The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]
You can’t always complain about how sex in movies comes in either the “prurient, puritanical, and embarrassed” flavor of the American cinema or the “explicit, specific, joyless, and punishing” flavor of the French (which I probably do more in real life than on the blog, but still…) and then not praise a movie that is […]
Two films starring Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, premiered on 21 January, 2011, at the Sundance Film Festival. One of these was Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it was so buzzed-about and well-regarded that it was snatched up and given a nice awards-baiting berth and gifted by Fox Searchlight with […]
The word of the day, boys and girls, is “ambivalent”. As in, “I feel extremely ambivalent towards Bellflower, because Bellfower is extremely ambivalent about its two main characters.” Not in the good way.* One gets the feeling – anyway, I got the feeling, and it does seem that Bellflower is something of a Rosarch test […]
The best parts of I Melt with You are in the first 40 minutes, when it’s a story of four 44-year-old men indulging in a non-stop whirlwind of alcohol and recreational drugs just because they can, and also to stop feeling pain and any other human emotion. It is a celebration of absolutely everything that […]
The first warning sign was that Like Crazy won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, though despite how much I like to argue the contrary, it’s not actually true that nothing good ever comes from Sundance. Heck, just this year we got Take Shelter. However, in this case bigotry wins out: Like Crazy is awful, […]
My gut tells me that a great pun would be to call Martha Marcy May Marlene by the alternate name Martha Marcy Meh Marlene, but there are a number of objections to that, among them being that it’s not quite as bad as being “meh”, another that your eye tends to glide over the words […]
There are certain movies that can only be rightfully called “gentle”. Our Idiot Brother is one of those movies. There are also certain movies that are so gentle that it doesn’t seem that they’d crack if you breathed on them too heavily. Our Idiot Brother is one of those movies, as well. The conceit is […]
Four years ago, Davis Guggenheim made one of the most spectacularly successful documentaries of all time, An Inconvenient Truth: critically beloved, a box-office smash as such things go, the winner of a great many awards, and it was the first paving stone in the road to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Price. A hard act to […]
Perhaps you would think, from the advertisements (which play up its ties to Little Miss Sunshine), from the presence of Alan Arkin (playing almost exactly the same character he played in Little Miss Sunshine), from the subject matter (the ways that family members both love and hate each other, and the crazy ways they prove […]
Hey, so you know that absolutely hilarious trailer for Choke that promised a sarcastic dark comedy starring Sam Rockwell as a sex addict? Whoever put that trailer together is a bona-fide evil genius. It’s not that Choke is exactly a failed comedy, mind; it’s really more like an anti-comedy, a satire wallowing in misery instead […]
And once again, we learn that nothing good comes out of Sundance. The problem with American Teen in a nutshell: as the end credits rolled, I scoured them for whatever hint would give the game away, that this was actually a fictional story filmed to look exactly like a documentary about high school seniors in […]
