December 31, 2009: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is another in the line of films that make fans of screenwriter (and now director) Charlie Kaufman ecstatic about his genius, and non-fans adamant about his incomprehensibility. The twisted mind which brought us Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation […]
December 26, 2009: Man on Wire I had seen Man on Wire (2008) before, but it was before I started writing reviews, so I need to cover it now! I watched this with my extended family over the holiday break, and it’s a fascinating and very accessible documentary for the whole family. This Oscar-winner for […]
December 19, 2009: Die Hard 2 I wouldn’t have figured that I’d be reviewing two Die Hard films in as many months. This isn’t the result of a marathon, just the revisiting of a new action film on home video followed by the viewing of a Christmas classic to get away from the obligation of […]
December 18, 2009: District 9 District 9 is an odd duck. Tonally unique but still bearing the mark of an action blockbuster, it arrived amid a barrage of cryptic print advertising and did pretty good business at the box office. This rough, pseudo-documentary-style film about the ghettoization of a group of aliens stranded on earth […]
December 8, 2009: An Education I hadn’t been overly keen to see An Education, not knowing much about it, but it has been burning through the festival circuit and has huge Oscar potential, and right now I’m in the phase of my annual Oscar-viewing preparation where I try to knock off the obvious selections to […]
December 8, 2009: Up in the Air Jason Reitman has taken the film world by storm, and increases his profile every time he sits in the director’s chair. His feature debut, Thank You for Smoking (2005), was an honest shakeup for contemporary satirical comedy. His follow-up, Juno, was an Oscar darling a couple of years […]
December 7, 2009: Planes, Trains & Automobiles The late John Hughes is indelibly associated with movies examining teen angst in the 1980s, and for good reason. He had that genre locked up. On occasion he came up with a little something about adults as well, and while Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) revels in its […]
November 30, 2009: 2012 I certainly haven’t been waiting and hoping, and don’t necessarily get any pleasure from the opportunity, to declare a film to be ridiculously ridiculous. But that’s exactly what 2012 is. Is it even a spoiler for this kind of movie if I tell the reader that in the scene with the […]
November 25, 2009: Food, Inc. First off, I suppose I should note that this was the first time I really thought about whether finishing a movie after midnight counts as me having watched it on the day that the evening is a part of, or the next day. I’m going to declare that I’ll go […]
November 7, 2009: Live Free or Die Hard I have been a Die Hard fan for a fairly long time, integrating the films into the family Christmas routine as far back as the early 1990s. With this franchise, Bruce Willis handily established himself as a capable action star with the indelible character of John McClane, […]