Category: Movies
-
Rags to Raja
Hang on, we may need a last-minute recount on the best movie of 2008, because I just got back from seeing Slumdog Millionaire. Considering it’s been getting near-universal praise from critics and audiences, I hadn’t heard that much about it. I would’ve passed it by if an internet pal hadn’t recommended I see it in…
-
Lepton of Disappointment
The worst thing about Quantum of Solace is that it has to follow Casino Royale. That’s the capsule review I’ve been hearing in the past few weeks: “It’s not as good as the first one, but still okay.” And that’s a shame, because it’s not a bad movie; in fact, it’s still in the top…
-
Sequential Images
I wasn’t aware of The Criterion Contraption blog until the author started commenting on here, and I wish I’d found it years ago. It’s exactly the thing I’ve been looking for. The premise is that the aforementioned author, Matthew Dessem, is watching the movies of The Criterion Collection in order by spine number, and writing…
-
The Spy Who Didn’t Have Enough Sense to Come In From the Cold
Burn After Reading and the Coen Brothers’ populism
-
The Beast Must Have a Problem He’s Not Telling Us About
Friday night I imitated a normal person and left work before dark. I just sat at home and watched movies on AMC, so I guess I imitated a depressingly boring normal person, but still, it beats working. Apparently, AMC runs horror movies on Friday nights, and this week we got: Puppet Master (a reminder of…
-
Just ’cause it’s a theme song, don’t mean it’s not true
When I first heard about Tropic Thunder, I thought it was going to be just another two hours of Ben Stiller and Jack Black hamming it up, or at best one of Stiller’s MTV Movie Awards parodies stretched out to feature length. Turns out it’s got plenty of both, but it manages to be surprisingly…
-
Maybe I Didn’t Want to Believe As Much as I’d Originally Thought
Somehow I’d gotten the idea that the new X-Files movie was about werewolves. I think maybe I mis-heard “Wendigo” when someone was saying, “When did it go horribly wrong?” So if you go see the movie expecting werewolves or yeti, you’re going to be disappointed. Of course, if you go see the movie at all,…
-
Why So Serious?, or, I Miss the Giant Penny
According to the box office numbers, there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has already seen The Dark Knight. But just in case, I’ll include a spoiler warning: it’s pretty damn good. The movie mentions several times how the Joker and Batman are both “freaks” and outsiders, and how lonely it is to be…
-
The Right Hand of Doom
I really wanted to love Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and for the first 15 or 20 minutes, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. There’s a really clever flashback to Hellboy’s time growing up on an army base (previously only seen in a two-page gag story called “Pancakes”), and a…
-
An Inconvenient Contaminant
I saw Wall-E last week for my birthday (thanks, Rain!), but have been too busy distracted buying stuff and staring blankly at computer screens to be able to write anything about it. It’s so good I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “wonderful.” At this point, it’s a given that any…
-
Espinazo
It’s an old cliche that Hollywood takes the hard work of creative people and squeezes all of the originality and innovation and intelligence out of it, to dumb it down for the mass market. I never really believed it, though: instead of this big, faceless, creativity-sucking entity, isn’t it easier just to assume that some…
-
Cine Puro
Memorial Day weekend seemed like as good a time as any to make some progress on the Netflix queue, in the form of a style-over-substance double feature. In one of the special features for The Orphanage, executive producer Guillermo del Toro describes a couple of scenes as “pure cinema.” He’s talking about the scenes without…