January 9, 2011: Never Let Me Go Despite the fact that I persist in mixing up this film with Let Me In (which itself is a remake of Let the Right One In – you can perhaps understand my confusion), I managed to find Never Let Me Go and watched it with my wife at […]
January 6, 2011: The Other Guys This one snuck up on me. I hadn’t really intended to see The Other Guys, but I put it on to see whether it was actually as funny as I had heard it was. It seemed to be uneven enough to fall well short of comedy classic status, but […]
January 6, 2011: Stone From the tense opening flashback scene through the desperate and deliberate changes in character of a prisoner to the indiscretions of a parole review officer, Stone flirts with being something greater than the sum of its parts. It almost makes it, but I don’t think it quite manages it in the […]
January 3, 2011: Rabbit Hole Chalk this one up to Oscar-season required viewing. I had seen previews for Rabbit Hole and it looked like just another “couple struggling because they react differently to trauma” dramas, and while I’ll admit that it was better than I expected it to be, the film was still entirely unremarkable. […]
December 29, 2010: Mamma Mia I hadn’t necessarily planned to see Mamma Mia (2008), but I had been intrigued, since I like ABBA music as much as any other person even though nobody is allowed to admit it for some reason. The DVD turned out to be available for everyone to watch when we were […]
December 16, 2010: Taken For a Ride Taken For a Ride is a short documentary (52 minutes) from 1996 which gives an overview of the well-documented but not well-known reality of how public transit systems in several US cities were systematically dismantled and made less efficient through the 20th century by the careful and deliberate […]
December 15, 2010: The King’s Speech The King’s Speech is an Oscar front-runner for Colin Firth’s (aka Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy, as many people love him best) lead performance as the man who became King George VI of England (I’ll just call him George throughout this review for simplicity’s sake). A sensitively-told but difficult […]
December 13, 2010: Robocop I accidentally watched Robocop (1987). As a half-assed reviewer, I’ve had to constantly re-evaluate the line between my having “seen” and “not seen” a movie, so that I know whether or not I need to write about it, and generally my rule has been that if pretty much the entire movie […]
December 11, 2010: Tootsie I had been talking recently with my wife about revisiting two opposite-gender impersonation films from roughly the same era, Tootsie and Victor Victoria. It turns out they were released in the same year (1982) and we started the comparison on this evening with Tootsie. I’ve always been a fan but hadn’t […]
December 9, 2010: The September Issue When The September Issue came through on its theatrical run, I was intrigued by the idea of a documentary about Anna Wintour, Vogue Magazine’s (USA) longtime editor-in-chief. However, the buzz among reviewers was that in order to get so close to her in filming, the producers were forced to […]