December 2011
70 posts
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Movie Review
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN
I believe I’d said more than once on this blog that I don’t like biopics. If your life merits a film, then chances are you’ve overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to succeed in the end. They’re all the same arc, and the only fun comes from that ‘behind the scenes’ voyeuristic feeling of seeing the private moments of someone famous.
...
WatchDecember 30, 2011
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Movie Review
A DANGEROUS METHOD
The problem with David Cronenberg’s historical drama is its source material. Not the stage play (by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay), nor the book the play was based on, but the very characters tasked with delivering this story (whether it’s true or not). Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender, what a year he’s having) has a female patient, who...
WatchDecember 29, 2011
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Movie Review
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL
Ever since the Confusion Salad that was de Palma’s 1996 Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise - as producer - has made each sequel a must-see (for me anyways) because of his choice of director. In 2000, John Woo’s sequel was a John Woo film: glitz, glamour, fast cars, crazy action sequences and a slo-mo dove flying at lens. 2006 gave us J. J....
WatchDecember 28, 2011
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Movie Review
CARNAGE
There’s a clever, knowing little joke in Woody Allen’s charming Midnight in Paris. Gil (Owen Wilson) is chatting with famed Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and casually suggests, “Hey Luis, what about making a movie about people at a dinner party who can’t leave?” Luis is perplexed: “Why can’t they leave? I don’t understand.” Gil...
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Movie Review
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Having not read Larsson’s book, seeing Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish adaptation shocked me. Lisbeth’s story was so brutal, and so unexpected in what is otherwise a fairly standard procedural, that I wasn’t sure what to think. Noomi Rapace handled Lisbeth’s fractured mind perfectly, and the result was a hybrid of sorts: half...
WatchDecember 27, 2011
DVD Tuesday
Honestly, not much, Apollo 18, Final Destination 5. Meh.
WatchDecember 26, 2011
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WatchDecember 24, 2011
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Movie Review
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
The film has a nice pedigree. Based on the popular Tintin comics. The first animated film from Steven Spielberg. Produced by Peter Jackson. Edgar Wright is a co-writer. So I had high hopes for a good time. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
In the comics, Tintin has his trusty sidekick Snowy the terrier. Snowy is cute and all, and helps Tintin from time to time, but I...
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Movie Review
SHAME
In director Steve McQueen’s first film, the stunning Hunger, the very title references a state in which the main character chooses to be. Bobby Sands begins a hunger strike to protest the conditions IRA prisoners faced in British prisons. It’s a deliberate three-act film, with the first act establishing the conditions, the second showing Sands coming to his decision, and the...
WatchDecember 23, 2011
(feat. the man himself)
Everything's Fine and Agreeable
From an interview with Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa:
Well, I recently did a police procedural for a major broadcast network. And the note came down from the network time and time again that there could be no conflict among the police officers and detectives who were trying to solve the crime. In other words, they didn’t want any dissention in the ranks among the good guys. Because if you...
WatchDecember 22, 2011
WatchDecember 21, 2011
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Movie Review
SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS
Have you ever watched a behind-the-scenes special for a movie? You can get a simple little thrill, a little “oh cool” when you see how the filmmakers pulled off a particular scene or shot. Take, for example, the oldhollywood photos I reblogged yesterday, featuring the ridiculous towering rig Hitchcock had built for that key shot (pun intended) in...
WatchDecember 20, 2011
DVD Tuesday
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS -Absolutely adored this Woody Allen film, a love letter to art in the City of Lights.
MARGIN CALL -Writer/director J.C. Chandor’s debut imagines a 36-hour period at an investment bank at the start of the financial crisis. Already won a few awards.
WARRIOR - I didn’t give this mixed-martial arts film much of a look, but I’ve heard a surprising amount of...
WatchDecember 19, 2011
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Movie Review
YOUNG ADULT
Director Jason Reitman’s films always cleverly deal with a sort of uniquely American isolation. The awkward life of a hated tobacco lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking, the stigma of teen pregnancy in Juno, a lone traveler forever criss-crossing the Midwest, firing people, in Up In The Air. Here, he teams again with Juno writer Diablo Cody for another such story, this one...
WatchDecember 18, 2011
WatchDecember 17, 2011
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Movie Review
THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 romantic comedy is one of surprising depth and character. Many know it (thanks - or no thanks - to Nora Ephron’s loose remake You’ve Got Mail) as the story of two co-workers (James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) who bicker and fight every day at the shop, but unbeknownst to them, they’re in love with each other. ...
WatchDecember 16, 2011
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Movie Review
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
As Deep Impact had Armageddon, and Wyatt Earp had Tombstone, so does this year’s lackluster No Strings Attached have the better counterpart in this twin. Director Will Gluck, of Easy A, is definitely finding his style: both films have sassy, confident, quick reparteé with a meta rom-com self-awareness (and a wise, no holes barred Patricia Clarkson). Timberlake and...
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Movie Review
FEAR AND DESIRE
“I guess I’m not built for this.” “Nobody ever was. It’s all a trick we perform when we’d rather not die immediately.”
So ponder two soldiers of a fictional war in legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s first feature film. Shot in 1953, when Kubrick was only 24 years old, prints of this work have long been hard to come by (its...
WatchDecember 15, 2011
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Movie Review
TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
You can often think of a good spy movie as a house of cards. You build a large solid foundation (who are the players, what’s the situation), and then something TWISTS, and you’re forced to start somewhat anew. And so you move up, and start building the smaller base of something as a second tier, and work on that until something TWISTS, and you add a...
WatchDecember 14, 2011
In The Dark
I’ve noticed as I shoot my daily 30-second videos that, if the shot is extremely dark, the file size is way smaller. For example, the Dec 13 video is about 26MB, whereas the Dec 1 video is less than 11. Why is that? I mean, a pixel is a pixel, right, whether it’s black or white or red? Why is there so much less “information” in the dark ones?
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Movie Review
A WOMAN, A GUN, AND A NOODLE SHOP
This is an interesting film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers): it is a fairly faithful remake of the Coen Brothers’ debut neo-noir film Blood Simple. The first stand-out here is the way the film looks. Every frame of Yimou’s film is like a stunning painting; just look at that still above. The sky, the costumes, the...
WatchDecember 13, 2011
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Movie Review
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
In Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant novel Slaughterhouse-Five, there is an alien race called Tralfamadorians, who exist in four dimensions. Thus, their “books” unfold as such:
We Tralfamadorians read [symbols] all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen...
DVD Tuesday
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -Surprisingly smart event film, and worth seeing with the calls for an Andy Serkis Oscar nomination rising louder and louder.
KUNG FU PANDA 2 - I enjoyed the first one well enough. This is on the queue for a lazy Saturday.
WatchDecember 12, 2011
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Movie Review
THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER
Writer/director David Mitchell’s Linklater-esque film about one last night of parties and sleepovers before high school starts back up seems a very personal one, despite the expansive cast and interweaving storylines. The entire film is filled with authentic, simple moments of teen awkwardness, extended moments of silence or uncertainty in the face of...
WatchDecember 11, 2011
WatchDecember 10, 2011