes or so, [...]
Adventureland
(2009) dir. Greg Mottola
viewed: 09/09/09
This “coming of age” movie set in 1987 in an amusement park to the tunes of college radio of the day tries hard to get the period and temperment right. Hard to argue with a soundtrack that includes Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Lou Reed and so forth. And its winsome protagonists, [...]
