Many a year ago, when I was first readying to watch the notorious Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour, I was given this advice: “just fast-forward between the songs. Don’t watch the story. Pretend it’s a series of music videos.” I’d be inclined to repeat that advice for anyone thinking about seeing the new Outkast musical […]
Between my job, which has gone from soul-crushing to soul-crushingly busy, and this well-advised “watch a movie every day all summer” plan, I’ve basically lost the ability to think. Which goes a long way to explaining why I’m not talking about anything in the real world: talking about movies is really more of a reflex […]
As was noted in comments, Sunday is not the same thing as Saturday, and perhaps in the future I should not make promises I cannot keep. Let us just say that yesterday did not go the way I wanted it to. So: a fellow film-buff who I trust very much suggested that I see Oliver […]
Low expectations are a good thing: they let me experience one of the pleasantest movie surprises of 2006 in the form of our first “period magician” drama, The Illusionist. Well I remember first hearing about the project: Edward Norton! Paul Giamatti! Jessica…Biel…! (?) And I was excited. But a funny thing happened: the film got […]
If you ask a hundred people why they fell in love with Snakes on a Plane during those heady days last summer, you’d get a hundred different reasons, but every one of them would come back to the title. Snakes on a Plane. It’s really quite a perfect title. You knew from the moment you […]
One day I might actually stop spending money on unscary horror movies that I know are going to be bad. That day hasn’t come yet. And the latest milestone on this particular road to hell is Pulse, another damn J-Horror remake, this time of the film that more or less birthed the genre. I never […]
I liked Quinceañera – quite a lot, actually – so please forgive me that my first comment is a rather significant criticism: I’m aware that there is this thing called “Mexican-American culture.” I suppose that I don’t know a lot about it, but I know that it exists, and that Mexican-Americans tend to be poorer […]
The attentive reader has doubtlessly realised by now that I have very little interest in film as a storytelling medium. Which is not at all the same thing as being anti-narrative (although I do not accord narrative much pride of place), and it’s not to say that I don’t think a film’s plot is an […]
Yesterday, probably because of the shift in the weather, I had a fairly harsh headache all day. By the time I left work at 4:45, I’d already taken six aspirins since waking up, and they just really weren’t helping much. I arrived at the theater at 5:02 for a 5:10 movie. The only ticket-seller on […]
If there’s one film plot that’s been overdone more than the dysfunctional family, it’s the road-trip. Which makes Michael Arndt, the writer of Little Miss Sunshine a holy fool: the only thing more shocking than the idea of making a film cobbled together from those two misbegotten genres is how extraordinarily successful it is. And […]
It’s very tempting to over-praise The Descent, a horror film by Neil “Dog Soldiers” Marshall released last year in Britain and most places that aren’t the United States. There is no genre of film so regularly ruined by inane scripts and boilerplate technical proficiency as horror, and so to stumble across a scary movie that’s […]
When it is this…summer-ey…out (and I know that the whole country has been heatwaved all week, but the record will show Chicago being right up there with the best of ’em), two things happen: -I stop caring about the rest of the world. So I have no idea what’s happening anywhere, and I hope it’s […]
