Category: Movies

A month or so before The Darjeeling Limited was released, they made the Hotel Chevalier short film available on iTunes. Watching that sucked away any desire I’d had to see the full movie. I just kept thinking: This! This is exactly what people hate about Wes Anderson movies! It’s so overcrowded with affectations and artificially…

Even though I’ve gone on record as being unimpressed with the French New Wave, I still feel totally justified in my rental of Le Samourai. Movies with the word “Samurai” title have rarely let me down. And listen to the Netflix description (with most intriguing words highlighted by me): A little bit gangster film, a…

Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts. I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple…

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight. I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall —…

The way I see it, there’s two different groups of people who wouldn’t be completely bowled over by the movie Once: Musicians living in Dublin, who wouldn’t see what the big deal is, and Unholy creatures cursed to walk the earth for eternity after having their souls ripped from their rotting corpses. I’d been hearing…

Last night I went to see Cloverfield again. Surprisingly, it’s still as good the second time, and I highly recommend seeing it in Digital Projection if possible, because the clear picture and better sound system make it awesome. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in all the backstory and alternate-reality game stuff surrounding Cloverfield, there’s a wiki…

I hope nobody else has used that title to talk about Cloverfield, because I’m inordinately proud of it. This movie is definitely one that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in, so if you’re interested in it, I recommend seeing it soon and avoiding trailers and reviews. I’ll just say that…

I saw Beowulf in IMAX 3D at the Metreon this afternoon. Anybody who has interest in this movie but hasn’t seen it yet for whatever reason, I’d say that 3D, whether it’s the IMAX version or not, is really the way to go. It delivers pretty well on the spectacle, and that kind of thing…

No Country for Old Men is about as close to perfect as you’re ever going to see in a movie. Not a single shot is unnecessary. The pacing is perfect; both for the movie overall, and for individual scenes that feel as if they were meticulously orchestrated down to a fraction of a second. Almost…

They’ve been warning us for years that the onslaught of digital distribution, torrents, iTunes, rental-by-mail services, and the new entertainment-in-pill-form (not available in some markets) was going to change everything. What they failed to warn us about were all the tragic implications of the entertainment glut. Case in point: there are currently movies by Wes…

Astute readers will notice I haven’t been updating this weblog, and that’s because of a desperate attempt to get caught up with work. (That’s what happens when every time you get stuck writing, you run to the safety of The Orange Box and watching Japanese movies from the 80s about schoolgirl detectives). But it’s still…

On his Invincible Super-Blog, Chris Sims wrote a fine review of the 1987 Japanese movie Sukeban Deka that was enough to make me put it at the top of my Netflix queue, and for that I’m thankful. Still, it’s hobbled by the old “aren’t those Japanese people wacky?” mentality that doesn’t really capture the sheer…