December 8, 2010: Temple Grandin I’ve known of Temple Grandin, though not by name, for a few years since my wife read her autobiography and talked about it a bit. When watching the Emmy awards this past fall, the HBO made-for-cable feature adaptation of her life story was winning a number of awards so we […]
December 7, 2010: Black Swan I knew I was seeing two movies this day (having just seen 127 Hours), but I wasn’t sure whether I’d be seeing two good ones. I’d been wary of Black Swan because of the ballet dancing and Natalie Portman, but the bold vision of director Darren Aronofsky came close enough […]
December 7, 2010: 127 Hours I wrote recently about the odd career path of Danny Boyle, when I reviewed Millions (2004). For his first feature since his Oscar win a couple of years ago for Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle brings us 127 Hours. A recent standout on the festival circuit, this film interprets the true-life story […]
December 4, 2010: Love Story I’ve seen Love Story (1970) before, but not for quite some time and I was ready to revisit it. My wife had recently read the book and was interested in a comparison with the film, so we watched it together. Is it a good thing or a bad thing that […]
December 1, 2010: Men Who Swim Telling the story of an all-male synchronized swimming team from Sweden, Men Who Swim is a great little documentary which is well-suited to the medium and its capabilities. Anchored by a Welshman who permanently relocated to Sweden several years ago and now has a wife and children there, the […]
December 1, 2010: The Good, the Bad and the Bearded The Good, the Bad and the Bearded is a student documentary which was presented in advance of the monthly Doc Soup screening, which is a year-round extension of the Hot Docs documentary film festival. A short film showing the facial hair of a number of […]
November 24, 2010: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer Eliot Spitzer was once the new sheriff in town, who came to New York state as attorney general and later as Governor, vowing to clean up the corruption and filth in the state. And that he did for a number of years, making […]
November 24, 2010: Fair Game Based on the story of the deliberate leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2003, Fair Game is a dramatization of that difficult period in her life. Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame and Sean Penn plays her husband Joe Wilson. This is a story of which I […]
November 21, 2010: Napoleon Dynamite I’ve been told for years that I should see this movie, although with the caveat that I might either love it or hate it. I watched about an hour of the film paying about 70% attention, and that was not enough for me to understand the hype. Was it too […]
November 19, 2010: Scarface (1983) If I happened to be a child of the 1920s, then I might have grown up under the influence of the 1932 incarnation of Scarface, a film accused of glorifying the gangster lifestyle and which suffered censorship in its day as a result but has gone on to become respected […]