Tag Archive
Do You Have Any Change For the Trending Machine? Part I: The Living Wake
There’s a reason the public, and especially those within the industry, consider Hollywood executives as the unofficial whipping boys for the evil studio system. It doesn’t only have to do with their need to justify their jobs by offering up extraneous and contradictory notes and suggestions for filmmakers to improve their products. It isn’t just […]
Opening in theaters May 15th
The best movie of last year, not released to US theaters, was Big Man Japan, a hilarious, moving, silly, deadpan, ridiculous mockumentary. Imagine if Christopher Guest made a movie about Godzilla, as if he were real, and you sort of get the idea, but it is a lot better than that description. Big Man Japan […]
Mediocrity Breeds Contempt: Film Festivals Part II
As mentioned in part I of this series (which you can read here), there’s an eagerness for an audience to fall in love with some hidden gem at a film festival, especially a smaller one. This was hammered home with The Answer Man (also known as Arlen Faber), which got a featured spot in the […]
The Life Aquatic
It may be near impossible to mix ironic distance with serious violence and death, but there was certainly an effort put forth in The Life Aquatic. I’m not sure what the point was to throw graphic violence and pirates into a self-conscious comedy satirizing such a thin target as how silly Jacques Cousteau films look […]
Napoleon Dynamite and its ilk
Few movies make me actually angry for people falling for the condescending crap being thrown at them, but Napoleon Dynamite manages it. It’s not just that there’s no point to the film. It’s just so self conscious and so deliberate in its attempts to be “weird” and retro. Traits are established for the characters and […]