War Without End
For the past three decades, Tim O’Brien has been trying to tell true war stories – even though most of them, strictly speaking, are fiction.
Tagged: Fiction, Interviews, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, War
You Are Forgiven
Near the end of Nathaniel Kahn’s engaging and illuminating documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey, one of his interview subjects suggests that some people with greatness in them must be excused for being boorish, emotionally absent, or simply insufferable as human beings. They should be forgiven because they have a higher calling: God’s work.
Ghost in the Shell
I shan’t belabor the point – apples and oranges and all that stuff – but how in the hell do The Jacket and The Grudge score roughly the same with critics?
Tagged: Horror, John Maybury, Reviews, Takashi Shimizu, The Grudge, The Jacket, Thrillers
All Alone
In toto, Errol Morris’ First Person doesn’t feel scattershot; it comes together at the end in mysterious, alchemic, and near-miraculous ways. The television series is a composition of disparate moods, tones, and colors, touching on myriad extremities of the human condition and containing multitudes, but it also has an elusive quality of oneness.
Tagged: Documentaries, Errol Morris, First Person, Reviews, Television
At the Drive-in
Neither Red Eye nor The Skeleton Key would survive my typical level of indoor scrutiny, but neither sucked, which made the pairing perfect for a Saturday night outdoors with pizza and beer.
Tagged: Horror, Iain Softley, Red Eye, Reviews, The Skeleton Key, Ways of Watching, Wes Craven
A Suffocating Density
I rarely complain that a movie is too short, but Paul Haggis’ Crash is too short. I don’t mean that I didn’t want it to end – quite the contrary. Instead, I mean that at 113 minutes it’s overcrowded, rushed, and skeletal, all to the degree that it’s only intermittently credible.
Tagged: Crash, Paul Haggis, Reviews
Subverting the Perverted
Forget about the shit, piss, vomit, semen, vaginal mucus, blood, burst boils, incest, abortions, anal sex, oral sex, fisting, bestiality, sex with wounds, anal musical talent, and other pleasantries in The Aristocrats. I wanna talk about editing!
The Case of the Missing Spine
The Constant Gardener is about a guy who finally finds a spine. And he’s part of a film that never does.
Tagged: Fernando Meirelles, Politics, Reviews, The Constant Gardener, Thrillers
When Bad Movies Do Good Things
Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida has no apparent reason for existing, no message, no discernible structure, and only the faintest of pulses. It’s lazy, mean-spirited, hateful, and tedious. Why, then, is it so valuable?
Tagged: Documentaries, Errol Morris, Reviews, Vernon Florida
Eat the Rich
Is it any wonder the dead are fed up and primed for revolt? Is it any surprise that writer/director George A. Romero is cheering them on in Land of the Dead? And is it so hard to see these zombies as a blunt allegory for racial minorities, the impoverished, the politically disenfranchised? On the final question, apparently so.
Tagged: George A. Romero, Horror, Land of the Dead, Misunderstood Movies, Reviews, Zombies