(1991) dir. Frank Oz
viewed: 01/31/10
I’d never seen this early 1990’s Bill Murray comedy about a man (Bob) with a multitude of social disorders (back when psychiatric shenanigans were funny), who is transferred to and the plagues his new psychiatrist, played by Richard Dreyfuss. It’s really of the era just prior to the explosion of medications for [...]
Archive of entries posted on January 2010
What About Bob?
24 City
(2008) dir. Zhang Ke Jia
viewed: 01/29/10
It’s not like I don’t have aspirations to be more read, more appreciated, attract more readers, but the bottom line is the way that I do this film diary thing is that I write about the films that I see, the films that interest me, not the films that just [...]
Police, Adjective
(2009) dir. Corneliu Porumboiu
viewed: 01/29/10
The Romanian New Wave, anyone?
Well, outside of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), I can’t claim any experience with it, despite the fact that director Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) and Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) have had the buzz that typically draws one to [...]
Pandorum
(2009) dir. Christian Alvart
viewed: 01/29/10
Bad science fiction. I’ve talked about how I like that, right? Well, badness is in the eye of the beholder, no doubt. And conversely, when the most unusual of circumstances arises, when one of these pretty badly panned films turns out to be a little better than I’d been reading, I [...]
Gamer
(2009) dir. Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor
viewed: 01/26/10
Having a penchant for bad science fiction, I’m apt to pick up lots of movies that would pass quickly by most people without even a blink of an eye, and with some of them, I just put them in my Netflix queue and wait for them to hit DVD. [...]
The White Ribbon
(2009) dir. Michael Haneke
viewed: 01/26/10 at Embarcadero Center Cinema, SF, CA
Winner of the Palme D’or at Cannes last year, Michael Haneke’s film, The White Ribbon, filmed in black-and-white, is a parable-like tale of some of the dark sides of human nature. Namely, Haneke considers it a story about Fascism, or the elements therein, which gave rise [...]
Ballad of Narayama
(1983) dir. Shohei Imamura
viewed: 01/24/10
Though I’ve studied film and even taken a Japanese Film and Aesthetics class, til now, I’d only seen one of Shohei Imamura’s films, his 1979 film Vengeance Is Mine. Unsurprisingly perhaps, his 1983 film Ballad of Narayama is quite a different thing from my memory of the only other of his [...]
Dead-End Drive In
(1985) dir. Brian Trenchard-Smith
viewed: 01/22/10
After watching the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), I felt it behooved me to watch some example of “Oxploitation”. This film, Dead-End Drive In, was one that I’d remembered from the video stores of the 1980’s, with no concept about what it was about, much [...]
Coraline
(2009) dir. Henry Selick
viewed: 01/22/10
This is the third time that I have watched Coraline (02/07/09 and 02/28/09 are my previous posts about it.) Interestingly, in the now 8+ years of writing this Film Diary, I have only now seen two films in full 3x in that span (the other being the wonderful Buster Keaton film Sherlock [...]
To Have and Have Not
(1944) dir. Howard Hawks
viewed: 01/20/10
You know those great movies that were made in the days before “they don’t make ‘em like they used to?” The best of Hollywood’s output during its heyday? Movies with classic lines like “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” Starring great [...]
