October 6, 2010: Reservoir Dogs I didn’t actually watch Reservoir Dogs (1992) all the way through on this occasion, but it’s a fairly short film and over the space of two days I watched enough of it to more or less count as a viewing. While the logic of this film can break down if […]
October 4, 2010: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps I’ve been waiting for 23 years to see this film. I saw the original in the theatre with a friend at the tender age of 13, and in retrospect I don’t know why at that age I would have been so eager to see a drama about […]
September 24, 2010: Harry Brown I saw previews for Harry Brown but didn’t manage to see it in the theatre. No matter, it plays just fine on the small screen. I knew from the trailer that it would be a total guilty pleasure movie, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be. The title […]
September 21, 2010: Redbelt I must have seen David Mamet’s Heist (2001) too many times. I’m looking too hard for double-crosses and intrigue in his movies now. Redbelt (2008) was not at all what I was expecting, so I adjusted my attitude during the film, but it turned out to be much more straightforward than […]
September 17, 2010: Blame My final film for the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival is Blame, an Australian effort about some teens who take their ex-teacher prisoner in a misguided attempt at revenge for his earlier treatment of one of their peers. A well-mounted production to be sure, Blame suffers from requiring just a bit […]
September 15, 2010: I Am Slave I Am Slave is a British film which examines the modern-day first-world slave trade from the angle of a fictionalized retelling of a true story. In real life, Mende Nazer actually went through the ordeal of being kidnapped from her tribal home in Africa and shipped to the middle […]
September 14, 2010: Carancho Continuing at the Toronto International Film Festival, my next film was Carancho, an Argentinian film about corruption in the emergency medical services and automotive insurance business. This was a tense thriller and the best film I saw at the festival this year. Ricardo Darín is presumably not the star of every […]
September 11, 2010: United 93 I must admit that the significance of the events of September 11, 2001 didn’t sink in with me immediately. Of course, we all know now that the brazen assault on complacent and ignorant westerners, on North Americans’ own hallowed ground, would significantly though not fundamentally change the way privileged lives […]
September 10, 2010: The Erotic Man The Toronto International Film Festival is up and running again (not anymore as I write this review, of course). I am seeing four out of the 300 films this year, and the first one is The Erotic Man, written and directed by Jørgen Leth. I was informed that Leth […]
September 9, 2010: Kicking and Screaming I wanted to like Kicking and Screaming. I really did. Having been quite a fan of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), and having appreciated the underlying message behind this year’s Greenberg, I thought I’d go back to the beginning, in the spirit of my recent journeys […]