December 13, 2008: Road House Readers who are new to Half-Assed Movie Reviews might wonder why the hell I would bother with a stupid 20-year-old movie that would be better left in the garbage pile of late-1980s cinema. Readers who are familiar with my reviews will likely not be surprised. Road House (1989) was released […]
December 13, 2008: Helvetica I consider myself to enjoy documentaries in general, but at the end of them, I often find myself wondering whether I’ve taken the most efficient path to learning about something. It’s a similar feeling to what I get after rare occasions of watching the news on television, realizing that I could […]
December 11, 2008: Black Christmas The late Canadian director Bob Clark made his name in the 1970s, perhaps most famously with the low-budget and influential horror classic Black Christmas (1974). He went on to direct the popular and much-reviled though in my opinion underrated Porky’s in 1982, and the 1983 cult favourite A Christmas Story […]
November 24, 2008: The Apartment I had originally set myself the goal to fill in the gaps in my Best Picture viewing back to 1960, prior to the next Oscar show in late February. However, these days my January and February are entirely consumed with trying to watch every single nominated film in the current […]
November 23, 2008: A Woman Under the Influence I’ve been working my way through a borrowed John Cassavetes DVD box set for a distressingly long time now, and will probably give up before I get to the end. There are just so many movies to watch, it makes an intense focus on one director seem […]
November 23, 2008: Wall·E The folks from Pixar have dominated children’s animation for over a decade now, creating iconic stories and characters accessible to children and adults alike, not to mention generating unfathomable volumes of tie-in merchandise. From the first feature Toy Story in 1995, through a couple of (to my thinking) near-missteps along the […]
November 22, 2008: The Godfather: Part II Ah, where to even begin? I could probably spend all day writing about the Godfather films, and volumes have already been written. Doesn’t anyone who actually cares about this story already know everything they want to know, while anyone else really isn’t into it at all? What would […]
November 21, 2008: My Cousin Vinny My Cousin Vinny (1992) is another one of those comedies I can repeatedly watch, sometimes just putting on the DVD in the background while I do something else. The energy in the performances and the story, the portrayals edging on cartoonish stereotypes but clearly reflecting reality, and the comic […]
November 21, 2008: Wall Street Wall Street (1987) is a movie I’ve seen many times over the years, often in pieces, since it’s an example of a movie I can turn on to watch a certain scene, and find myself engrossed until the end. On this particular occasion I watched the film in several installments […]
November 21, 2008: Stormbreaker Having a child in my household, aside from making playing with Lego an acceptable use of time for an adult, brings into view a selection of books and movies which might otherwise never have surfaced in my consciousness. This also means a certain amount of taking the bad along with the […]