Category: Movies
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Qu’est-ce que c’est, “irrelevant?”
Apparently I’m zero for two on my quest to become movie literate. Tonight’s entry: Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard, which leaves a viewer in 2006 feeling as jaded and disillusioned as its main characters. Cinema studies professors and students like to write about Breathless almost as much as French people like to be smug. For me…
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R.I.P. Peter Boyle
I guess it’s a little weird to be upset when celebrities pass away, but then few celebrities are as cool as Peter Boyle. He’s got a permanent place on my cool list just for his performance in Young Frankenstein, of course. But he was great in everything I saw him in — the “Clyde Bruckman’s…
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Best Actress in a Supporting Role
I was surprised that For Your Consideration had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes until I started following the links. Some of the reviews, like the one from The Onion’s AV Club are critical of the movie but still give it a recommendation. I guess that’s a sign that a pass/fail rating isn’t suitable…
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The Man With the Golden Franchise
When I heard they were doing a reboot of the James Bond franchise, I thought it was a terrible idea. The series has degraded so far down to parody at this point, the only way to do it correctly would be to start releasing them as period pieces. Not Austin Powers parody, but just turn…
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A Tale Told by an Idiot
I mentioned RiffTrax a while back. Tonight I finally got to try it out. Fans of MST3k have wondered a lot what it would be like if the guys had been able to do a good movie for a change. Well, I still can’ tanswer that, because I saw The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I own…
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Roast in a 250 degree oven for 45 minutes, then rub it with a turtle
That’s Pearl Forrester’s turkey recipe from Mystery Science Theater 3000. A post on Rain’s blog reminded me how I used to gather round the VCR on Thanksgiving day, watching or recording as much of the MST3K marathon as I could manage. I had moved on from that profound sense of loss, so thanks to Rain…
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Flushed Away
One thing I forgot to mention: Flushed Away is a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it to anybody who likes Wallace & Gromit. It’s pretty dire for the first ten minutes or so; the whole thing has the taint of DreamWorks about it, and you’re likely to believe that the whole thing’s been…
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Chick movies
This week I had an inadvertent Mary Harron film festival, because I rented The Notorious Bettie Page and American Psycho without realizing they were both by the same director. You can understand my confusion — one’s a biography about a 50s pin-up star, and the other’s a horror/black comedy adaptation of a satirical novel about…
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A bum, which is what he is
For years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without all that tedious reading. And I’ve been quoting them for so long, I feel like…
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How not to make “Event Horizon”
As our lives get increasingly hectic and confusing, it becomes dangerously more and more likely that one of us is bound to look up from what he’s been doing and suddenly realize, “Oh, shit. I just made Event Horizon.” Paul W.S. Anderson has lived through this experience, and he’ll tell you the only way that…
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The Blue and the Greying
Several years ago, someone recommended I watch Sherman’s March: a Meditation to the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. I’m glad I waited so long to finally see it. The premise of the movie is that filmmaker Ross McElwee received a grant to film a documentary about…
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Decompression
The day after crunch mode ends on a project is like a bullet train hitting a concrete mammoth. “Brick wall” seemed too mundane. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, instead of finding myself sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do and too bored even to nap. There’s still plenty to…