Just because you’re prescient, doesn’t make you smart. It might be an accident. Take Richard Brooks’ Wrong is Right, his penultimate film (and his second looniest, behind his final film Fever Pitch), made 5 years after his last studio film, 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Now Wrong is Right appears to have guessed right in […]
Featured Directors
Featured quote (not written by me)
Cultural critic James Wolcott, on the new film critic:
"Film critics today have become these rabid completists... They feel like that with festivals, they have to see everything, no matter how minor. Part of it is bragging rights. The other part is that the only thing that feeds into their movie writing is other movies."
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Archive for August 27th, 2012
Death Watch
Monday, August 27th, 2012
Tags: 1950's, Adam Lippe, Albert Brooks, Bertrand Tavernier, Black Moon, Blade Runner, cameo, Children of Men, Cliché, Coup de Torchon, death, Death Watch, distribution problems, elitist, grave, Harvey Keitel, Ingmar Bergman, Iphone, Mad Libs, Minority Report, mort, movie review, Never Let Me Go, Philip K. Dick, Pleasantville, R rated, Real Life, reality TV, RegrettableSincerity.com, Richard Brooks, Robbie Coltrane, Robert De Bauleac, Roger Clemens, Romy Schneider, Sean Connery, soap opera, The Adjustment Bureau, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Seventh Seal, The Truman Show, Total Recall, World Trade Center, Wrong is Right, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Posted in Drama, Sci-Fi | No Comments »
The Music of Chance
Monday, August 27th, 2012
One of my least favorite terms to describe a movie/book/play is “a two-hander.” Sure, it’s a shorthand way of describing a piece of fiction that features only two characters, who are polar opposites of each other debating their particular points of view. But it’s such a reductive description, as if the story were so simplistic* […]
Tags: Adam Lippe, American Buffalo, Angels and Insects, Blood Oranges, Blue in the Face, Cabaret, Charles Durning, Chris Penn, David Mamet, distribution problems, Europe, gambling, Glengarry Glen Ross, Homicide, Jack and Jill, James Spader, Joel Grey, M. Emmet Walsh, Mandy Patinkin, Midnight Cowboy, morality play, movie review, Ocean's Eleven, Oleanna, parable, Paul Auster, Philip Haas, platonic, R rated, R2, Ratzo Rizzo, RegrettableSincerity.com, Smoke, The Music of Chance, The Spanish Prisoner, two-hander, widescreen
Posted in Drama | No Comments »
Death Watch
Monday, August 27th, 2012
Tags: 1950's, Adam Lippe, Albert Brooks, Bertrand Tavernier, Black Moon, Blade Runner, cameo, Children of Men, Cliché, Coup de Torchon, death, Death Watch, distribution problems, elitist, grave, Harvey Keitel, Ingmar Bergman, Iphone, Mad Libs, Minority Report, mort, movie review, Never Let Me Go, Philip K. Dick, Pleasantville, R rated, Real Life, reality TV, RegrettableSincerity.com, Richard Brooks, Robbie Coltrane, Robert De Bauleac, Roger Clemens, Romy Schneider, Sean Connery, soap opera, The Adjustment Bureau, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Seventh Seal, The Truman Show, Total Recall, World Trade Center, Wrong is Right, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
Posted in Drama, Sci-Fi | No Comments »
The Music of Chance
Monday, August 27th, 2012
One of my least favorite terms to describe a movie/book/play is “a two-hander.” Sure, it’s a shorthand way of describing a piece of fiction that features only two characters, who are polar opposites of each other debating their particular points of view. But it’s such a reductive description, as if the story were so simplistic* […]
One of my least favorite terms to describe a movie/book/play is “a two-hander.” Sure, it’s a shorthand way of describing a piece of fiction that features only two characters, who are polar opposites of each other debating their particular points of view. But it’s such a reductive description, as if the story were so simplistic* […]
Tags: Adam Lippe, American Buffalo, Angels and Insects, Blood Oranges, Blue in the Face, Cabaret, Charles Durning, Chris Penn, David Mamet, distribution problems, Europe, gambling, Glengarry Glen Ross, Homicide, Jack and Jill, James Spader, Joel Grey, M. Emmet Walsh, Mandy Patinkin, Midnight Cowboy, morality play, movie review, Ocean's Eleven, Oleanna, parable, Paul Auster, Philip Haas, platonic, R rated, R2, Ratzo Rizzo, RegrettableSincerity.com, Smoke, The Music of Chance, The Spanish Prisoner, two-hander, widescreen
Posted in Drama | No Comments »
Now on DVD and Blu-Ray
Roadracers
Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.
Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]
Recent Reviews
- A radio interview with the person who wrote this sentence, Part IV: Comfort and Joy and Dream Lover
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- The Lift
- A podcast with Summer Qing [Qing Xu], co-star of Looper: Mandarin and English friendly version.
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- Death Watch
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Archive
Featured Quote (written by me)
On Cold Fish:
Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”
Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.