November 15, 2010: Inside Job If you want to be scared about the way the world works in the backrooms and boardrooms, with powerful men (yes, still mostly men) divvying up the world among themselves, look no further than Inside Job. An eye-opening treatise on the players and the causes involved with the global economic […]
November 8, 2010: Machete I went back and forth a few times about whether or not I’d bother with this one. I’m really glad I decided to see it. Director Robert Rodriguez is known for movies which aim only to entertain, often with over-the-top blood-spraying gleefulness and rock-bottom budgets, and Machete totally delivers on that […]
November 4, 2010: A Few Good Men Continuing in my effort to re-watch and review older movies that I have seen many times and want to be able to play without any further burden of writing about, I took another look at A Few Good Men (1992). It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen […]
October 27, 2010: Carlos Living in a big city affords me certain filmgoing opportunities. Carlos is a sprawling 5.5-hour epic examination of the life of the terrorist popularly known as Carlos the Jackal. It was created as a European three-part miniseries and will be trimmed down to feature length for North American distribution. I got […]
October 21, 2010: Nowhere Boy Nowhere Boy is the latest film to examine some aspect of the younger life of one of the Beatles. Here we are treated to some of what turned John Lennon into the complex emotional figure he was for his whole short life up until he was callously gunned down 30 […]
October 18, 2010: Jackass 3D Presently we’re going through the third cinematic attempt at 3D technology, each cycle separated by about 30 years. We’ve come a long way from the 3D sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s and the monster flicks of the early 1980s – technologically, if perhaps not narratively. I’m finding it entertaining to […]
October 13, 2010: The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Anyone who heard about The Human Centipede or read a review of it was probably disgusted and appalled and wondered why or how anyone could ever make such a film. Not quite a horror movie, it falls more into the “mad scientist art film” category. I had […]
October 11, 2010: Millions I’m far from a scholar of director Danny Boyle’s career, but it has become more and more clear to me over the years how two seemingly separate and parallel threads in his career are really more tightly linked than is immediately apparent. I associate Millions (2004) with what I think of […]
October 6, 2010: The Social Network This one snuck up on me. A movie about the rise of Facebook, directed by David Fincher, and I didn’t hear about it until about 2 days before it was released. My second film of the night, a rare evening when I was watching two movies which both scored […]
October 6, 2010: The Town Ben Affleck has gone from being a minor character actor 15 years ago to being a respected writer/director. Bringing an authenticity to films about his native Boston, he sticks to the mantra of “write what you know” and has been quite successful at that. The Town is a heist caper […]