A bit of business upfront: I’m going to be whoring my filmmaking skills out to shoot what amounts to a corporate video tomorrow for several hours, so the odds are strong against my posting anything. I loves me some filthy lucre more than I love this blog, what can I say? Yet another movie review, […]

According to the IMDb, Lady in the Water cost $75 million to make, and to judge from the finished product, the great majority of that went to industrial quantities of some very fine hallucinogenics. This is not an intelligible film. It is the work of a writer-director who has lost all connection to reality. And […]

I’m having a hard time deciding if Clerks II is Kevin Smith’s career-best film. Here’s the thing: more than any other writer/director I can name, Smith’s films are all about the screenplay. On some level I salute this tendency, as it is a refreshing corrective to the legions of indie filmmakers who think that overbaked […]

For three seasons running from 1999-2000, one of the great unsung American sitcoms aired on Comedy Central: Strangers with Candy, a sick-minded surrealist affair concerning the travails of Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old ex-junkie/prostitute who returned to high school as a freshman to get her life back in order. Played explicitly as a parody of the […]

While I am of course sympathetic to the political goals of the Michael Moore school of documentary-making, I think that the aesthetics and intellectual fortitude of the films are inconsistent, to say the least. Yet there’s a certain cheefulness in the way that filmmakers stuff these cinematic essays full of hard fact, dubious innuendo and […]

In the early 1990’s, Richard Linklater wrote and directed two films – Slacker and Dazed and Confused – that were masterpieces of laid-back, plotless observation. As suggested by their titles, these are films about just kind of being; hanging around, doing nothing, and talking a lot about what’s on your mind but saying very little. […]

I’ll presume that everyone who might conceivably want to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest has done so already, given the incredible sum of money it has already taken in. I’d take this moment to complain about the nature of the Hollywood marketing beast that can turn anything into the Hit Film of […]

36 hours ago, I was prepared to say that Clean, an official selection at the 2004 Cannes Festival, was a very solid film, not quite a great one, but a satisfying-in-all-ways piece of craftsmanship. Now I find that I have forgotten much of it, or at least why it excited me so. At any rate, […]

Some films are just really annoying to write about, because there’s nothing to them but a script. And it seems like all anybody’s concerned about is staying out of the way. So there’s no interesting camerawork, or editing, or anything that’s not completely, unexceptionably servicable. It’s entirely professional and homogenized. The Devil Wears Prada was […]