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Great, trashy, doom-and-gloom, can't-win-don't try kind of fun. "Double Indemnity" is the only Billy Wilder movie I really love (sorry, my filmsnob cred sinks). I saw "Touch of Evil" in the theater during it's 50th anniversary re-release, the other two on DVD.

( Double Indemnity (**** out of ****) )

The Black Dahlia (2006)
Day of the Jackal (1973)
Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Farewell My Concubine (1993)

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1973, 115 min, PG.  Directed & co-written by Francois Truffaut, starring Jacqueline Bissett, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Valentina Cortese, and Jean-Pierre Leaud.

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Two movies, really, with the jumbled all-over-the-place narrative to prove it. One movie is engaging in a shallow, pop way, about a charming-yet-tyrannical music manager who sells out and commercializes R&B music in the 1950s and ‘60s. Because the manager is played by Jamie Foxx, he instantly brings to mind Ray Charles, another of the era’s ( Read more... )

So the MLK weekend kicked off with “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” on DVD.  As you may have guessed, it is depressing, but it’s also the antidote to all those goddamned doctor-hospital TV shows.  In it, a 62-year-old pensioner fades from life, and we watch him go through the emergency world.  He throws up, calls an ambulance, and the ball gets rolling ( Read more... )

It just drags on and on and on.  “The Da Vinci Code” is an exposition-heavy “thriller” that really will surprise you with its levelness of badness.  We follow yet still another couple on the run from villains who can’t shoot straight and cops slightly less incompetent than the graduates of “Police Academy.”  They run, he explains things, they run, ( Read more... )