Documentary
You Made Horror Movies Boring, or Why You Are Wrong About The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is a perfect example of a movie that’s been blown up into a love it or hate it film, because of its enormous hype and box office. The same can be said for Forrest Gump, Gladiator, Monster’s Ball, Slumdog Millionaire, Titanic, Crash, etc. People think it’s cool to say how much […]
Forgotten Silver
Forgotten Silver is an extraordinary and sadly unappreciated document that reveals the career of the great unheralded New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie. Co-directors Costa Botes and Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings and Heavenly Creatures fame, give us as yet untold history in their discovery of McKenzie, the creator of the first feature length […]
The Anti-Auteur, Michael Winterbottom
As versatile as Steven Soderbergh and just as willing to take chances, if not more so, Michael Winterbottom has made some of the worst movies of their era (The Claim, Wonderland), and some of the most interesting and entertaining as well (24 Hour Party People, Welcome To Sarajevo). Since 1995, he has made 17 feature […]
A Decade Under the Influence and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
A Decade Under the Influence, like the movie of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls reveals nothing surprising, but is competently made. It does go on for an hour more (and broken up into three segments for airing on IFC, it comes in just under 3 hours total), so it’s a little strange that they actually had […]
The Party’s Over
Phil Hoffman does the narration and also the interviewing. He is admittedly clueless and looks like a retarded child with down syndrome gawking up at everyone. He is in awe of everything. In the first five minutes, they criticize MTV for the style and fashion and of course, the movie, co-directed by Donovan Leitch (yes, […]
Portishead: PNYC
In July of 1997 , the British band Portishead, who up until then had released two terrific records, Dummy and a self titled album, played at Roseland, a famous New York City venue. That a live album was released was always kind of a surprise to me, Portishead does not play the kind of music […]