December 2008
28 posts
WatchAndy Warhol, Steven Spielberg, TV ghosts and swallowing the future.
'Good' - Aligning With the Nazis, Blindfold... →
This rickety film collapses completely in its revelatory scene at a concentration camp, where Halder finally faces the reality he has denied. As he wanders dazedly around the premises casting furtive glances, the prisoners and guards, played by healthy-looking actors, are clumsily arranged in stiff tableaus as though they were about to perform in a pageant. It is the single most unconvincing...
Steve Garbarino: Leave It To Cheever - New York... →
‘The Swimmer” was ”The Graduate” (released a year before) on acid chased with a gin-and-tonic, a ”Wading for Godot” of intended muddle. While it was set in late summer, decaying leaves dropped off trees into ponds. Owls hooted in broad daylight. In one day — the elapsed time of the film — it appeared as if summer had turned to fall. It was a...
Bill Maher Makes an Adolescent Case Against... →
Throwing his own brand of snake oil on the fire, [Bill Maher] insists that faith makes a virtue of stupidity, identifies religion as dangerous because it encourages people to believe they have all the answers, and warns the world to “grow up or die.” Heavy stuff. … Religulous doesn’t really go anywhere … It’s ultimately a celebration of the old-time religion we...
“Nothing in the logic of the film explains it, but then, to use the phrase “the...”
– A. O. Scott, Movie Review - The Spirit - Returned From the Dead, Ducking Villains and Vixens - NYTimes.com
Elizabeth Drew: Frost/Nixon: A Dishonorable... →
First of all, the whole arrangement between Frost and Nixon was dubious from the outset. While the script is straightforward about the fact that under their agreement Nixon was to be paid for the interviews (a then-whopping $600,000), a highly unusual arrangement, it omits the even more questionable part of the deal in which Nixon was guaranteed twenty percent of the profits from the sales of the...
The Movie Review: 'Man on Wire' →
Though Marsh makes no reference to 9/11, it’s present in every frame, a somber counterpoint to Petit’s merry caper. The time and place that Man on Wire capture so indelibly are both gone forever. It is not merely that it would be impossible to accomplish a feat like Petit’s today; it would be almost impossible even to conceive it. Our dreams have grown narrower and our fears...
The year 2008 in lists: The eight most ridiculous... →
Wait, so the Joker really orchestrated that big truck chase just so that he could get caught and go to prison, then he could kidnap that guard and grab his phone to make the call to set off the bomb he’d previously sewn inside the henchman in the next cell? That would kill the guy who stole the mobsters’ money, thus enabling him to … er, what? Heath Ledger’s Joker may have been a...
“I hope no one wastes their time worrying whether High-Rise is prescient,...”
– High-Rise review by Martin Amis, 1975 « Castle of Illusion
Movie Review: Body of Lies - Big Stars Wielding an... →
As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity.
“[Kill Bill] was scarcely a film at all - just a lot of cinematic posing by...”
– JG Ballard (Twelve film-lovers pick their most hated movies of all time | Film | The Guardian)
David Cronenberg talks to Charlie Kaufman -... →
Mostly about parenting.
Garth Marenghi: 'I hereby vow never to work in TV... →
Darkplace was a project conceived, written and filmed in the 1980s. My aim was a simple one: to change the evolutionary course of Man over a series of half-hour episodes. I would write, direct and star. My publisher Dean Learner would produce. I would exec produce. I set about composing my visionary scripts. Blessed with innate foresight from birth (one of my first words was “sooth”),...
WatchJunkopia (via U B U W E B - Film & Chris Marker - Junkopia (1981) )
