I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases.  As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream").  So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs ( Read more... )

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) **

Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

"How to Train Your Dragon" looks pleasant enough, in a middle-of-the-road Pixar-y kind of way, but the story is so by-the-numbers that stretches of it feel like a chore.  Within the first couple of minutes, the teenage Viking hero says he wants to kill a dragon so he ( Read more... )

I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases.  As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream").  So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs ( Read more... )

I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases.  As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream").  So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs ( Read more... )

Repo Men (2010) **

Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, and Leiv Schreiber are affable in this well-meaning but forgettable SF satire / adventure.  Jude and Forest have two of the best laughs in the movies.  Jude tips back his head, just a little, and his laugh comes out so suddenly, so honestly, and with such gleeful British posh-school poncey-ness.  ( Read more... )

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THE INFORMANT! (***1/2) - Dir. Stephen Soderbergh

Soderbergh does two movies a year, it seems, one serious and one silly.  More often than not I prefer the silly one.  In “The Informant!” Matt Damon is mesmerizing as a fascinating, real-life goofball:  a corporate whistleblower who is himself crooked.  The mental gymnastics he plays to justify ( Read more... )

I watched over 30 movies released in 2009 but have hardly written about any of them.  Here are some quick reviews.

My latest theory about why we like or dislike a movie (or a book or any other piece of fiction or art) has to do with subtlety.  If we feel a movie is being obvious, we feel condescended to; if we feel a movie is opaque, we get ( Read more... )

Saw this back at Landmark River Oaks with the wife, possibly at a pre-release screening. Liked it a lot when I first saw it, but if I saw it again the mixture of fact/fiction/interviews/animation might strike me as too clever. I'd probably still like it though.

( 2003 review (***1/2 out of ****) )

Unlike books, poetry, sculptures, and all that other stuff, movies exist in time. They give us the "feeling" of time better than any other artform. We can be made to feel time pass quickly, slowly, inevitably, excruciatingly. Even cinema's bastard offspring TV has a time tool that it could uniquely but rarely exploits: the enforced break. ( Read more... )